I Sat In on My Son’s Sex-Ed Class, and I Was Shocked by What I Heard My Son Responded by Standing Up to the Teacher’s Arguments with Science
Until yesterday, I only ever found out what happened in my son’s sex-ed classes by asking him about it. That was painful enough. In elementary school, he apparently learned that HIV is hereditary because you get it from your mother. In middle school, he had to help the teacher explain something about sex anatomy when the teacher was stumped and my son happened to know the facts. (I am a sex researcher and I work on intersex; he knows a lot about sex anatomy.)
Now he’s a freshman in high school, and his sex ed is being taught in a health class by a gym teacher in conjunction with some “special helpers.” Two evenings ago, as we were driving back from the vet with a pet rat suffering from a bad foot, my son broke it to me: They are teaching sexual abstinence in the class. It’s not abstinence only, but it may as well be.
I told my son why I think teaching teenagers abstinence is stupid, channeling all I’ve come to understand thanks to years of listening to the Savage Lovecast: (1) Sex is pleasurable, and there’s no good reason you should deny it to yourself if you have a consenting partner and you’re on the same page. (2) Marrying someone who you haven’t had sex with is a potential disaster. How do you know if you’re sexually compatible? (3) Whomever you love enough to marry deserves to have you well-practiced at sex before you marry.
My son nodded at all this. He then remarked to me that in class, he had turned to his classmate and said, “I can see I’m going to be spending some time with Google Scholar tonight.” Having heard previously from me about the ineffectiveness of abstinence education, he wanted to gather some data about it that he could present to the teachers. (What can I say? We’re a household of data geeks.)
So he and I sat down over dinner and did some looking together. We didn’t spend a ton of time on it because I had to run to a local government meeting after dinner, but we found a page that seemed to sum up nicely a lot of the potential problems with abstinence education and virginity pledges. I offered to come to class to see what they were teaching if he wanted me to—but only if he wanted me to.
While I was off at my meeting, he decided to use my home office to print off copies of that webpage. When I got home, he told me he was thinking of giving one to his teacher, one to the guest teacher, and one to the principal.
In the morning, I asked him whether he wanted me to come to class. He said he did. I told him I was just going to sit quietly and observe, although I brought my computer so I could take notes. The regular class teacher was very nice, as my son had described him. That teacher gave me a seat in the back corner where I could watch without being in the way.
The visiting sex-ed presenter—let’s call her Ms. Thomas—started class by asking if there were any questions from last time. My son’s hand shot up. He asked her if her teaching of sexual practices was evidence-based.
Looking startled, she said yes.
“Then why are you teaching abstinence when it doesn’t decrease the amount of premarital sex and increases dangerous practices, including sex without contraception?” he said. He gave his teacher a copy of what he had brought.
“That’s not true,” she said. “You can look up anything on the internet.” She referred him instead to the National Abstinence Education Association’s website. (When I got home, I discovered it is a 501(c)(4) organization—a lobbying group that does things like trying to stop “anti-abstinence justices” from getting federal judgeships.)
The class started to murmur at my son’s attempt to challenge this visiting educator. To be honest, it didn’t strike me at first as particularly dramatic. He’s been raised to believe authority rests in good studies, not in individual humans, and he’s been challenging us since he was 2 years old. (“The earth does NOT move! The sun goes UP and DOWN!”) We’ve never said to him, “Don’t challenge me, boy!” We’ve always said, “What’s your evidence? I’ll show you mine.”
But Ms. Thomas didn’t want to discuss evidence. She wanted to move on, and move on she did. The kids were told they were going to continue to talk about “stories of abstinence” and “non-abstinence stories that led to consequences.”
And so we were presented with a visiting guy I’m going to call Jerry. Jerry told us a genuinely sad story of how he was raised by an alcoholic father and how Jerry got into alcohol and drugs at a young age. He hooked up with a girl “whose mother had put her on birth control.” But it failed, and she got pregnant. Jerry said that he and his girl didn’t tell their parents as the pregnancy progressed.
Hold on a second: Her mother gave her birth control but would be shocked that she had sex? Clearly Jerry’s lesson here—the reason he needed to drop that the girl had been on birth control but that when she got pregnant, they didn’t tell her mother—was supposed to be this: Birth control fails. It fails all the time. And sex is so shameful that if you get pregnant, you can’t get prenatal care. You have to hide the pregnancy. In shame.
Jerry told us that once the girl “showed” and everyone found out, other kids mocked her and friends deserted her. If I followed this disaster story correctly, Jerry later went on to knock up another girl. Same basic story of another child they weren’t ready for. Failure to finish school, failure to be employed, more drugs, more sex. One of his friends overdosed and was “a vegetable,” according to Jerry, for 11 years.
The upshot? Sex is just one disastrous component of “a bad lifestyle.”
But then—then!—Jerry met a beautiful girl he liked so much. And she had been raised in “the abstinence lifestyle.” He decided to put it back in his pants and woo her. He told us he “put her on a pedestal.” After two long, chaste years, he married her. And then he fethed her. And they now have two kids.
The lesson Jerry wanted to impart? This: “You’ll find a good girl. If you find one who says ‘no,’ that’s the one you want.”
He actually said that. If a girl says no, “that’s the one you want.”
Silly me! I have been teaching my son that if a girl says no, you exit politely and get the hell out of her space.
Now Ms. Thomas was up. She wanted to talk about birth control. I thought this was promising—it suggested a recognition that you can have sex without wanting a baby. But her message was also one of sexual doom: “It is absolutely better to use something rather than nothing if you have sex,” she said. “But condoms fail.”
Condoms fail 18 percent of the time, according to this woman. She said stats on that vary, but she went with that big number anyway. She told the story of a couple of teens who came across a box of condoms in which every condom had a pinhole leak. They knew this because they filled them all with water first. (They must have been super turned on!) According to Ms. Thomas, the FDA allows condom manufacturers to have a failure rate of 1 box in 400. You, son—you might be the buyer of box 400.
(Condoms do have a high failure rate—18 percent—when used improperly, according to the CDC, which is why a sex education class should cover how to use a condom correctly! Correct usage of condoms brings failure rate down to 2 percent, a lower failure rate than most hormonal birth control methods.)
At this point, it became clear to me that while this was not technically abstinence-only sex education, it was terror-based sex education. By now, we had learned that sex is associated with drug abuse, drug overdose, disease, unwanted pregnancy—pretty much every horror you can name except shingles and Lawrence Welk.
And that good girls say “no,” and you don’t want you no slut who says “yes.”
Ms. Thomas’s dire warnings continued: “It takes only one sperm to fertilize an egg. It takes only one act of sex to get pregnant.”
I wanted to raise my hand and blurt out, “Not if it’s anal or oral!”
