It seems unfair to slam you for typos or spelling mistakes, so I’ll ignore them, but neither of these sentences would win any Plain English awards:
[quote]
[ul][li]Now, would it be your contention that were it not for the limited sex education we have that in the US, unwanted pregnancies would be even more frequent than they are?[/li][li]If the ultimate purpose of sex education is to avoid unwanted pregnancy and STD transmission, then it should be reasonable to not provide sex education if so other means can be found to achieve that goal[/ul][/li][/quote]
Separately, and more to the point, too many of your comments seem designed to piss in the punch for your own entertainment, and contribute nothing worthwhile to this thread. For instance, saying
is worthless, unless you’re suggesting that we introduce more repressive social environments. I’m confident that you’re not suggesting that, so why bother to say it?
Or further, saying:
fails to address or contradict any of the points I have made. What are these “MANY ways”? More repressive social environments?
I’ve been at great pains to suggest that this is a complicated problem that requires a multi-tiered response. While more liberal abortion laws won’t solve the problem by themselves they are a component part of the solution (compared with an all-out ban on abortion, as currently exists under the jurisdiction being discussed).
Similarly, while more sex education is unnecessary among children who have a basic understanding of the mechanics of sex, or the risks involved in irresponsible sexual behaviour, I’ve been arguing for more efficient sex education among children whose own behaviour betrays an ignorance of these things. I’ve also been arguing for this education to be conducted with parents’ involvement rather than in defiance of parents. Sometimes that requires parents to be educated as much as their children (which I’ll agree is beyond the scope of schools, but it seems to be a requirement in the society we’re discussing here).
Guinastasia’s comments are clearly directed at enPhantBlanc, and while I agree with them, I’ll apologise if you feel insulted at being linked to that person, but too many of your postings seem to be for your own entertainment and are in ignorance of life in Ireland or the UK, rather than addressing points other people have raised here.
Um, guy, while I agree that the focus needs to include the older male partners of 15 year old girls, referring to said girls as “stupid whores” and “stupid child ho’s” is not only offensive, it’s really misogynistic.
Yer kinda ruining the cred of yer argument. Ya know what I mean?
Except for the typo in the second sentence you quote (“so” should have been “some”), I fail to see how either of those are unclear.
I didn’t realize that I was engaged in a conversation with you, so I’m sorry you don’t feel I have properly addressed your multi-tiered approach to world problems. For what it is worth, I agree completely. I feel I have been arguing against the overly simplistic views presented throughout this thread that a girl did stupid act A, therefore solution X is called for.
My point, in case I was unclear the previous times that I stated it, is that there are many solutions for preventing stupid act A. Therefore it is not obvious, as so many people have stated, that solution X is the clear solution. I, personally, do not favor a return to more socially repressive times, but that is just the solution that many people (for example, religious fundamentalist) propose. Further, I would go so far as to suggest that their evidence of efficacy is superior to the evidence for sexual education preventing stupid act A.
Therefore, if you want to argue that sexual education in schools is important, I feel that the best reason for supporting such is the belief that “education” is the goal, not curing social ills.
I did not realize that this discussion was limited to only those with detailed personal knowledge of life in Ireland and the UK. At no point was I arguing the legalities, just the principles; which I am pretty sure would remain unchanged should I emigrate.
Now, I am supremely sorry that you feel that I am pissing in your punch for my own amusement. I do not feel that is so, I am stating my opinions for your edification. If you don’t agree with them, fine. But if you insist on dismissing me as an intellectual incompetent just because you disagree with me, I’m going to find it very difficult to add you to my Christmas card list.
Also, the thread you just linked was not an attempt as “amusing sarcasm”. My suggestion that she not be in the wedding unless the bride pay for the dress is an honest one. I feel that the tradition of bridesmaids paying for their owns dresses (which they’ll likely never wear again) is particularly stupid. My acknowledgment that I am in the minority on this issue was not intended for humor, but rather to acknowledge that I am in the minority on this issue.
