Huh, I told both my teenage boys not to have sex until they were married or 35, whichever came first. They agreed. They said they wouldn't do drugs either. I gave them a pass on rock and roll.

Also: I couldn't stand that co-ed camp and managed to get sent home early because I walked out of the chapel when the (woman) speaker told us that girls shouldn't grow up and be doctors, we should grow up and marry doctors and make babies for them. Yeah.

I happily attended and worked at an all-girls Christian camp throughout my childhood and teenagehood. It was so much easier to have fun without hormones and boys getting in the way. ;)

And it sure seems that abstinence education ends up actually pushing kids to try sex (possibly because it's so exotic and "dangerous") and get pregnant than does teaching about contraception and demystifying the whole thing.

I've heard that teenage kids who've had abstinence education tend to have sex at about the same rate as kids who did not, but they do tend to use contraception at a much lower rate. Maybe that's due to them being taught that "abstinence is the only real contraception" or maybe it's because they'd feel less guilty having sex in a moment of passion than they would actually planning ahead and getting contraception.

But one funny thing about kids who take "virginity pledges" - years later, the overwhelming majority of these kids deny ever having made such a pledge.

I gave them a pass on rock and roll.

Not to get all finger-pointy but God gave rock and roll to everyone.

maybe it's because they'd feel less guilty having sex in a moment of passion than they would actually planning ahead and getting contraception.

BINGO

Javachick, have you ever read Blankets?

Not to get all finger-pointy but God gave rock and roll to everyone.

Yeah. Plus us Americans are guaranteed the right to rock. It's in the constitution or something.

I remember a conversation I had with some other girls in my dorm in college. One of them said that she was considering having sex with her boyfriend. I jokingly gestured toward the basket of free condoms on the side table and said, "Well, we know you'll be safe." She said something like, "Oh, he doesn't want to use condoms. And it's not like they actually work, anyway." And several other girls agreed, that condoms don't actually work, and that I'd been taken in by condom industry propaganda if I thought that they did.

(Mostly, they had totally out-of-context statistics, like the 10% failure rate with "normal usage." I'd been taught in health class in high school that that meant that, among couples who said that condoms were their primary method of birth control -- meaning that they usually used them, but maybe sometimes not -- 10% of them got pregnant. These girls had learned that the same statistic meant that, in real-world situations, as opposed to controlled ones where everything is done perfectly, 10% of acts of intercourse with a condom resulted in pregnancy.)

years later, the overwhelming majority of these kids deny ever having made such a pledge.

I'd be interested to know how many decide to make the pledge on their own, and how many are pressured by parents, churches, and so forth.

Mom and I got into an interesting discussion yesterday regarding the fact that I had to get a pap in order to get birth control when I was an older teen. Now they don't recommend pap's until you are over 21 or have been sexually active for 2 years.

It got us talking about how the care and maintenance of "the glittery hoo-ha of happiness" has changed and how that could have an impact on teen sexuality.