Propaganda Only

Back in seventh grade, a couple of my friends and I went to see Rocky, the classic American underdog movie.

If you're one of the ten people that's never seen it - Rocky, a palooka club boxer from Philadelphia, fights Apollo Creed, the Heavyweight Champion of the World. Rocky has no chance - but he goes the distance.

Leaving the movie, most of us absorbed the lesson; the plucky underdog, through sheer perseverence, stayed in the fight, went the distance, against all odds...

But one of my friends - let's call him "Stupid Moron" - didn't get it. "But," he said, "Rocky lost".

"Yabbut, he met his goal - he went the distance! And he got the girl, and his respect, and..."

"...but he lost!"

The Strib's editorial last Sunday reminded me of that scene.

The piece - entitled "The threat of 'abstinence-only'" - starts with a bunch of gaping assumptions.

What do parents want from school sex ed? Surely they want their kids to come away with insight as well as knowledge -- with a sense of the profound power (and possible peril) of sexual intimacy.

No.

I want that to come from nearly anywhere but the public school. But that's splitting hairs in the context of this discussion.

But such abstractions are hard to measure, so researchers usually gauge sex-ed effectiveness by looking at facts: They assess how successful various programs are in delaying teen sex and averting teen pregnancy.

And of course it matters what works, because premature sexual activity can mar young lives and foreclose futures. That's why Minnesotans should worry about news that the state's $5 million "abstinence-only" sex education program -- taught to 45,000 of the state's students -- isn't working. The conclusion comes from a study underwritten by the state Health Department, which found that the five-year-old abstinence-only initiative -- which forbids any mention of contraception or safe sex -- has done little to encourage healthy behavior among teens exposed to it.

I worked wth a little fly-by-night consultant operation a few years ago. The group - mostly liberal women - tittered with similar glee at the word from the National Institutes of Health, that the programs didn't generate a lot of results. These women - or, in a few cases, womyn - had a vested interest in the failure of abstinence only. For some, it was about money - they were earning $1000 a day consulting with school districts to integrate new sex-ed programs. For others, it was purely ideological; they saw "abstinence" as a conservative bellwether - and a defeat to a conservative program is a defeat for conservatism.

The company's not around anymore, by the way.

This should surprise no one. Public-health experts have known for years that abstinence-only sex ed is a flop. Both the National Institutes ofHealth and the National Academy of Science have said so. A 2001 Surgeon General report found that the approach increases the chance that kids will neglect to use condoms or other contraceptives when they do become sexually active -- heightening their risk for disease and pregnancy. And a just-released study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute notes that, so far, "no education program focusing exclusively on abstinence has shown success in delaying sexual activity."

"But Rocky Didn't Win!"

There are three canards here.

First - of course "abstinence only" doesn't work in the public schools. It is delivered with the same sort of constrictions every public school program has - ergo, kids go up against two of the greatest forces in their lives - the hormone driven dementia of onrushing sexual awareness and the juggernauts of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and a popular culture that oozes sex from every magazine stand - with a program and set of pamphlets that are, if anything, less compelling than the D.A.R.E. anti-drug program (which also fails, against the vastly lesser allure of drug abuse).

Second - abstinence only DOES work. It's all that is taught in Catholic schools; no contraception, no abortion, no sex. And students at Catholic schools have a lower rate of teenage pregnancy than public schools. That's because "sex ed" in the Catholic school doesn't divorce the physical and moral components of sexuality - something no public school in his day and age is allowed to do. The difference is especially noticeable in schools with the most troubled kids - kids that may have grown up without either the social motivations and moral education to have any perspective about sex other that what the mainstream of society teaches them.

Third - I challenge anyone to show me a program that has "worked" with students who are not fundamentally wired to accept the program's message - students who've inherited no moral background from their family upbringing. We'll touch on that later.

So to be perfectly accurate, the Strib should have said "Abstinence-only programs, when combined with the publicly-acceptable version of morality, fail".

But it's not about accuracy, is it?

The wiser alternative? Scientists know that, too: programs that urge teens to hold off on sex but stress contraceptive use for those who do become active. Despite the fussing of some abstinence-only fans, there's no evidence at all that such an open approach encourages earlier sexual experimentation. Quite the contrary: Scores of studies show that comprehensive sex ed helps to postpone initiation of sexual activity and increase contraceptive use.

But the Strib doesn't think you need to see the criteria of these "scores" of studies.

What programs are they comparing? What populations? Are the experiences of the "abstinence only" programs at faith-based schools considered? Do the studies control for factors like family religious, social, educational and economic backgrounds?

Pregnancy, birth and abortion rates among Minnesota teens have dropped dramatically in the last decade -- and now stand among the lowest in the nation. The reasons? A dip in teenage sexual activity explains some of it. But most of the decline -- 80 percent of it, researchers say -- is due to increased contraceptive use among teens who do have sex.

The Strib considers this a victory.

Despite its impressive overall ranking, Minnesota has one of the country's highest birth rates for African-American teens -- five times the rate for whites.

Exactly.

Now, why is that? Do the African-American kids get one-fifth the sex education white kids get? No, that's absurd. They do, however, face a dominant popular culture that glorifies irresponsible sex, that treats responsible fatherhood as expendable, and a welfare system that subsidizes teen preganancy and guts the family structures that, up until the 1950s, gave Afro and Anglo America nearly identical out of wedlock pregnancy rates.

What's the lesson, here?

It's not the program. It's the moral background in which the program is presented.

A thoughtful society can do a lot to steer teens away from early sex and unwanted pregnancy; sex ed is far from the only factor.

Right. But we don't have a thoughtful society. We have Hollywood, and pop music, "Bratz" dolls, TV, and even the Disney Channel starting to sexualize kids younger and younger. We have teeny idol Britney Spears playing cat-and-mouse with virginity while living with fellow teen idol Justin Timberlake. We have Christina Aguilera glamourizing sluttiness. We have President Clinton, glamourizing and legitimizing the Lothario. We have innumerable examples of sex as glamorous, powerful, fun, grown-up - and very few of pregnancy, of single parenthood, of the options that pregnancy closes down. And that popular culture, like the Strib, sniffs at the moral aspects of the question - which are the very ones that seem to actually connect with people.

But there's little question that sex ed can play a positive role in nudging teens along the right path -- and no question at all about what sort of sex ed works best.

"But Rocky lost the fight".

Posted by Mitch at January 12, 2004 06:09 AM