One final question: Did you feel that the link to my People Pages picture added something to the discussion? Though you may have meant nothing by it, it was the first time anybody has done that when referencing me and I am forced to consider there may have been an attempt at insult.
If you need any services in translating this post to the language in which you think, please let me know.
Yup.
With “whore/ho” I’m citing “some,” cited in Guinastasia’s post:
“She gave herself away quite freely and some would call her a whore.”
“Stupid” comes from Obfusciatrist mostly:
“Well, there are several stupid acts in that story. Most of them committed by the 15 year old girl.”
“Is it possible (not to mention likely) that this is just a very stupid 15-year-old girl?”
“At 15 she is too young to make all choices regarding her body. And she is stupid.”
and partly from Scylla:
“I don’t blame abortion laws, I blame a girl who behaved very stupidly.”
The cited “some” persist in believing that the problem is with the fifteen-year-old having loose morals. Others believe the problem is that fifteen-year-olds are stupid. I do not think that these are the problems. My point is that discussions of a pregnant child’s intelligence and character aren’t particularly useful unless the child freely made the decision to become pregnant and will freely make decisions about the pregnancy. If she was free to make decisions, then efforts to improve her morality or educate her ignorance will have effect. Unfortunately (I think but remain too lazy to make any effort to prove), situations in which fifteen-year-old girls make free choices about sex are rarer than the cited “some” and the aforementioned others believe. The effort to educate girls that teen pregnancy is bad for them, I am saying, is half the battle, and not the most important half. I think we ought to impose sanctions on the impregnators equal to the biological sanctions imposed upon the impregnated.
Apologia:
Sorry I posted twice. It was taking forever and I couldn’t tell whether it went through or not.
Forgive my feeble grasp of the language.
My laziness is very wrong and I really ought to do my research. Maybe I heard it on NPR or something.
Maybe everton is correct and I am speaking in some coptic dialect. Can I get some confirmation as to whether I am speaking clearly or not? It all makes sense in my head and when I read it back to myself, but then I know what I mean.
I have not made any comment on the girl’s morality. At fifteen, she can have sex on the bar at the local Denny’s for all I care. Stupidity is not inherently immoral.
Allowing herself to become pregnant was stupid, not immoral. Choosing to mutilate her body rather than carrying the child to term was stupid, not immoral. Refusing to go to her parents for help out of (most likely) exaggerated fear was stupid, not immoral.
I don’t know it for sure, thus the “(most likely)”. However, in my experience, unless there was physical abuse prior to the announcement of pregnancy then it is unlikely that the announcement will trigger it.
Yet, despite this, every pregant teenager I have ever dealt with has feared that her parents “will beat her to within an inch of her life” if she tells them. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but that my experience tells me that it rarely happens in a family that wasn’t already abusive.
You don’t say whether your friend had any true reason to fear violence, just that her parents were tough on her.
My own mother (since we all enjoy anecdotal argument) experienced the same fear. She was kicked out of the house, but there was never any risk of physical violence. Now, having to survive on your own is not fun, but neither is it justification for self-mutilation.
Of course you haven’t, of course it isn’t. That’s why I differentiated b/w Scylla and you (who have called this child stupid) and the nameless hordes that make up “some” (whom Guinastasia cited above and who believe that undesired pregnancies result from moral turpitude).
A child can only allow herself to become pregnant or prevent herself from becoming pregnant if she is both free to make decisions about the sex she has and capable of enforcing her partner’s compliance with those decisions. We haven’t done the research that would tell us whether or not this particular child was in a position of equal power in her relationship with her semen donor. The claim that she was stupid is thus impossible to support.
Without doing the research we don’t know what is most likely. Thus this “stupid” is also impossible to support.
To sum up:
You didn’t say “whore.”
I didn’t accuse you of saying “whore.”
You said “stupid.”
