Of late I have become rather addicted to the Yahoo! Answers community. Anyone with a Yahoo! account can ask any question they like, and then anyone else can answer it. Jocelyn and Rachel know what I'm talking about. What started out as the pastime of the incredibly bored became an obsession however, when I discovered how uneducated the majority of grade school aged people in this country are when it comes to sex.
Questions like "Could my girrlfriend be pregnet?!?!?!?!?1" are some of the most common on the forum. 13-year-olds wondering if they should have sex, how often they should have sex, where they should have sex and HOW to have sex flood the question boards.
This is what abstinence only education has done to our society. The only contraception method teenagers know of in detail is to not have sex at all, and for hormonally raging people, thats like telling Hitler, "Now, hold on a moment, I know I'm Jewish, but I've got some qualities I think you'd really like". It just wont work. Teenagers WILL have sex, no matter how sinful and dangerous and culturally taboo it might be simply because it feels good - hard drugs being illegal doesn't stop their use, for the same reason. Sex, at least, can be pretty harmless, if done properly.
We have seen just in the last week that children cannot grasp the idea of becoming parents - a group of girls in Massachusetts, starved for love, decided to have children and raise them together. How pitiful is that? The lives of 17 high schoolers to be changed forever because their parents and school system failed them.
Well, what started out as an attempt at humor became a rant against the educational system in this country. For those who wanted laughs, here they are - a series of skits which rather reflect the knowledge level of safe sex amongst teenagers.
Sex and Childbirth - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhERi3SkdFE
Contraception - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIrd34dQTzY&NR=1
(Starts of the same as the first, but the conversation takes a different turn)
Safe Sex - http://youtube.com/watch?v=nLejEZ2KYs0
Condoms - http://youtube.com/watch?v=3rQeZbN5OM8
For those of you who were looking for another of my rants about problems with this country, I hope you found it.
Now, go out and change the world.
