Reply #23: Who was the Surgeon General candidate ... [View All]

[Philostopher]

Didn't Clinton propose a candidate for Surgeon General who advocated teaching teenagers about masturbation as an alternative to prematurely experimenting with sex? I can see her face, but can't remember her name. They practically tarred and feathered her.

I know the evangelicals (and if them, then doubtless the fundies) want their kids to believe that masturbation will condemn them to hell -- I grew up in an evangelical church, and remember sitting in a room full of skeptical, snorting fellow teenagers twenty-five years ago watching a slickly-produced video determined to convince us of that -- but let's get real, here. Teaching these kids that there's an alternative to full penetration sex would cut down on unplanned pregnancies. Even mutual masturbation, if practiced with relatively minor precautions, is a much less likely vector for STDs and seldom results in pregnancy.

It's all part of the 'sex is dirty' ethic that makes sex so tempting to teenagers in the first place. But I remember being a teenager, and I remember the moral relativism I practiced. I was a virgin when I married, but only on technical grounds. So what? If the people I went to church with had known some of the stuff that happened before I got married, they wouldn't have considered me one; however, I sure as hell wasn't going to get pregnant doing what I did.