“Stupid” and “whore” are both illogical and impossible to support.
Neither “stupid” nor “whore” is germane or useful.
“The cited ‘some’ persist in believing that the problem is with the fifteen-year-old having loose morals.”
I was one of the cited some, apparently I should have magically realized I was not included. Though none of your quotes mention morality, so I don’t really know where you are going.
It seems to be your suggestion that the vast majority of sexually active teenage girls are not actually making that choice. Rather, they are essentially being raped by manipulative boys. Personally, I find that idea to be amazingly dismissive of the cognitive abilities of teenage girls. Also, there are many forms of contraception that do not rely on the cooperation (or even the knowledge) of the male partner. I also find rediculous the claim that most sexually active teenage girls are actually involved with boys/men much older than them. Yes, it happens, but to claim that it is close to the norm is silly. Who are all the 15-year-old boys having sex with? I know I wasn’t getting lucky with the older ladies, but rather with the other 15-year-old girls around me.
If it turns out that the girl spoken of in the OP was, in fact, raped, then I may reconsider my position. However, if the process of becoming pregnant we forced on her against her will, then not going to her parents was even stupider (though possibly adequately explained by trauma).
“I was one of the cited some, apparently I should have magically realized I was not included. Though none of your quotes mention morality, so I don’t really know where you are going.”
That was so poorly written that I have no choice but to quit my job and go enroll in a fifth grade writing class.
I wrote: “The cited ‘some’ persist in believing that the problem is with the fifteen-year-old having loose morals. Others believe the problem is that fifteen-year-olds are stupid.” You and Scylla were in the “others” category. I should have said “Guinastasia’s ‘some’” or something like that to differentiate them from you. It’s from this post from millennia ago: “She gave herself away quite freely and some would call her a whore.”
This part of your post is hard to parse. I will make a stab at answering a question I imagine may be in it: I had to make the overflogged Guinastasia citation stand for the legions of people who will shriek about teens being sluts or whores because they’re pregnant out of wedlock. I did so because there is nobody from the legion of “some” on the board posting about morals. But you “others” are here and you are posting about intelligence. I lumped a nonexistant discussion of this child’s morals together with the documented discussion of her intelligence because I wanted to point out that a discussion of her intelligence is no more useful than a discussion of her morals. Both are logically bankrupt, neither is supported with evidence. And I don’t see the relevance of either morality or intelligence if we’re talking about solutions to the problem of unwanted pregnancies.
Do what now? What does cognitive ability have to do with rape?
I never said anything about any vast majorities. I didn’t do any research so don’t have a clue about majorities, vast or otherwise. But I heard somewhere, possibly I found it on a Bazooka gum wrapper, that there is a double standard operative in the modern world wherein females and males are still not social equals, and I thought perhaps that that might contribute to the problem of unwanted pregnancies, just as it contributes to things like wife beating, gender inequality in salaries, it being famously dangerous for women and girls to go out in public after dark without escort because they’ll get abducted, blablabla.
Those would include the pill, the shot and the implant, none of which are available to teens in Ireland, and they aren’t widely available to kids here, either. You have to get parental permission many places, they’re expensive (btw, for more evidence that there’s sexism in the world, refer to recent news reports on how expensive the birth control pill is and how it’s not paid for by many insurance companies that pay for viagra), you have to travel to get to a clinic that’ll dispense them. Finally, not everyone can safely take hormonal contraceptives.
Yeah, that’s why I said “many many,” not “most.” The age difference isn’t the operative difference anyway; the operative difference is the difference in power. Males have more power than females in this society. Again my lazy ass offers no statistical evidence! I don’t even know where I picked that one up it’s so gotdamned obscure. Cereal box? Dunno.
Even if I’m wrong and there is no power differential and sexism is mostly limited to beer commercials and women and girls almost never get pregnant against their will, it should be clear even to fifteen-year-olds that a better way to stop unwanted pregnancy would be to make it undesirable to all, not half, of the responsible parties.