She moved on to a “game.” The game involved everyone getting a number from one to six. She rolled the dice. If your number came up, your condom failed. But your condom didn’t just fail. A pregnancy resulted. And from the pregnancy came a baby. When your number came up, you raised your hand and Ms. Thomas handed you a paper baby.
It took all my willpower not to go up to the regular teacher at this point and ask if there weren’t some scissors in his desk we could use to hand around for paper abortions to prevent all these unwanted paper babies. But I didn’t. Within a few minutes, the entire class was preggers. Even the boys.
The bell rang. The kids hastened to clear the room to get to their next class. I went up to try to calmly talk to these people. I failed. I started screaming and swearing. I feel bad about that. I’m glad my son takes after his father and doesn’t start yelling and swearing in such situations.
But what I’d just seen was worse than anything I’d expected in a progressive school district in a liberal college town. I mean, here’s what these visiting “educators” were telling those kids: Condoms fail. They fail so often, they are pointless. There is no birth control except condoms. So if you have sex, you will end up with a pregnancy, and there is no abortion—you have to have that baby. And you will be shamed.
And what about that bit about wanting a “good girl” who says “no”? What year is this?
I remember when a friend of mine whose daughter is gay and was also going to my son’s school tried to nudge me to pay attention to sex ed, but I had told her I was too busy. Another friend had told me about a “Gender Equity” club forming at the high school, a group of students trying to agitate for positive change in sexuality and gender issues. I had reacted again with “I’m too busy.” Honestly, I’m sure that after my son’s no-means-yes sex-ed class ended, I was yelling and swearing at the visiting teachers partly out of sheer guilt.
Once home, I worried about how my kid was doing after challenging Ms. Thomas and being rebuffed. But I shouldn’t have been worried; he came home five hours later with a smile.
“The news got to the locker commons before I even got there,” he said.
What news? The news that he had challenged the teachers with information. I had missed that he hadn’t just said what he’d said—he’d also passed information around to all his classmates so they could read what he’d found out about abstinence education and virginity pledges and how they don’t really help.
At this point, I confessed to him that I had tweeted about the whole thing and it had gone national while he was at school. He cracked up. He especially enjoyed hearing about the math geeks on Twitter who were trying to calculate what the odds were that a classroom of 20 kids could all have condoms fail and get pregnant in a few dice rolls. It came to about one in three billion.
We went for ice cream and, on the way home, swung by the drugstore. I bought him a box of condoms.
“You know what my friends and I are going to do with those. We’re just going to use those to make water balloons and to cover stuff as a joke,” he said.
“Then we’ll get the nonlubricated kind,” I answered.
Back at home, he went on to the medical literature and found a meta-analysis of 13 studies on abstinence education in the BMJ. He went over it with his father, who is a physician. I gave him the information on the website Ms. Thomas had referred him to—showing him it is a political lobbying group. And I noticed for the first time that my son was wearing a shirt my brother gave him: “Stand back—I’m going to try science.”
His father warned him: “Tomorrow, you can’t expect the adults in the room to act rational. They have their emotions tied up with this, and whatever evidence you bring isn’t going to convince them. Just be prepared for that.”
Our son said he was prepared, and that convincing them wasn’t his goal. His goal was to teach the other kids some of the truth, and also to let them know it’s okay to challenge authority.
Me? I’m kicking myself now for not having gone to all those school-board meetings where they talked about the sex-ed curriculum. But I wonder if it would have mattered. Because whatever they write in the curriculum plan, what matters is where the rubber meets Ms. Thomas.
I am sure, when the school board approved this curriculum that included condom use, Jerry’s story was not run by them—especially not the slut-shaming bit about “good girls.” Nor, probably, were the other visitors earlier in the week run past the school board. (And just to be clear, some of them were good. My son tells me they had someone in to talk personally about abusive relationships, and that it was very useful and powerful.)
Liberal parents like me, the mistake we make is thinking of ourselves as the kind of people who don’t interfere in public schools. As a consequence, the only people who do interfere with sex-ed curricula are the conservatives. If people like me—people who want to see sex ed include teaching about masturbation, the pleasure urge, the existence of LGBT people—don’t show up and push our side, the “middle ground” turns out to be damned near the right.
We’re going to need more than my kid and his printouts to teach this generation right. recommended
Alice Dreger is author of the new book Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science (named one of the “best books of the month” in nonfiction by Amazon). The principal from her son’s high school has called to officially inform her she will now be subject to special monitoring at her son’s school, allegedly for saying “feth” in front of “children” after class ended.
If I was ever taught about abstinence in sex ed, I have totally forgotten. We were taught about fundamental facts about anatonmy, pregnancy, disease, and contraception. I don't think there was much on the subject of feelings or mutual respect or whatnot.
Gotta say, the mom here sounds like a serious donkey-cave.
When I was in middle school and high school we covered contraceptive methods, the proper way to put on a condom and use other contraceptive methods, and STDs. They did also say several times that abstinence was the only way to 100% avoid an STD or unwanted pregnancy, but all of the information on STDs and contraceptive methods was useful and accurate, including the importance of using the proper lubricant with the proper type of condom (some lubricants can damage condoms).
Interestingly enough, we also got a demonstration on why Magnum or extra-large condoms are pure marketing gimmicks. We had a student put a regular condom on their entire forearm. So unless your ween is bigger than a human forearm, there's no reason to buy magnum condoms unless you just enjoy looking like a douchebag.
Manchu wrote: Gotta say, the mom here sounds like a serious donkey-cave.
A whole lot of the population must be donkey-caves if they don't want their children lied to about things that could seriously impact the course of their entire lives
Manchu wrote: Gotta say, the mom here sounds like a serious donkey-cave.
How so?
I mean yeah, she shouldn't have lost her temper but apart from that?
It's not surprising that she lost her temper considering she was looking for a fight. The proper thing to do in such a situation is not follow your kid into a class and make a scene. If your kids tell you they are getting taught something you consider ridiculous about sex ed, the adult thing to do would be clear that up with your kid at your home. With the example she sets, it's no wonder her kids walk into classes with statistics printed from the internet. That kids will probably grow up to be an donkey-cave, too. Like maybe a journalist that tracks down people in small town's to report on their "backward" attitudes.
ph34r wrote: A whole lot of the population must be donkey-caves if they don't want their children lied to about things that could seriously impact the course of their entire lives
The mom was only there because the kid already thought the material was stupid. This kid was in no danger of getting confused by the hamfisted messages from these "educators." Mom and kid were just spoiling to get on a high horse.
von Hohenstein wrote: Did this happen in the US, a so called "free" country, or somewhere in Pakistan?
No way. An adult trying to get into a high school would be stopped at the office. They're hardcore about that, even keeping out the helicoptering soccer moms.
