...The TV cheerily announced this morning that oral cancers caused by human papillomavirus are expected to outnumber cervical cancers -- especially among young people.
Sometimes I think the Victorians had the right idea, (in practice), leaving vice to adults and doing their best to keep things on the q.t. even then. You can tell kids all day about STDs and how to prevent their spread, and by the time the school-bell rings, the more daring will have worked out a half-dozen ways around "those silly rules," all of them high-risk.
The only thing I know that is strongly correlated with reduced STD rates in young people is involved parents. They know their teachers are fools -- but most of 'em are still convinced Mom and Dad aren't, no matter how much they try to pretend otherwise.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
2 comments:
In the late '70's the pre-teen sex education delivered to me in my big suburban schools told me all about the then known diseases and how to avoid them.
I'm sure that the teachers' intended message was "whether to do this is your decision, and you must be mature in assessing the risks". The message that came through loud and clear to us 11-year olds was that the way we were to demonstrate that we were mature was by having sex and accepting the risks.
I had a phenomenal amount of personal freedom, time, and mobility at that age, so I suppose I am fortunate that my lardy flabbiness and bottle-bottom glasses helped make it so that no on was particularly interested in passing their spirochetes on to me.
I don't know about that, Ms. X. I've always been one that believes that you never harm anyone by giving them knowlege, and that you can do massive harm by denying knowledge when it is needed.
yeah, there will always be kids who use these lessons as ways to develop high-risk ways around the risks. But those kids would have been doing all of these high-risk behaviors, anyway, and at least now they are going into it knowing what they are risking.
THe key here is parents, always has been, always will be. As a kid, i was more afraid of how disappointed my parents would have been if I'd caught the clap than I was of actually catching the clap. It isn't hard to instill that sort of self-consciousness in a kid unless they are a total sociopath, but then them catching the clap is probably the least of your concerns.
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