Sex-ed ought to be directed at boys, and it should be pregnancy prevention as well as STD prevention. Boys “don’t relate” to pregnancy prevention talk because pregnancy doesn’t affect them. That’s obvious, isn’t it? Nobody on this board is talking about how stupid this child’s sex partner was. Why? Why because he wasn’t stupid. There’s no reason he should take precautions because nothing adverse happens to the impregnaTOR, just to the impregnaTEE. Boys who “get lucky” may “get her in trouble,” but that doesn’t make them any less lucky. For teen pregnancy stats to change, the lucklessness needs to be spread around and boys need to experience some of the trouble they cause. That’s why we should socially sanction males for unwanted pregnancy much as females are biologically sanctioned. So I will go on record with the following unsubstantiated diatribe: whoever it was who impregnated the fifteen-year-old Irish girl was stupid. He was very stupid, he did a stupid thing, and I blame him for behaving very stupidly. Some would call him a whore.
Fine, he was a stupid whore. Now, unless he physically forced himself on this girl, then she was stupid for allowing herself to become pregnant and she was stupid for choosing self-mutilation over the other options.
He was stupid for impregnating her (it is just as easy to avoid becoming a father as it is to avoid becoming a father).
So, we’re agreed that everybody involved was stupid?
No. I wanted to equalize things, so I tried to be as abusive of him as people tend to be of women and girls in this situation. We don’t know any more about their intelligence than we do about their morals or their hair color or whether they raise hamsters. We don’t know that he was stupid and we don’t know she was stupid, either. We don’t know anything about the situation.
Furthermore you don’t know that the only way to subvert someone’s will is through physical force, you don’t know she allowed herself to become pregnant, you don’t know she had options other than self-mutilation.
What’s that parenthetical? You meant “being” for the second “becoming?” Anyway, it’s not as easy for boys to take responsibility as it is for them not to take responsibility. It’s clearly easier for the boy to do nothing at all than it is for the boy to get all prophylactic. Here, I’ll do the permutations: he does nothing, she gets pregnant, nothing happens to him. He takes precautions, she gets pregnant, nothing happens to him. He does nothing, she doesn’t get pregnant, nothing happens to him. He takes precautions, she doesn’t get pregnant, nothing happens to him. No matter what he does, nothing happens to him. She is the one to whom things happen.
Here are some more permutations. If she gets pregnant, it could be because “she’s stupid,” whatever that means, or it could be:
she doesn’t know where babies come from,
she and the boy both believe in magic like “you can’t get pregnant on your period,”
she believes in magic, the boy knows better but says nothing,
She doesn’t know where babies come from, the boy explains, mixing science with magic either knowing better or not,
she thinks she’s using her birth control correctly but is doing something wrong,
he thinks he’s using the condom correctly but is doing something wrong,
she’s taking antibiotics and nobody told her that makes her pills ineffective,
they’re using the withdrawal method and the boy doesn’t get out in time,
they’re using the rhythm method full stop,
the pill fails,
the condom busts,
the diaphragm slips,
the stupid little spermicidal leaflet thing about the size of a contac lense which is a class action suit waiting to happen fails,
they run out of condoms and he says, “it’s okay this once,” and she says, “no,” and he says, “I’ll be careful,” and she says, “no,” and he says, “whatever other bullshit line,” and she says, “no” and so it goes until she falls asleep saying “no,” at which time he leaps into action.
