Technical Virgins, Doctors, and Church Ladies

We are never sure exactly what it is that the critics of the Montgomery County sex-ed curriculum really want. They say they like the current curriculum, but then they complain about it all the time, and blame everything that happens on it. Kids misbehaving on the school bus? It's because of the sex-ed classes they take. They say they don't want the schools to teach abstinence-only, but then they crusade on and on about how risky condoms are, and how people shouldn't have sex at all until they're married, and complain that the condom video only gave "lip service" to abstinence. They say it's not about religion, but then they talk about chastity and some so-called moral values that they seem to hold, which don't follow from reason and are almost certainly derived from religion.

Of course it's not just here in Montgomery County, these people are confusing everybody everywhere. They have giant national organizations that get on their collective high-horses over stuff, boycotting this or that, or banning books or fighting their school districts or whatever. What do they want? Nobody knows, because it has nothing to do with reality. Like, they do not believe that homosexuality is natural, or they believe it goes against God's teachings, or something. Okay, so ... then what? Are gay people supposed to just stop being gay? You can't figure out what in the world they think is supposed to happen. I don't think they'll be happy until sex ... just ... goes ... away.

This week USA Today had a kind of interesting article about how kids are reacting to these impossible mixed messages.

They have figured out how to be "technical virgins."

Ten years after Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky's relationship made oral sex a mainstream topic, there's still plenty of debate over whether oral sex is really sex.

"There's not only confusion; there's fighting over it," says J. Dennis Fortenberry, a physician who specializes in adolescent medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine. "People disagree fairly vehemently."

The latest fuss is spurred by new federal data that found that more than half of 15- to 19-year-olds have received or given oral sex. Although the study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not ask the particulars of these encounters, research conducted in pre-Clinton times, along with more recent studies, suggests that teens largely fall on the "it's not sex" side. 'Technical virginity' becomes part of teens' equation

(Of course they have to mention Clinton in this... Oh those liberal media.)

Technically, I guess, a virgin is a female whose vagina has not been penetrated by a penis, or a male whose penis has not been inside a vagina. So there's your definition.

Now, some teenagers are going to be thinking about how to work around that definition so they can enjoy sex without, you know, losing that virginity that everybody keeps talking about. And it turns out to be easy.

A study published in 1999 in the Journal of the American Medical Association examines the definition of sex based on a 1991 random sample of 599 college students from 29 states. Sixty percent said oral-genital contact did not constitute having sex. "That's the 'technical virginity' thing that's going on," says Stephanie Sanders, associate director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University and co-author of the study, which the researchers titled "Would You Say You 'Had Sex' If ...?"

Now this article is going to go around a couple of sharp curves here. Watch this:

What constitutes sex tends to be defined in a culture and varies with the times, Fortenberry says.

"In certain times in the history of the world, certain kinds of kissing would be considered sex," he says. "Not too many years ago, a woman would have been considered a 'loose woman' if she kissed a person before marriage."

But a new book from the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, an Austin-based non-profit that has worked for abstinence education with the Bush administration, doesn't waffle. In Questions Kids Ask About Sex, oral sex is clearly sex.

"Sex occurs when one person touches another person's genitals and causes that person to get sexually excited," the book states. "A girl or boy who's had oral sex doesn't feel or think like a virgin anymore, because he or she has had a form of sex."

Melissa Cox, who edited and contributed to the book, is a Denver-based medical writer who also edited a publication for Focus on the Family, an organization devoted to Christian family values.

She says a medical panel for the institute determined that oral sex is sex because it places young people at risk for sexually transmitted diseases and infections, puts them at risk for long-term emotional harm and opens the door for other sexual activity.

Maybe that didn't seem strange to you, but to go from quoting "a physician who specializes in adolescent medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine" to somebody who writes for rightwing Christian groups, mmm, do those seem equivalent to you? Like, does this lady have any qualifications? You may have noticed that none were mentioned.

This is exactly what we've got in our county. The doctors are clear about how to approach the subject of sex, whether it's sexual orientation, safe sex practices, or developing a comprehensive outline for understanding the dimensions of sexual identity. And then you've got people from these religious groups, who want sex to go away. And the church ladies pretend that they are discussing the topic on the same level as the doctors.

Isn't that special?

Part of the problem, of course, is that different people have different goals. The doctors are concerned about public health issues, mainly having to do with disease and unwanted pregnancies. The church ladies want teenagers to be little ladies and gentlemen. For them, even if oral sex is not sex (and of course, we're just defining a word here, we're not looking for any statement of fact), it's still bad. And it needs to stop. If there were no health risk to it, I doubt the doctors would have much to say about it.

See, this isn't easy. Sex won't go away, sorry, but it just won't. We're built for it. You can sandbag the river at one point, but it's going to spill over somewhere else. Been that way since the dawn of time. We need to teach our kids what's going on and how to deal with it, honestly, thoroughly, and objectively.