Virginity vows: back to the '50s

[teach1st]

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/03/21/Columns/Virginity_vows__back_.shtml

ROBYN E. BLUMNER, St. Petersburg Times, 3/21/04

The virginity pledge, a written promise made by young people to stay chaste until married, which has been pushed by every evangelical preacher and home schooler with a pulse, is a campaign littered with broken vows.

According to a government-backed longitudinal study, 88 percent of those who signed the pledge didn't live up to it. Among the 12,000 teens studied, the pledgers did delay sexual intercourse by about 18 months compared to their nonpledging peers, but then they caught up, acquiring sexual partners and catching sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the process.

Drawing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, lead researcher Peter Bearman of Columbia University found that pledgers were especially careless when they decided to dump their vows, with male teens using condoms at a 40 percent rate, rather than the 60 percent rate for those who didn't pledge. This explains the significant rate of STDs among pledgers, which is not statistically different than that for nonpledgers.

Moreover, the teens who took the pledge were less likely than nonpledgers to know they were infected with an STD, raising concerns about transmission.

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[JackDragna]

1. My favorite thing about the "no sex til marriage" crap..

..is what those who never marry are supposed to do to fulfill their sexual desires. Is someone who doesn't get married until their late 30's really supposed to spend their entire young adulthood celibate? What planet are these people from?

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. The thing that gets me

is that these same churches that want the virginity pledge also don't do anything about teaching about birth control or on ways to relieve sexual tension by personal means, which is silly. That's how virgins who don't get married until their late thirties cope. (And contrary to what the Bible thumpers say, there's nothing in the Bible forbidding it!)

[NuttyFluffers]

3. tense people are easier to control

creating tension, and especially the ubiquitous sexual tension, is a great way to keep people always dancing to your every whim.

not to say religion is evil. but it is undeniable there were those who used it for evil purposes. and for those, what better way to exert control? it's hard to think coherently when you are about to bust a gasket. a very convenient state of mind for those who choose to manipulate a position of power.

[Ilsa]

4. And then on the other side we've got pharmacists

trying to get out of honoring professional agreements to supply prescribed birth control, etc to young women who need it, and Asscrack looking for abortion records.

I guess they just want some more babies to either adopt or place in group homes to raise for cannon fodder.

The overall picture is bleak if kds don't have the tools they need to stay safe.

[patricia92243]

5. In the 50's we did not TALK about having sex outside marriage, abortion,..

incest and a whole bunch of stuff. These things happened, but we didn't TALK about it. You'd be absolutely amazed at the people (my sister for one) who actually, honestly believe nothing of this sort happened in "the good old days".

People believe that abortion being legalized is what made women have abortions. Which is ABSOLUTELY back wards. Women were having abortions anyhow, and it was legalized so it would be safe.

By the way - I'm live in the Bible belt and am a Christian myself.

[teach1st]

6. Did Ward Cleaver have office flings?

http://www.salon.com/sex/galleries/2004/01/23/female/index.html

Salon (Paid registration or free day pass may be required)

One reason Kinsey's book was so shocking when it came out was because it indicated that a high percentage of men were having sex before marriage. They were having sex outside of marriage with other partners. They were masturbating. A large number of men had some sort of homosexual encounter, even though it might only have been once. American men were much more sexually active than most people thought. When the female volume came out in 1953, it was even more shocking -- women were as sexually active as men. Especially in the 1950s, that was a conservative time.

As I recall, there is also considerable evidence that sexual abuse was widespread as well in the good old days, but without discussion and education it was rarely reported or remediated.

[kskiska]

8. It wasn't openly talked about

but I remember, even in junior high school, girls suddenly dropping out of school because they were pregnant. Usually they were spirited away in the dead of night to a home for unwed mothers where they would be pressured to give up their babies for adoption. There were also whispers about where to go for an abortion. n
As for abortions, I discovered after my mother's death that she'd had a very bloody abortion back in the early 1940s.

When "Peyton Place" came out it was a tremendous hit because everyone knew this stuff was going on all around them.

Another thing, sex education in schools was a joke. I remember how it was integrated into "Health" class and there were no specifics, just talk about "hormones" and pimples.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. Yyyup!

My grandmother told of a friend of hers who had two abortions during the Depression, and I remember when the father of a girl who went to the same grade school was arrested for performing abortions.

The other response to pregnancy was the "shotgun" wedding with a pregnant bride. The other side of the "shotgun" wedding was the "we desperately want each other's bodies" wedding, in which two otherwise incompatible and immature teens with a strong infatuation for each other would elope, because having sex outside of marriage was "wrong."

In my high school, there was no official sex education program, and when asked about it for a newspaper article, the high school principal stated that there was no program, but in fact, the biology teacher had about a two-week sex education unit in his standard course.

[lolly]

15. Read an article about ob/gyn wards pre-Rowe

This was a few years back--but they interviewed some elderly docs and nurses who had been around in the 50s and before.

Anyway, the point was that these people all seemed to be pro-choice because they had seen the horrors of back alley abortions. By one estimate, about 1/2 the beds in ob/gyn wards were not new mothers but victims of botched abortions--many were rendered sterile, had horrific debilitating infections, etc. But apparently these women were invisible; no one mentioned them.

[Art_from_Ark]

16. At least you had it in Health class

At my school, it was given a 10-minute onceover by some coach in PE class.

[kskiska]

17. Well, the P.E. teachers

were also required to teach "Health," so it was pretty much the same deal you got, but once a week or so.

[bemildred]

7. More obedience rituals. nt

[Fovea]

9. Religion as a system of social control

What's God got to do with it?

[yellowcanine]

11. This is just common sense, isn't it?

Use of condoms require some conscious planning - so of course young people who haven't taken the vows are more likely to be using them than the failed vow takers. The vow taking is a head in the sand approach. Chastity belts, anyone?

[Mountainman]

12. The difference between those who take a virginity pledge and those who

don't is the guilt felt by those who pledge and break their pledge because they have sex then lie about it.

[lolly]

14. Also, it makes them feel less guilty

If you plan ahead (which you have to do if you're using birth control) then you're bad.

If you were just "caught up in the passion and couldn't stop yourself," then you can convince yourself that you're not a "bad" person, you were just subject to forces beyond your control.

[DinahMoeHum]

13. This kind of pledge breaks more easily than a condom. . .

No...this time it's NOT funny.

a tisket, a tasket, a condom or a casket.

:evilfrown: