No matter what position you use, make sure it’s condom-friendly, kids.
Since 2012, when House Bill 999 (HB999) was passed by the Mississippi legislature, public schools statewide are required to offer sex-ed classes to their students (for the first time in state history).
HB999 was much needed, considering a reported 76% of Mississippi high school students do the deed before graduation, and Mississippi has the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation with STD and HIV transmission rates. And those number are rising steadily every year.
But just because Mississippi is known for its southern hospitality, that doesn’t mean they’ve approached the task with a friendly drawl and a glass of lemonade; they’re more into serving up straight lemons, with a side of Peppermint Pattie.
60% of the schools in Mississippi agreed to follow a prepared curriculum that offers fun “purity presentations.” One such exercise involves in-school mock wedding ceremonies, where students pledge themselves to one another before God and their peers to enforce the idea that sex = marriage. Another involves unwrapping a York Peppermint Pattie and then passing it from student to student to note how dirty it gets by the time it’s made its rounds around the classroom.
Filling the impressionable minds of youth with the idea that engaging in sexual activity will make them dirty is not the best way to get them to knock it off.
How many research studies have to be released that prove abstinence-only programs do not actually decrease sexual activity in teenagers? Because as much as its proponents would like to believe they’re effective, they’re not. It’s not that complicated: teens are going to have sex if they want to. They’ll just do it without knowing anything about condoms and believing that “you can’t get pregnant your first time.”
What is complicated is offering young people incomplete or misguided information, intentionally confusing labels about what happens when they do decide to do it (which they probably will, even it’s not full-blown intercourse). HB999 grants a provision that allows instructors to teach students about condoms and other contraceptive alternatives, but only if they mention failure rates and only if they agree not to demonstrate or discuss how to properly use one.
Which makes us wonder: considering how conservative and religious Mississippi is as a state overall, who’s going to be the one teacher that talks about condoms? No, better to keep responsible sex a taboo subject and stick to shame and fear tactics to control teenagers and their growing bodies.
Something similar happened the year before in Texas, where teachers were encouraged to compare people to toothbrushes. As in: you only want to put something in your mouth that hasn’t been used by someone else before, because, gross. Right? As far as using toothbrushes go, yeah, sharing is definitely not the business. (If that particular squirm-worthy mistake has never happened to you, you can bet that situation will be featured on any and all of your favorite sitcoms.) While there are women out there who do wait until marriage to have sex for the first time (more power to you, sisters!), the fact remains that virgin brides are never going to take the majority. This outdated concept of being “used” or “unclean” if you’ve had sex is an incredibly damaging one; it instills the idea that your value and worth as a human being is dependent on remaining chaste, and once you no longer are, you deserve to be thrown away like a piece of gum, or a Peppermint Pattie.
It’s about as ridiculous as that sex-ed scene in Mean Girls when Coach Carr says:
“You’re going to want to take off your clothes, and touch each other. But if you touch each other, you will get chlamydia…and die.”
He then asks them to promise not to do it and gives them condoms anyway. Sounds about right. Where exactly was Mean Girls set again? (Evanston.)
Meanwhile, back in good ol’ Mississippi, an activist group of parents dubbed the “sex moms” aren’t taking the fact that schools are calling their daughters dirty chunks of chocolate lightly. They’ve taken to the system in an attempt to get the dirty chocolate analogies banned from school sex-ed curricula. They’ve been successful with one school district so far, but with more than six hundred public schools giving purity presentations, they’ve got a long, hard battle to fight.
Best of luck, ladies.