Manchu wrote: It's not surprising that she lost her temper considering she was looking for a fight. The proper thing to do in such a situation is not follow your kid into a class and make a scene. If your kids tell you they are getting taught something you consider ridiculous about sex ed, the adult thing to do would be clear that up with your kid at your home. With the example she sets, it's no wonder her kids walk into classes with statistics printed from the internet. That kids will probably grow up to be an donkey-cave, too. Like maybe a journalist that tracks down people in small town's to report on their "backward" attitudes.
My thoughts, exactly. Everyone involved in this story sounds like an donkey-cave.
My opinion on this has wavered over the past few years, but I do think good sex education should be taught in public school. It's a public health issue, and the fewer unfit babies having babies we see, the better. Quite honestly, though, I don't think it matters what we teach in the schools. It all starts with the culture at home.
I taught for 5 years, 4 of which were at the HS level. Nearly every student I had that was conceived when their parents were young (22 or under) already have multiple children. That cycle starts, and continues, at home; I'm not convinced anything that can or will be taught in the school will impact that a whole lot.
Manchu wrote: It's not surprising that she lost her temper considering she was looking for a fight. The proper thing to do in such a situation is not follow your kid into a class and make a scene. If your kids tell you they are getting taught something you consider ridiculous about sex ed, the adult thing to do would be clear that up with your kid at your home. With the example she sets, it's no wonder her kids walk into classes with statistics printed from the internet. That kids will probably grow up to be an donkey-cave, too. Like maybe a journalist that tracks down people in small town's to report on their "backward" attitudes.
My thoughts, exactly. Everyone involved in this story sounds like an donkey-cave.
My opinion on this has wavered over the past few years, but I do think good sex education should be taught in public school. It's a public health issue, and the fewer unfit babies having babies we see, the better. Quite honestly, though, I don't think it matters what we teach in the schools. It all starts with the culture at home.
I taught for 5 years, 4 of which were at the HS level. Nearly every student I had that was conceived when their parents were young (22 or under) already have multiple children. That cycle starts, and continues, at home; I'm not convinced anything that can or will be taught in the school will impact that a whole lot.
And yet, as this woman and her kid pointed out to the "teacher", the evidence disagrees with you. Thorough, evidence-based sex/relationship education is extremely strongly correlated with lower rates of teen pregnancy, lower rates of STIs, even lower rates of domestic abuse, relative to abstinence-based education; that's true both when comparing regions within nations and between nations. Now sure, it's possible that areas with good sex-ed just happen to have loads of good parents, and areas with terrible "abstinence-first" programmes just happen to have loads of terrible ones, but is it likely? No.
And frankly Manchu, it's a tad hilarious that you think a kid intelligent enough to find the holes in his teacher's arguments, challenge them on it, and then do his classmates the service of filling those holes in for them when the "teacher" dismisses the evidence out of hand is "an donkey-cave" - I'd say he's a fine wee man, and if more kids were raised to take that attitude we might not live in a society where journalists have so many backwards hellpits full of numpties and rednecks to occupy their time.
I had it in middle school and it was not abstinence only.
We were taught about the science of baby making, STDs, contraceptives, and watched a few videos about Cool Guy Johnny having a burning sensation when he urinated.
Manchu wrote: Gotta say, the mom here sounds like a serious donkey-cave.
How so?
I mean yeah, she shouldn't have lost her temper but apart from that?
It's not surprising that she lost her temper considering she was looking for a fight. The proper thing to do in such a situation is not follow your kid into a class and make a scene. If your kids tell you they are getting taught something you consider ridiculous about sex ed, the adult thing to do would be clear that up with your kid at your home. With the example she sets, it's no wonder her kids walk into classes with statistics printed from the internet. That kids will probably grow up to be an donkey-cave, too. Like maybe a journalist that tracks down people in small town's to report on their "backward" attitudes.
ph34r wrote: A whole lot of the population must be donkey-caves if they don't want their children lied to about things that could seriously impact the course of their entire lives
The mom was only there because the kid already thought the material was stupid. This kid was in no danger of getting confused by the hamfisted messages from these "educators." Mom and kid were just spoiling to get on a high horse.
Her child asked her to come to the class to see what was being taught. As a parent she was well within her rights to go along and observe, as per the schools rules.
And the kid doesn't want his friends and classmates to be mislead by idiots with an agenda to push, so he brings in scientific evidence to show how these people are wrong. That makes him an donkey-cave? Sounds like a good, smart kid who's been taught that evidence is needed to support a point of view and who doesn't want his friends to end up pregnant or infected with STI's to me.
Her child asked her to come to the class to see what was being taught.
No. The mom asked at least 3 times if she could go.
Edit: Sorry, twice.
Until yesterday, I only ever found out what happened in my son’s sex-ed classes by asking him about it. That was painful enough. In elementary school, he apparently learned that HIV is hereditary because you get it from your mother. In middle school, he had to help the teacher explain something about sex anatomy when the teacher was stumped and my son happened to know the facts. (I am a sex researcher and I work on intersex; he knows a lot about sex anatomy.)
Now he’s a freshman in high school, and his sex ed is being taught in a health class by a gym teacher in conjunction with some “special helpers.” Two evenings ago, as we were driving back from the vet with a pet rat suffering from a bad foot, my son broke it to me: They are teaching sexual abstinence in the class. It’s not abstinence only, but it may as well be.
I told my son why I think teaching teenagers abstinence is stupid, channeling all I’ve come to understand thanks to years of listening to the Savage Lovecast: (1) Sex is pleasurable, and there’s no good reason you should deny it to yourself if you have a consenting partner and you’re on the same page. (2) Marrying someone who you haven’t had sex with is a potential disaster. How do you know if you’re sexually compatible? (3) Whomever you love enough to marry deserves to have you well-practiced at sex before you marry.
My son nodded at all this. He then remarked to me that in class, he had turned to his classmate and said, “I can see I’m going to be spending some time with Google Scholar tonight.” Having heard previously from me about the ineffectiveness of abstinence education, he wanted to gather some data about it that he could present to the teachers. (What can I say? We’re a household of data geeks.)
So he and I sat down over dinner and did some looking together. We didn’t spend a ton of time on it because I had to run to a local government meeting after dinner, but we found a page that seemed to sum up nicely a lot of the potential problems with abstinence education and virginity pledges. I offered to come to class to see what they were teaching if he wanted me to—but only if he wanted me to.
While I was off at my meeting, he decided to use my home office to print off copies of that webpage. When I got home, he told me he was thinking of giving one to his teacher, one to the guest teacher, and one to the principal.
In the morning, I asked him whether he wanted me to come to class.
I seem to recall the abstinence only sex ed really started being pushed during the last Bush Administration, prior to that it was more practical in content. That was some years ago now so I've no idea whether that has reversed at all under Obama.
