Teen abstinence - the gross-out factor

** Steve Waldman, founder of Beliefnet.com, maintains kind of a blog/column on that site. His December 3 entry takes a look at some trends in the movement for teen celibacy today.

Lecturing to hormone-crazed teenagers about abstinence actually works? That seems to be the implication of a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control showing a 16% drop in the number of teens having intercourse compared to ten years earlier. And, according to the Newsweek cover story that brought this issue once again to our attention, the youngsters now pledging abstinence were influenced by in-school abstinence programs, like the ones President Bush wants to fund.
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I also figured the abstinence approach was based partly on a false premise; that many teens really would rather not have sex but were feeling pressured into doing it. My memory of adolescence was that most teens wanted to have sex but felt there wasn't enough supply to fill the demand, in part because it was taboo. This may reveal a bit too much about my own adolescent frustrations, but I assumed this was the reality of the world.

Instead, it turns out President Bush and other advocates of abstinence programs were right: there is a large group of teens in a gray area – they would rather not have sex but need some good reasons or peer support to say no.

But judging from the Newsweek article they are not abstaining primarily for moral reasons. These programs seem to be at their most effective when they stress not Sodom and Gomorrah but syphillus and gonorrhea. Chris, one of the celibate teens profiled, joined a Christian abstinence group called Teen Advisors. “We watched their slide show in eighth grade and it just has pictures of all these STDs [sexually transmitted diseases],” he says. “It’s one of the grossest things you’ve ever seen. I didn’t want to touch a girl, like, forever.”

Read the article

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