Two Kids are Lâil Angels. Two are Lâil Devils.
Why All Four are Perfect
Dancing on the Edge
The Everyday Struggle of Middle Class Parents
A Lack of Education
How One Mom Sparked a National Debate on Teaching Abstinence in the Classroom
Parent to Parent
“Get on Team Parent”
Why Talk About God?
Secular Parenting for a Less-Jerkish Future
In April, Alice Dregerâmom, bioethicist, activist, and professor at Chicagoâs Northwestern Universityâsat in on her sonâs abstinence sex ed class at East Lansing High School in Michigan. The misinformation being delivered by the visiting âeducatorsâ was so shocking, she began live tweeting itâand her outraged missives quickly went global and started a national debate on sex education in schools. Hereâs her story.âEditor
Until recently, the only way I could find out what was going on in my sonâs sex ed classes was by asking him about it. For example, in middle school, I learned he had to help the teacher explain something about sex anatomy when she was stumped. By the way, Iâm a sex researcher studying intersex (those whose genitals do not fit the typical definitions of male or female), so he knows a lot about sex anatomy.
Now heâs a freshman in high school, and Iâve learned his sex ed is being taught in a health class by a gym teacher in conjunction with some âspecial helpers.â We were driving back from the vet with a pet rat suffering from a bad foot, when my son broke it to me: Theyâre teaching sexual abstinence in the class. Itâs not abstinence only, but it may as well be.
I told my son why I think teaching teenagers abstinence is stupid, channeling my years of experience with the subject: (1) Sex is pleasurable, and thereâs no good reason you should deny it to yourself if you have a consenting partner and youâre on the same page. (2) Marrying someone who you havenât had sex with is a potential disaster. How do you know if youâre sexually compatible? (3) Whomever you love enough to marry deserves to have you well-practiced at sex before you marry.
My son nodded and remarked that, in class, heâd said to his classmate, âI can see Iâm going to be spending some time with Google Scholar tonight.â Having heard previously about the ineffectiveness of abstinence education (again from me), he wanted to gather some data on the subject to present to the teachers. (What can I say? Weâre a household of data geeks.)
So he and I sat down over dinner and did some looking together. We didnât spend a ton of time on it, but we found a page that seemed to nicely sum up many of the potential problems with abstinence education and virginity pledges. I offered to come to class to see what they were teaching if he wanted me toâbut only if he wanted me to.
He printed off copies of the webpage and said he was thinking of giving them to his teacher, guest teacher, and the principal.
In the morning, I asked whether he wanted me to come to class. He did. I told him I was just going to quietly observe, although I brought my computer so I could take notes. The regular class teacher was very nice, and I was seated in the back corner where I could watch without being in the way.
The visiting sex ed presenterâletâs call her Ms. Thomasâstarted class by asking if there were any questions from last time. My sonâs hand shot up. He asked if her teaching of sexual practices was evidence-based.
Looking startled, she said yes.
âThen why are you teaching abstinence when it doesnât decrease the amount of premarital sex and increases dangerous practices, including sex without contraception?â he said. He gave Ms. Thomas a copy of what he had brought.
âThatâs not true,â she said. âYou can look up anything on the internet.â She referred him instead to the National Abstinence Education Associationâs website. (When I got home, I discovered it is a 501(c)(4) organizationâa lobbying group that does things like trying to stop âanti-abstinence justicesâ from getting federal judgeships.)
The class began murmuring at my sonâs attempt to challenge this visiting educator. To be honest, it didnât strike me at first as particularly dramatic. Heâs been raised to believe authority rests in good studies, not in individual humans, and heâs been challenging us since he was two years old. (âThe earth does NOT move! The sun goes UP and DOWN!â) Weâve never said to him, âDonât challenge me, boy!â Weâve always said, âWhatâs your evidence? Iâll show you mine.â
But Ms. Thomas didnât want to discuss evidence. She wanted to move on, and move on she did. The kids were told they were going to continue to talk about âstories of abstinenceâ and ânon-abstinence stories that led to consequences.â
And so we were presented with a visitor Iâm going to call Jerry. Jerry told a genuinely sad story of how he was raised by an alcoholic father and got into alcohol and drugs at a young age. He hooked up with a girl âwhose mother had put her on birth control.â But it failed, and she got pregnant. Jerry said he and his girl didnât tell their parents as the pregnancy progressed.
Hold on a second: Her mother gave her birth control, but would be shocked she had sex? Clearly Jerryâs lesson hereâthe reason he needed to include that the girl had been on birth control but didnât tell her mother when she got pregnantâwas supposed to be this:Â Birth control fails. It fails all the time. And sex is so shameful that if you get pregnant, you canât get prenatal care. You have to hide the pregnancy. In shame.
Jerry told us that once the girl âshowedâ and everyone found out, she was mocked and friends deserted her. If I followed this disaster story correctly, Jerry later went on to knock up another girl. Same basic story: another child they werenât ready for, failure to finish school, failure to be employed, more drugs, more sex. One of his friends overdosed and was âa vegetable,â according to Jerry, for 11 years.
The upshot? Sex is just one disastrous component of âa bad lifestyle.â
But thenâthen!âJerry met a beautiful girl he liked so much. And she had been raised in âthe abstinence lifestyle.â He decided to put it back in his pants, woo her, and âput her on a pedestal.â After two long, chaste years, he married her. And then they had sex. And now have two kids.
The lesson Jerry wanted to impart? This: âYouâll find a good girl. If you find one who says 'no,â thatâs the one you want.â
He actually said that. If a girl says no, âthatâs the one you want.â
Silly me! Iâve been teaching my son that if a girl says no, you exit politely and get the hell out of her space.