Her child asked her to come to the class to see what was being taught. As a parent she was well within her rights to go along and observe, as per the schools rules.
Again thats a bit of a surprise. Normally you can't do that here. They don't want strangers walking the halls. I guess my question would be, why doesn't this great social justice warrior out working instead of picking a fight with some teachers. She sounds like a giant .
And the kid doesn't want his friends and classmates to be mislead by idiots with an agenda to push, so he brings in scientific evidence to show how these people are wrong. That makes him an donkey-cave?
Yes, yes it does. Like his mother he's trying to pick a fight with a teacher. News flash, no one gives a . In fact, almost no one was probably awake in the class until he started being a butthead. If you disagree with something in class...too bad. Be quiet, regurgiate the nonsense, get an A. if not, get an F. But just shut up already. No one cares what you think dill weed.
And yet, as this woman and her kid pointed out to the "teacher", the evidence disagrees with you. Thorough, evidence-based sex/relationship education is extremely strongly correlated with lower rates of teen pregnancy, lower rates of STIs, even lower rates of domestic abuse, relative to abstinence-based education; that's true both when comparing regions within nations and between nations. Now sure, it's possible that areas with good sex-ed just happen to have loads of good parents, and areas with terrible "abstinence-first" programmes just happen to have loads of terrible ones, but is it likely? No.
I told my son why I think teaching teenagers abstinence is stupid
And I think she's stupid for saying so. IMO Abstinence ONLY is pretty ignorant, but there's no arguing that abstinence is the easiest way to keep yourself from getting pregnant.
The article's narrative: My son took a proactive approach to taking his education in his own hands and stood up to the hierarchy "Footloose Style" for his good and the good of all his classmates. I'm so proud.
The actual story: Know-it-all, helicopter parent with a bone to pick disrupts a teacher while he's conducting the sex-ed program he's legally not allowed to alter for risk of losing his fething job.
Should the school teach abstinence only? feth no. That's dumb.
Is it the teacher's fault? feth no. That's the politicians getting involved in the fething schools.
Do I have any respect for this lady? feth no. She should pick on the school board, the state legislature, or even the principal. But leave the fething teacher alone. What-A-Bitch, indeed.
I know schools that are receptive to a parent coming to watch a lesson, they don't want to be closed off to parental involvement. They won't have been 'wandering the halls' but given a visitor pass and the visit prearranged.
kronk wrote: The article's narrative: My son took a proactive approach to taking his education in his own hands and stood up to the hierarchy "Footloose Style" for his good and the good of all his classmates. I'm so proud.
The actual story: Know-it-all, helicopter parent with a bone to pick disrupts a teacher while he's conducting the sex-ed program he's legally not allowed to alter for risk of losing his fething job.
Should the school teach abstinence only? feth no. That's dumb.
Is it the teacher's fault? feth no. That's the politicians getting involved in the fething schools.
Do I have any respect for this lady? feth no. She should pick on the school board, the state legislature, or even the principal. But leave the fething teacher alone. What-A-Bitch, indeed.
Wow, taking "you want a girl who says 'no" to mean "no means yes (ie rape her) is a pretty far stretch.
I don't know what others experienced in school but the girl who slept with everyone wasn't the one I was hoping to date.
That whole article makes me sad for the future. Her whole approach seems asinine. The part about paper abortions flies in the face of pro Abortionists claims that it isn't used for birth control. I guess her version of the class would be feth all you want, if you get pregnant just kill it!
And the kid doesn't want his friends and classmates to be mislead by idiots with an agenda to push, so he brings in scientific evidence to show how these people are wrong. That makes him an donkey-cave?
Yes, yes it does. Like his mother he's trying to pick a fight with a teacher. News flash, no one gives a . In fact, almost no one was probably awake in the class until he started being a butthead. If you disagree with something in class...too bad. Be quiet, regurgiate the nonsense, get an A. if not, get an F. But just shut up already. No one cares what you think dill weed.
So asking a teacher to back up their claims with evidence is picking a fight? Guess I shouldn't have corrected my GCSE science teacher on Newton's Laws, then...
As for people probably not being awake, now the kid is an donkey-cave for actually resulting in his peers engage with their education in this topic?
kronk wrote: The article's narrative: My son took a proactive approach to taking his education in his own hands and stood up to the hierarchy "Footloose Style" for his good and the good of all his classmates. I'm so proud.
The actual story: Know-it-all, helicopter parent with a bone to pick disrupts a teacher while he's conducting the sex-ed program he's legally not allowed to alter for risk of losing his fething job.
Should the school teach abstinence only? feth no. That's dumb.
Is it the teacher's fault? feth no. That's the politicians getting involved in the fething schools.
Do I have any respect for this lady? feth no. She should pick on the school board, the state legislature, or even the principal. But leave the fething teacher alone. What-A-Bitch, indeed.
Kronk has the absolute way of it.
Um...
I disagree.
While I'm shocked that this school would let a parent sit-in this... but, then again it's reasonable they'd probably make exceptions simply given of the subject matter.
Couple things kronk, frazzled, et. el... Feth the teachers and Feth the schools. They may be nice people, who has careers and the schools may be doing their best in the interests for the students. But, again, it's the parents, and ONLY the parents are responsible for their kids education and wellbeing. IMO, she was absolutely right to make a scene, because sometimes, it may be the only way to jar some sense into these people.
*need I remind you what my step dad did for me when I got in trouble in school?
kronk wrote: The article's narrative: My son took a proactive approach to taking his education in his own hands and stood up to the hierarchy "Footloose Style" for his good and the good of all his classmates. I'm so proud.
The actual story: Know-it-all, helicopter parent with a bone to pick disrupts a teacher while he's conducting the sex-ed program he's legally not allowed to alter for risk of losing his fething job.
Should the school teach abstinence only? feth no. That's dumb.
Is it the teacher's fault? feth no. That's the politicians getting involved in the fething schools.
Do I have any respect for this lady? feth no. She should pick on the school board, the state legislature, or even the principal. But leave the fething teacher alone. What-A-Bitch, indeed.
1) She did not disrupt the class, she only spoke to the teacher after the class had finished. 2) Her child took it upon himself to research the topic beforehand, any competent teacher worth their pay would not just wave away a child actually engaging in the subject at hand, even if that child had a viewpoint which was contrary to their own. An incompetent teacher has no place in the classroom. 3) It was not a normal teacher but two guest speakers, brought in to basically tell a load of anecdotes with no scientific basis or evidence to any of it.
For example, their claim that the FDA allows 1 out of every 400 boxes of condoms to be completely defective, which is a 0.25% chance of getting a pack of completely defective condoms. This is completely false.
