There’s a lot of debate over whether we should be teaching kids about birth control in school. After all, there’s only one sexual behavior which is 100% effective at preventing pregnancy and disease, right? By teaching them about condoms we’ll only be giving them a false sense of security. So I modestly propose…
Masturbation-only sex ed.
That’s right. Instead of teaching kids about birth control, which will only encourage them to have sex, we’ll teach them to fuel all their sexual desires into masturbation. Classes will not only ensure kids that masturbation won’t make them go blind, but will teach kids how to get the maximum satisfaction. After all, if they don’t do a good job masturbating, they’ll try to have sex with each other.
Sounds good, no? I think I’ve found the answer to all our problems.
Strictly against catholic teachings (and other religions, i’m sure), hence, never going to happen in our society.
Remember, self-pleasure according to them is evil 'cause it doesn’t result in pro-creation. Catholic parents would be yanking their kids out of public schooling left and right.
Kids could be prone to excessively masterbating if exposed to it at an earlier age, when it’s encouraged so, which would lead to quite an unhealthy habit. Mentally unhealthy - opting to masterbate rather than have real relationships. I’m sure there are other unhealthy aspects to it, I’ll post these sometime later.
Parents would still object, by the way. They’d say that it is a deviant attitude.
Using condoms is against Catholic teachings too, have you heard of Catholic parents yanking their kids left and right out of public schools that hand them out? The more likely thing that would happen would be that some parents (plenty of non Catholics I’m willing to bet) would just try to get their kid out of sex-ed class and find a substitution for it.
If I undstand you, then you’re saying that the Catholics go to the Catholic parochial schools, and everyone else goes to public schools. Isn’t that a bit oversimplistic?
These are natural urges that human beings have been feeling for ages; they are what has kept our species going. To think that someone’s health teacher will have a significant impact upon this very private matter is pure folly.
I think Ben, that your modest proposal (and the comment Publius made had me LOL) assumes that people will listen to their teachers. Now if I hadn’t learned exactly how most males masturbate by reading about it in a book during the fall of 1990, I would have learned what I needed to know from my cousin during the spring of 1991. This sort of information has been disseminated on an informal basis forever.
Now for another walk down memory lane: when I was a freshman in high school (at that point, people still wore their backpacks with only one strap) I took a health class, as per state requirement. From my perspective, the teacher was very old, and in working at a job which involved coming to high school everyday BY CHOICE, had made a very questionable career move. If someone had said, with a straight face, that this guy was going to influence peoples’ very private decisions about sex, I would have just laughed.
Teachers can do wonderful things: they can help get their students interested in literature and ideas they might otherwise have never considered. But the idea of someone saying “Mr. C told us to wait until we’re married, and in the meantime, to pleasure ourselves whenever we feel like it!” Please.
Your argument that there is no 100% effective form of birth control is correct, but there are some that come pretty close: the Pill is something like 99% effective.
I didn’t fail to notice the wink and smile that appeared next to your comment about Sweden’s teen pregnancy rate, but I did a Google search anyway: Sweden + teen pregnancy. I accessed the Alan Guttmacher Institute (which is affiliated with Planned Parenthood) page and learned that the United States (where teen pregnancy is at record lows, a fact rarely reported in the mainstream media) has teen pregnancy rates four times higher than that of Sweden.
See, that’s a bit different. Parents would freak out upon hearing, at face value, that masterbation was being encouraged and methods taught in school. It sounds, like I said, a course in deviance to them.
The parent would view the whole class as a ‘poisoning’ of their child’s minds, IMO. (even though by nature the class might solve future abortion issues their offspring might have ) Catholic parents tend to freak out about these issues.
Of course, from the outset I was viewing this as a class geared towards Middle-school level students, so I figured it would be mandatory. Now, if it’s at the high school level, then it wouldn’t be such a big issue at all. Only thing is that the health class would be treated as a joke by most high schoolers, but hey, most classes are treated as such by the jokers.
) Catholic parents tend to freak out about these issues.