same scenario except he bullies her 'til she’s crying and then he starts kissing her “comfortingly” and she kisses back and then he starts up again and she tries to stop him but he keeps going with her fighting and protesting and afterwards she’s thinking, “I didn’t want that to happen. Was that rape? Naaah, he’s my boyfriend,” or she says, “you raped me!” and he says, “that’s ridiculous, we’ve been sleeping together for six months” and the law backs him up in the majority, I’ll risk it this time, of cases,
same scenario except he retreats into a snarling passive aggressive ball and she tries to explain about safe sex lectures and pamphlets she’s read and he gets increasingly ferociously bitchy the harder she tries and he finally starts to come around and there’s some cuddling and then he rapes her as above and she says, “you raped me,” and he says, “that’s ridiculous, you tried to hold out because we didn’t have rubbers but then you couldn’t resist, besides I can’t rape you, we’ve been sleeping together for six months,”
she gets (or is made) very drunk/fucked up, they have sex,
she goes to a frat party–according to Camille Paglia that’s about the same as walking naked into the sex-offenders wing of a maximum security prison, but not all teens have read Camille Paglia,
weird stuff like, he wants her to get pregnant for some reason so he punches a hole in the condom or the diaphragm, he’s her father/uncle/basketball coach and convinces her he’ll off her whole family/basketball team if she doesn’t screw him, he’s forty-two and tells her his wife made him get a vasectomy, but he’s lying. You note I came up with a bunch of permutations before I got to the weird stuff.
Because they suffer monumental consequences when they become pregnant, girls are more likely than boys to take steps to avoid becoming pregnant. A way to change the behavior that leads to unwanted pregnancy is to socially engineer some consequences for the boy involved so that he will be more likely to take preventative steps, too.
well i thought i’d jump in here and correct an inaccuracy.
in northern ireland, no you can’t get the implant or injections, but you can get the pill. from any General Practioner. if you are under 16 and the doctor thinks you know what you’re doing, and are likely to become pregnant without it, they don’t even have to tell your parents. and the pill is free. to all women. of all ages.
i know this from personal experience.
but that doesn’t mean i don’t know 4 girls who have had babies before they turned 18, another 10 who went to england for abortions (one of whom was “persuaded” by boyfriend and her parents, and regrets it terribly), and one poor girl who, at 19, is the mother of twins, and the unhappy wife of a baptist preacher’s son.
i don’t think teenagers are stupid, i think that they are under the firm impresion that they’re invincible. and that things happen to other people.
that’s why they smoke more than any other age group, have more vehicle accidents, and drink themselves into unconsciousness with frightening regularity.
oooops. Maybe I should try looking something up once in a while.
woah. I’m hung over from all my ranting. I agree that teenvincibility is a huge contributor to the problem–if Obfusciatrist had substituted that concept for the concept, “stupid,” I might never have taken that first sip and plunged into this embarrassing lost-weekend wall o’ words posting frenzy.
wuuuuhuhhuh… I need an aspirin. Or five aspirin. What if now I’ve taken that one fatal sip suddenly all I can do is rant… forever? Do they have those insta-coholics in www-world like they do in alcohol-world? I’m obviously a total neophyte and I rip off like that? For ninety paragraphs? Isn’t that a bad sign? Should I get myself banned? Am I in danger? I swear to God I had no control, it just… happened.
Nah, if you were speaking Coptic, I’d know where to start attempting to understand you.
My irony meter is going crazy. Someone is saying teenage girls are universally stupid? Who was that again?
Also, you suggest they get a contraceptive that the male doesn’t need to be involved in. What contraceptive is that, I might ask, that under your ideals they wouldn’t need to have their parents permission to get?
Please, explain this to me in a way that doesn’t make you sound utterly brainless or hypocritical.
Well, I’m just wondering how he figures it to be “much more dangerous” than an abortion… certainly there are bad things that can go wrong, but I’m wondering if there’re stats available to see the numbers of women who are injured/killed?
I didn’t doubt his claim… just want a cite or two, for future reference. And because it seems like an interesting factoid.
Well, a surgical abortion is pretty much routine procedure, and it’s rare that anything goes wrong.
It’s quick and over and done with.
Childbirth, on the other hand, can afford all sorts of complications, due to position of the baby, time of labor, contractions, dilating, bleeding, etc etc…