The FDA requires at least 996 out of every 1000 condoms on average to pass a water leak test. So there's a 0.4% chance of a single condom being defective. Now, lets assume now that the person is buying a small pack of condoms (lets say 3). There is a 6.4*10^-6 percent chance of all three of those condoms being defective. For a box of 10, there's a 1.05*10^-22 percent chance of all of those condoms being defective. As an example of how small that chance is, the current estimates for the number of stars in the observable universe is around the 10^22 mark, so you have a 1/(all the stars in the observable universe) percent chance of getting a box of 10 condoms which are all defective.
The "teachers" statement is completely wrong and deserves to be challenged. If your abstinence education has to be based on lies then it should not be taught. Period.
Then there's telling children that if they get pregnant they'll have to hide it from their parents, all their friends will leave them etc.
And the kid doesn't want his friends and classmates to be mislead by idiots with an agenda to push, so he brings in scientific evidence to show how these people are wrong. That makes him an donkey-cave?
Yes, yes it does. Like his mother he's trying to pick a fight with a teacher. News flash, no one gives a . In fact, almost no one was probably awake in the class until he started being a butthead. If you disagree with something in class...too bad. Be quiet, regurgiate the nonsense, get an A. if not, get an F. But just shut up already. No one cares what you think dill weed.
So asking a teacher to back up their claims with evidence is picking a fight? Guess I shouldn't have corrected my GCSE science teacher on Newton's Laws, then...
As Kronk noted, the teacher can't do anything about the curriculum. Take it up with the ones making the curriculum and teach your kid on your own. Grandstanding is class is just being a dick.
As for people probably not being awake, now the kid is an donkey-cave for actually resulting in his peers engage with their education in this topic?
Is that what you call it? I call it trying to act like a pompous donkey-cave. When I was in high school odds are I would have put a cigarette in this kids face for being annoying. But I'm much calmer now...
I hardly remember anything about our sex ed. But we certainly learned how to properly put up a condom. Yet when that knowledge could have been useful, about 13 years later, I had completely forgotten everything, of course . I may not be very representative of the average student though.
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Envy89 wrote: My sex ed class spent more time bashing Christianity then it did teaching sex ed.
That was very unfair. Tons of other religions deserve to be bashed in sex ed classes. I am a proponent of equal opportunity religion bashing sex ed. I wish our sex ed included religion bashing, it would have made them way more enjoyable to me. I would certainly have paid way more attention .
The fundamental purpose of education is to inure children to social norms. Over time, kids are separated out into a hierarchy that more or less mirrors class status. Some kids spend most of their time at school navigating the disciplinary system. Others spend most of their time obtaining skills and information to help them compete in the cut throat race to and through college. That hierarchy collapses when it comes to sex education because there is no such thing as AP Health Class. Suddenly, everyone is in the same room again. Suddenly, everyone is being treated as part of the lowest common denominator. Understandably, the kids used to being at the top of the hierarchy object. What else could they do? Over the years, they have been taught to deal with classroom information dynamically while the main task other kids dealt with was just showing up.
Sex ed is (but is not supposed to be) about ideology, which is what the kid and the mom wanted to debate about. TBF, this is also why teaching abstinence comes off as unacceptable. The expectation that human beings should restrain their sexual urges even when everyone involved consents has greatly diminished since the 1960s. The upper classes agree that the poorer classes simply do not have the moral or practical wisdom to abstain. And the upper classes themselves have little motve to abstain because they can usually financially and socially absorb any costs associated with sexual irresponsibility; like everything else for them, sex is a matter of consumption. So the overriding social norm becomes, let's limit the amount of collateral damage (disease, pregnancy) caused by sexual market forces, which are amoral and "natural" like all market forces. By the way, I have no problem with that, for the purposes of this conversation. I am just pointing it out to show how much abstinence diverges from this ideology. Abstinence is premised on the idea that everyone, regardless of class status, has the moral capacity and responsibility to avoid bad outcomes. Which is to say, bad outcomes are not an incidental byproduct of one's right/uncontrollable urge to consume sexual pleasure. This attitude is of course "sex negative" according to the dominant capitalist-classicist ideology of sex.
The battle in that class room was not about facts but rather about ideology. I am not posting here to fight on one side or the other. The story only interests me because it is an absurd clash of culture warriors where the mom ignorantly portrays herself as the hero and those who already unthinkingly accept her ideology cannot see otherwise. This kind of bully culture is really becoming the dominant mode.
whembly wrote: she was absolutely right to make a scene, because sometimes, it may be the only way to jar some sense into these people
That's what every two year old thinks about their parents. When one gets to be an adult, it is time to take a different approach.
The FDA requires at least 996 out of every 1000 condoms on average to pass a water leak test. So there's a 0.4% chance of a single condom being defective. Now, lets assume now that the person is buying a small pack of condoms (lets say 3). There is a 6.4*10^-6 percent chance of all three of those condoms being defective. For a box of 10, there's a 1.05*10^-22 percent chance of all of those condoms being defective. As an example of how small that chance is, the current estimates for the number of stars in the observable universe is around the 10^22 mark, so you have a 1/(all the stars in the observable universe) percent chance of getting a box of 10 condoms which are all defective.
So what you're saying is that statistics and numbers can be manipulated to fit a narrative?!?! You're kidding me!
When it comes to Abstinence, I'll paraphrase the great Wayne Gretzky.
"You don't make babies 100% of the times you abstain from sex."
Regardless, it isn't hard to not have a kid. And if having an 8lb tiny screaming monster that you're responsible for isn't enough of a deterrent, will anything be?
The FDA requires at least 996 out of every 1000 condoms on average to pass a water leak test. So there's a 0.4% chance of a single condom being defective. Now, lets assume now that the person is buying a small pack of condoms (lets say 3). There is a 6.4*10^-6 percent chance of all three of those condoms being defective. For a box of 10, there's a 1.05*10^-22 percent chance of all of those condoms being defective. As an example of how small that chance is, the current estimates for the number of stars in the observable universe is around the 10^22 mark, so you have a 1/(all the stars in the observable universe) percent chance of getting a box of 10 condoms which are all defective.
So what you're saying is that statistics and numbers can be manipulated to fit a narrative?!?! You're kidding me!
When it comes to Abstinence, I'll paraphrase the great Wayne Gretzky.
"You don't make babies 100% of the times you abstain from sex."
Regardless, it isn't hard to not have a kid. And if having an 8lb tiny screaming monster that you're responsible for isn't enough of a deterrent, will anything be?
Well in this case they're not manipulated. They're just plain false
And all comprehensive sex-ed courses include that not having sex is the only 100% effective way of not having a baby (unless you're having anal or oral sex). Nobody is arguing with that. But when you use a condom properly there is a 2% chance of failure, when you take the pill properly there is a 1% (or less) chance of failure. Combine these two methods and there's a 1 in 5000 chance of a pregnancy.
