Technical Virgins

There's a report out today that says over half of teenagers who take those Taliban-esque pledges to remain virgins until marriage break their pledge within the first year.

I'm not at all surprised. My teen daughter is particularly scathing on these pledges and on the pressure exerted in some schools to sign one. At one school she attended, the list of pledgers was displayed on a sign near the main entrance so that everyone could see who hadn't signed - the "sluts". Yet she reported, long before any Harvard study, that teens and sex go together no matter what pledge they have made. There's even a phrase, it seems - "technical virgin". It denotes those who, taking Bill Clinton's prevarications to a new level of expertise - indulge in anal rather than vaginal sex and are therefore, technically, still virgins.

Personally I'm with the late great Robert Heinlein on this one: "the second most ridiculous notion ever is that sex is inherently sinful."

(The first ridiculous notion was that God needs our noisy and public worship in exactly the way the local snakeoil seller lays down otherwise he gets unhappy.)

The evidence that faith-based prevention of anything - teen sex, pregnancies, AIDS or whatever - is a crock of cooked statistic touted by a legion of Mrs (and Mr) Grundies is now overwhelming. Can we get back to proper education and proper protection now?

Faith may well move mountains but in matters of sex, put thy trust in science and latex.