This just in: Humans enjoy sex
According to a new study apparently 95% of Americans have had premarital sex. The one issue I’d take up is it doesn’t mention the rate of people who abstained, got married, got divorced, then had what would presumably be called premarital sex. I’m not sure if that falls into the definition, but I’ve never heard the term postmarital sex, and it’s presumably premarital eventually. In the same line of thought, is it premarital sex if the person never gets married?
Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, defended the abstinence-only approach for teenagers.
“One of its values is to help young people delay the onset of sexual activity,” he said. “The longer one delays, the fewer lifetime sex partners they have, and the less the risk of contracting sexually transmitted disease.”
I call bullshit on that, or at least the reasoning behind it. It sounds to me like he’s implying that they just plain run out of time, which if that’s what he believes, is scary. Now if he means when people wait longer they tend to make better choices in mates (due to maturity), that’s at least a little bit better, but I’m disinclined to believe that capability of lateral thinking from one in the current administration. I’d say another possibility could be that people are just significantly more prone to settle (this person’s “good enough”) as they get older. That said, both safe sex and abstinence should be taught as a public service. Advantages and Disadvantages of both laid out in a fair and balanced way. Abstinence Upside: Reduces chance of getting and STD by 99.99% (there’s other ways to get STDs, despite the moniker), Reduces risk of pregnancy 100%. Abstinence Downside: Duh…No sex!. Safe Sex: Reduces risk of STDs by between 1-100% depending on which statistics you believe, Reduces risk of pregnancy significantly, Reduces risk you’ll become a useless weight on society, etc, etc.