People know how to not have sex, that doesn't need to be taught, most children have quite a lot of experience at it. People need to be taught how to properly use contraception, about consent, about relationships and domestic abuse and so on. This is stuff that children don't know and which will protect their health when they do decide to have sex and enter relationships.
The more I read this the more I don't see a good side here. The school taught a uninformative topic filled with mis-information and agenda, but was compelled to by the curriculum. The mother does not acquit herself well either. That's not to say what she was saying was wrong, but there were many other more constructive ways to do it.
Dreadclaw69 wrote: The more I read this the more I don't see a good side here. The school taught a uninformative topic filled with mis-information and agenda, but was compelled to by the curriculum. The mother does not acquit herself well either. That's not to say what she was saying was wrong, but there were many other more constructive ways to do it.
Well said... but, again... I don't blame the mother.
Hordini wrote: We had a student put a regular condom on their entire forearm.
Just because they can stretch that far doesn't mean it will feel comfortable at that tension, the truth of the matter is men's penises come in all shapes and sizes and for some the standard ones are too tight and it makes sex too difficult.
Hordini wrote: We had a student put a regular condom on their entire forearm.
Just because they can stretch that far doesn't mean it will feel comfortable at that tension, the truth of the matter is men's penises come in all shapes and sizes and for some the standard ones are too tight and it makes sex too difficult.
Also, sometimes the condom can be loose and in danger of coming off, as sometimes a penis can be thinner at the base thatln other areas which leads to looseness. Commonly seen where the penis bends due to tissue breakages
Unlike this school, I received proper sex education and biology class.
Manchu wrote: This kind of bully culture is really becoming the dominant mode.
Since when is opposing blatant lying and scare tactics "bully culture"?
Indeed, if anything the speakers attempts to belittle the kid ("You can look anything up on the internet") and the scare stories with absolutely no evidence are real bully tactics, designed to make sure that the kids just shut up and do what they're told or else
whembly wrote: Well said... but, again... I don't blame the mother.
We all ain't angels.
Those two statements don't go together.
:sigh:
You go with that buddy.
Story time... I wear hearing aids.
Therefore, when I was growing up, I'd get bullied/picked on... especially in middle school.
After taking actual physical punishment all day long, I snapped and beat the holy hell out of my opponent. Everyone in the class saw that I was defending myself.
And, yet, because of zero tolerance, the school suspend both of us.
My dad took exception to that and complained to the principle, (I was watching the conversation from the secretary's desk)... but, he was polite at first, but when the principle wouldn't change his mind. My dad simply said something to the effect of "fine, I'll be by your car in the parking lot and I'll beat the gak out of you"... the principle said, "I'll call the police!"... my dad said, "great, then we both go to jail... right?"
I don't know what that story is supposed to prove. Does it have anything to do with going into a classroom specifically to juice yourself up for a political argument with teachers? Nope.
It's commendable of her to take an interest in her child's education. It's abhorrent for those (apparently external?) teachers to try to deceive the children who should be able to trust them.
If people want to choose to be abstinent, that's a great choice and they should not be looked down on for that, but it's wrong for them to try to scare kids into abstinence because of their personal beliefs. It's especially abhorrent in that the research shows it does not work.
What do you mean, in terms of word count? In terms of meaning, it's probably the most important part of the story because it shows us where the mom is coming from ideologically. Another very important part of the story (although it doesn't take up many words!) is her motivation. Here are her own words on the subject:
The kid has invited me to his health class on sex ed to see how bad it is, so I'm going.
Well, "invited" actually means, I asked him a couple of times and he eventually said yes.
Manchu wrote: What do you mean, in terms of word count?
No, in terms of which events happened. You're taking one part of her story where she had one conversation with her son and trying to present it as her entire argument, probably because it lines up neatly with your opinion that this is some kind of "culture war bullying" or whatever instead of a parent fighting against a school that is blatantly lying to students.
In terms of meaning, it's probably the most important part of the story because it shows us where the mom is coming from ideologically.
Sure, it says where she's coming from, but it's not the entire story. Blatant lying about failure rates doesn't magically become honesty and legitimate education just because the person pointing out the lying has opinions.
Another very important part of the story (although it doesn't take up many words!) is her motivation. Here are her own words on the subject:
The kid has invited me to his health class on sex ed to see how bad it is, so I'm going.
What exactly is your point here? She heard that it sucks, she went to confirm that it sucks, and it did suck.
What do you mean, in terms of word count? In terms of meaning, it's probably the most important part of the story because it shows us where the mom is coming from ideologically. Another very important part of the story (although it doesn't take up many words!) is her motivation. Here are her own words on the subject:
The kid has invited me to his health class on sex ed to see how bad it is, so I'm going.
Well, "invited" actually means, I asked him a couple of times and he eventually said yes.
This has come up a couple of times in the thread, now. It's a serious stretch to try to paint that as anything weird at all.
Sometimes, when someone is going to something and your presence is not required but might be helpful to them, you ask them some time beforehand - would you like me to come along? For example, if a close friend is going to the cancer clinic to get the results of some scans, I might ask them if they want me to come along. Then, if I live with them, say, I would ask them on the morning if they still want me to come. This is not unusual.
It's also completely irrelevant, because she is not the one setting the educational agenda for her kid's school. If she was then I can see how, in particular, "you have a duty to have sex with a bunch of people so your eventual husband or wife has a more skilled lover" would be objectionable. She's not, though, and her personal beliefs are totally irrelevant in this case except insofar as they are not that you should try to terrify your kids into abstinence by lying to them (which research shows does not work and leads to harmful outcomes).
Manchu wrote: Mom and kid were just spoiling to get on a high horse.
Students get all kinds of bogus information in schools all the time. It only becomes an issue of OUTRAGE when culture warriors enter the arena, prepared to do ideological battle. Mom had been training son in the arts of culture war but desperately wanted to step into the ring herself.
Of course, the school bringing in abstinence advocates was pretty much baiting people like mom. For her, it was practically the same as the principal announcing MORTAL KOMBAT!!!
HiveFleetPlastic wrote: For example, if a close friend is going to the cancer clinic to get the results of some scans, I might ask them if they want me to come along.
Do the two of you spend time looking up research on 501(c)3 websites to prepare for a confrontation you are planning to initiate at the clinic?
HiveFleetPlastic wrote: For example, if a close friend is going to the cancer clinic to get the results of some scans, I might ask them if they want me to come along.
Do the two of you spend time looking up research on 501(c)3 websites to prepare for a confrontation at the clinic?
As a matter of fact, they explain her actions even according to her own account.
Sorry, I don't know what charitable organisations (that's a 501(c)3?) have to do with a cancer clinic. I guess this is an American thing?