Now Ms. Thomas was up. She wanted to talk about birth control, which I thought was promisingâit suggested a recognition that you can have sex without wanting a baby. But her message was also one of sexual doom: âIt is absolutely better to use something rather than nothing if you have sex,â she said. âBut condoms fail.â
Condoms fail 18 percent of the time, according to this woman. She noted that stats vary, but went with the big number anyway. She told the story of a couple of teens who came across a box of condoms in which every condom had a pinhole leak. They knew this because they filled them all with water first. (They must have been super turned on!) According to Ms. Thomas, the FDA allows condom manufacturers to have a failure rate of one box in 400. You, sonâyou might be the buyer of box 400.
(According to the CDC, condoms do have an 18 percent failure rate when used improperlyâwhich is why a sex education class should cover how to use a condom correctly! Correct usage of condoms brings failure rate down to two percent, lower than most hormonal birth control methods.)
At this point, it became clear that while this was not technically abstinence-only sex education, it was terror-based sex education. By now, we had learned sex is associated with drug abuse, drug overdose, disease, unwanted pregnancyâpretty much every horror you can name except shingles and Lawrence Welk.
And that good girls say âno,â and you donât want any slut who says âyes.â
Ms. Thomasâs dire warnings continued: âIt takes only one sperm to fertilize an egg. It takes only one act of sex to get pregnant.â
I wanted to raise my hand and blurt out, âNot if itâs anal or oral!â
She moved on to a âgame.â The game involved everyone getting a number from one to six. She rolled the dice. If your number came up, your condom failed. But your condom didnât just failâa pregnancy resulted. And from the pregnancy came a baby. When your number came up, you raised your hand and Ms. Thomas handed you a paper baby.
Within a few minutes, the entire class was preggers. Even the boys.
The bell rang. As kids cleared the room to get to their next class, I went up to calmly talk to these people. I failed. I started screaming and swearing. I feel bad about that. Iâm glad my son takes after his father and doesnât mimic me in such situations.
But what Iâd just seen was worse than anything Iâd expected in a progressive school district in a liberal college town. I mean, hereâs what these visiting âeducatorsâ were telling those kids: Condoms fail. They fail so often, they are pointless. There is no birth control except condoms. So if you have sex, you will end up with a pregnancy, and there is no abortionâyou have to have that baby. And you will be shamed.
And what about that bit about wanting a âgood girlâ who says ânoâ? What year is this?
I remember when a friend of mine (whose gay daughter also goes to my sonâs school) tried to nudge me to pay attention to sex edâbut I told her I was too busy. Another friend told me about a âGender Equityâ club forming at the high school; a group of students trying to agitate for positive change in sexuality and gender issues. Iâd reacted again with âIâm too busy.â Honestly, Iâm sure that after my sonâs âno-means-yesâ sex ed class ended, I was yelling and swearing at the visiting teachers partly out of sheer guilt.
Once home, I worried about how my kid was doing after challenging Ms. Thomas and being rebuffed. But I shouldnât have been worried; he came home five hours later with a smile.
âThe news got to the locker commons before I got there,â he said.
What news? The news that heâd challenged the teachers with information. Iâd missed that, in addition to what heâd said in class, heâd also passed out information to all his classmates so they could read what heâd found out about abstinence education and virginity pledgesâand how they donât really help.
At this point, I confessed that Iâd tweeted about the whole thing and it had gone national while he was at school. He cracked up. He especially enjoyed hearing about the Twitter math geeks who were calculating the odds of a classroom of 20 kids all experiencing condom failure and getting pregnant in a few dice rolls. It came to about one in three billion.
We went for ice cream and, on the way home, swung by the drugstore. I bought him a box of condoms.
âYou know what my friends and I are going to do with those. Weâre going to make water balloons and cover stuff as a joke,â he said.
âThen weâll get the non-lubricated kind,â I answered.
Back at home, he continued his internet research and found a meta-analysis of 13 studies on abstinence education in the medical journal BMJ. He went over it with his father, who is a physician. I gave him the information on the website Ms. Thomas had referred him toâshowing him that itâs a political lobbying group. And I noticed for the first time my son was wearing a shirt my brother gave him: âStand backâIâm going to try science.â
His father warned him: âTomorrow, you canât expect the adults in the room to act rational. They have their emotions tied up with this, and whatever evidence you bring isnât going to convince them. Just be prepared for that.â
Our son said he was prepared, and that convincing them wasnât his goal. His goal was to teach the other kids some of the truth, and also to let them know itâs okay to challenge authority.
Me? Iâm kicking myself now for not having gone to all those school-board meetings where they talked about the sex ed curriculum. But I wonder if it would have matteredâbecause whatever they write in the curriculum plan, what matters is where the rubber meets Ms. Thomas.
When the school board approved this curriculum that included condom use, Iâm sure Jerryâs story was not run by themâespecially not the slut-shaming bit about âgood girls.â And just to be clear, there were visitors earlier in the week who were good. My son tells me they had someone talk personally about abusive relationships, and it was very useful and powerful.
For liberal parents like me, the mistake we make is thinking of ourselves as the kind of people who donât interfere in public schools. As a consequence, the only people who do interfere with sex ed curricula are conservatives. If people like meâpeople who want to see sex ed include teaching about masturbation, the pleasure urge, the existence of LGBT peopleâdonât show up and push our side, the âmiddle groundâ turns out to be damned near the right.
Weâre going to need more than my kid and his printouts to teach this generation.
Alice Dreger is author of the new book Galileoâs Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science (named one of the âbest books of the monthâ in nonfiction by Amazon). Follow her on Twitter @AliceDreger.