If they wanted to do some research into it, sure, of course I'd help. People often want to be equipped with information when they go and talk to someone about treatment options - it helps contextualise the information you are given, and when it comes to something like cancer you want to be sure you have the best information available. I'm sure you don't think proper information about sex is any less important.
Why are we discussing how much of an arse the mum is (and I don't think she is at all) when the role of the class should be to educate people about sex? Abstinence whilst a nice idea is fething atrocious when it comes to arming children with knowledge on how to protect themselves from the potential pitfalls of sex.
Funnily enough I got my sex education in religion class, and it was all biology and stds ect. Abstinence and crud like purity balls belong in the 1920s teenagers are going to have sex, they should know how to prevent STDs and pregnancy.
I cannot believe schools try to teach this kind of gak in sex education class.
"today we are going to learn about sex....Don't do it, now everyone your homework is to write a virginity pledge, class dismissed."
In her article, mom demeans the abstinence group as a 501(c)4 lobbying group. Her son's info came from a 501(c)3. Both kinds of organizations are allowed tax exemption because of their roles in educating the public. 501(c)4s are not required to disclose who gives them money and for that reason are associated with lobbying. But both kinds of organizations can be and are ideologically-driven. It's myopic to criticize only one of them for having an agenda.
Seems like you are purposely ignoring the point of my other comment -- finding info to prepare to start a confrontation, which is what happened in this story, rather than, as you mention, contextualizing treatment options.
@Bullockist
My comments are founded on a concern about public rhetoric. To change up the example, it is increasingly OK here in the US to attack anti-vaccination folks at a personal level and with an extreme amount of vitriol. I personally have no sympathy whatsoever with any part of the anti-vaccination agenda. I would like to see that movement fade away completely. What I actually see, however, is an entrenchment of anti-vaccination beliefs fueled by a persecution complex. It seems like there is a positive correlation between commitment to the anti-vaccination beliefs and feelings of personal persecution. And giving vent to abusive, self-righteous behavior is simply not OK ... that point seems to be slipping away.
Manchu wrote: Students get all kinds of bogus information in schools all the time. It only becomes an issue of OUTRAGE when culture warriors enter the arena, prepared to do ideological battle.
Or when, as in this case, the lying is so blatant and indisputable that even a casual observer knows that something is wrong. We don't usually get outrage about math teachers telling their students that 1+1=3 because a teacher that incompetent would be fired long before it got to that point. But if they weren't fired and kept teaching the same material we'd all acknowledge that the school sucks and be outraged about it.
Mom had been training son in the arts of culture war but desperately wanted to step into the ring herself.
So what? She was absolutely correct in this case. Your whole argument here is nothing more than a giant ad hominem.
In her article, mom demeans the abstinence group as a 501(c)4 lobbying group. Her son's info came from a 501(c)3. Both kinds of organizations are allowed tax exemption because of their roles in educating the public. 501(c)4s are not required to disclose who gives them money and for that reason are associated with lobbying. But both kinds of organizations can be and are ideologically-driven. It's myopic to criticize only one of them for having an agenda.
Ah, thanks. Well, a thing that seems similar to me is here in my state we've had a thing recently where parents were getting "religious education" that they thought was education about religion but was actually Christian propaganda class. I don't think classes that aim to impose their religious values on people, run by groups external to the school, should be taught without being opt-in and clearly labeled as such. If this class was an opt-in "Christian abstinence-only education" (possibly that was run alongside an evidence-based one) then I don't think anyone would mind much.
Manchu wrote: Seems like you are purposely ignoring the point of my other comment -- "prepare for a confrontation," which is what happened in this story; rather than, as you mention, contextualizing treatment options.
Wouldn't you? If I was going to disagree with a teacher I'd likely want some kind of evidence to have a productive conversation with them. Otherwise the conversation would go something like:
Me: Excuse me, but I think something you taught my child over the past couple of lessons was incorrect.
Teacher: Oh, no. As you can see in the lesson materials, my information is quite correct and sourced!
Me: Oh. Well, I don't have any information of my own here, so thanks for your time.
Peregrine wrote: We don't usually get outrage about math teachers telling their students that 1+1=3 because a teacher that incompetent would be fired long before it got to that point.
Thankfully, mathematics has not become ideologically charged just yet.
Peregrine wrote: Your whole argument here is nothing more than a giant ad hominem.
Well, yeah. Did you not read my very first post:
Manchu wrote: Gotta say, the mom here sounds like a serious donkey-cave.
But an attack on the person is only fallacious when it substitutes as an attack on the person's argument. My argument is and has been that the mom's behavior was poor and not at all justified by her ideological outrage. I have never argued that the mom's ideology is wrong because she acted like an donkey-cave.
HiveFleetPlastic wrote: If this class was an opt-in "Christian abstinence-only education" (possibly that was run alongside an evidence-based one) then I don't think anyone would mind much.
Personally, I don't like the idea of having guest speakers on abstinance. They are only present for ideological reasons. A non-ideological lesson on abstinence is very simple: You do not have to have sex. If you do not have sex, you or your partner cannot become pregnant. Not having sex also means your chances of contracting a sexually-transmitted infection are nearly zero, all other things being equal. That's it. No need for any kind of guest speaker.
The fact that there was in this case a discussion about the efficacy of teaching abstinence during the time when abstinence was supposed to be taught is pretty telling.
HiveFleetPlastic wrote: If I was going to disagree with a teacher I'd likely want some kind of evidence to have a productive conversation with them.
If I was going to disagree with anyone IRL (unlike on the internet), especially someone in authority over me like a teacher, I would only do so if there was a reasonable chance the conversation would be productive. My rule of thumb is, ideological debates are almost never productive.
Manchu wrote: Thankfully, mathematics has not become ideologically charged just yet.
Yes, which is why we don't get any outrage over it. Since there's no right-wing ideology to protect bad math teachers they're just dealt with long before it gets any national-level attention. That doesn't mean that there's some kind of double standard for outrage. If the 1+1=3 teacher somehow didn't get fired and kept teaching that 1+1=3 we'd get the exact same kind of outrage that we see in this case.
But an attack on the person is only fallacious when it substitutes as an attack on the person's argument. My argument is and has been that the mom's behavior was poor and not at all justified by her ideological outrage. I have never argued that the mom's ideology is wrong because she acted like an donkey-cave.
All you've done here is complain about how horrible the mother is and rant about "bullying culture" or whatever. You've completely ignored the fact that the school is blatantly lying to students and the political opinions of the person pointing out the lying are irrelevant to that issue.
A non-ideological lesson on abstinence is very simple: You do not have to have sex. If you do not have sex, you or your partner cannot become pregnant. Not having sex also means your chances of contracting a sexually-transmitted infection are nearly zero, all other things being equal.
Which is fine, as long as it's not all the information students are given. Lying by omission is still lying, and any complete discussion of the risks of having sex must include honest information on ways to reduce the risk. And that includes the fact that those options are very effective and can reduce the risk to near-zero levels when used properly.
But of course we're never going to see that complete lesson in a situation like this because the entire point of abstinence-only "education" is to promote right-wing Christian ideology.
If I was going to disagree with anyone IRL (unlike on the internet), especially someone in authority over me like a teacher, I would only do so if there was a reasonable chance the conversation would be productive. My rule of thumb is, ideological debates are almost never productive.
So your opinion is that we should put up with blatant lying in schools because it wouldn't be "productive" to have a debate about it?
I don't have the interest (unlike with Star Wars) in this topic to cut through your usual legion of strawman arguments Perergine. I think my posts make my position pretty clear and they pretty clearly have little/nothing to do with the posts you wish I was making.
I think Manchu's position is that the parent in question should have just gone to the school board/state education department/state representative/whoever was responsible for these brazen, ideological warriors being given a classroom of children to manipulate and got them to put a stop to it, rather than sitting in on the class, going up to them after it had ended and yelling at them.
HiveFleetPlastic wrote: I think Manchu's position is that the parent in question should have just gone to the school board/state education department/state representative/whoever was responsible for these brazen, ideological warriors being given a classroom of children to manipulate and got them to put a stop to it, rather than sitting in on the class, going up to them after it had ended and yelling at them.
I certainly think that would be a good deal more effective if the goal is to stop all the blatant lying supposedly generating the outrage. But I think the actual goal was to set up a vanity match in the Mortal Kulture Kombat tournament hosted by the internet.
Manchu wrote: I don't have the interest (unlike with Star Wars) in this topic to cut through your usual legion of strawman arguments Perergine. I think my posts make my position pretty clear and they pretty clearly have little/nothing to do with the posts you wish I was making.
Oh good, and now after failing to defend your "culture war bullying" nonsense you're abandoning the thread. I guess we'll see you again next time there's an example of right-wing dishonesty and bad behavior to defend?
Manchu wrote: I certainly think that would be a good deal more effective if the goal is to stop all the blatant lying supposedly generating the outrage. But I think the actual goal was to set up a vanity match in the Mortal Kulture Kombat tournament hosted by the internet.
Alternatively, she knows that being on the receiving end of national-level outrage is a lot better at forcing a school to change than one person in a private meeting. After all, a school that runs a program like this in the first place is unlikely to get rid of it if they have the option of just quietly telling her to go away. Making a public story about it takes away the option to just quietly cover it up, and has the nice bonus of being an informative example of what happens when right-wing ideology is allowed to control educational content for people who don't happen to live in districts like this.
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Manchu wrote: LOL and he comes back with even more strawmen! Do you have any other moves?
Manchu wrote: This kind of bully culture is really becoming the dominant mode.
Manchu wrote: But I think the actual goal was to set up a vanity match in the Mortal Kulture Kombat tournament hosted by the internet.
All you've done here is complain about "culture war" and "bullying" while ignoring the fact that her outrage was entirely justified regardless of the fact that she has political opinions.
Peregrine wrote: All you've done here is complain about "culture war" and "bullying" while ignoring the fact that her outrage was entirely justified regardless of the fact that she has political opinions.
So your only objection is I am not talking about what you want to talk about.
Here is what you want to argue with me about:
Peregrine wrote: the fact that her outrage was entirely justified
I get that, I really do. And since I am not game, I get that you are having to do all the work for both of us. Sorry, I guess?
Manchu wrote: So your only objection is I am not talking about what you want to talk about.
No, it's that you're complaining about something that is completely irrelevant and acting like it means something. You're trying to present this as a "culture war" battle between rival ideologies, where both sides have valid opinions and the mom in the OP has no right to "bully" everyone into agreeing with her opinion. In reality the school is indisputably wrong, this is a one-side "debate" like the debate over teaching evolution in schools, and the fact that the person objecting to the school's blatant lying has political opinions is about as relevant to the discussion as her hair color.
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Manchu wrote: Here is what you want to argue with me about:
You're right, I want you to address the substance of the argument here instead of making another boring "SJWS CULTURE WAR FEMINIST BULLIES RUIN EVERYTHING" complaint.
Culture warriors always present ideological battles as their FACTS versus their opponents' OPINIONS. That's a rhetorical tactic. You have used it in pretty much every one of your posts ITT, for example.
In our story, mom taught this tactic to son. Son dutifully carried out mom's plan and the abstinence culture warrior immediately tried the same tactic in response, except she hadn't even bothered to come armed with internet print outs. Poor planning!
HiveFleetPlastic wrote: I think Manchu's position is that the parent in question should have just gone to the school board/state education department/state representative/whoever was responsible for these brazen, ideological warriors being given a classroom of children to manipulate and got them to put a stop to it, rather than sitting in on the class, going up to them after it had ended and yelling at them.
I certainly think that would be a good deal more effective if the goal is to stop all the blatant lying supposedly generating the outrage. But I think the actual goal was to set up a vanity match in the Mortal Kulture Kombat tournament hosted by the internet.
Shang Tsung = secret master of the internet
They are not mutually exclusive. The outrage will probably get people interested and aware when they wouldn't have been before. It will hopefully lead to those speakers being dropped from the programme.
She seems to have avoided putting any specific person up to the burned at the stake, so it's probably okay.
Manchu wrote: Culture warriors always present ideological battles as their FACTS versus their opponents' OPINIONS.
And now we're right back to you denying that the school was blatantly lying. Failure rates for birth control are not an opinion, and the school lied about them. No amount of "SJW CULTURE WAR BULLYING" complaining is going to change this.
Manchu wrote: I understand that (and did not claim otherwise); my claim is the different approaches suggest different motives/goals.
Only because you're determined to find an excuse to complain about "culture war bullying". In the real world people understand that bad publicity is an effective way of solving an offensive problem, and you don't have to be more concerned with scoring points in a "culture war" argument than practical results to go public with an accusation.
Good news then, because here's another one:
Oh FFS, you just claimed that this was an example of "my side has facts, your side has opinions". If the mom only has opinions and ideology then the school can't be lying, because if they were lying then she'd have facts on her side. But I'm sure you're going to come back and yell "STRAWMAN" because the only thing you love more than complaining about "SJW CULTURE WAR BULLYING" is insisting on a strict literal reading of everything you say and never following your arguments to their conclusions.
The idea of leveraging national conversation against a guest speaker in a sex ed class is a great example of culture war and, more importantly, how completely overblown and socially destructive it is.
My argument is that the confrontation in question was a clash of values rather than facts. Waving around internet print-offs is an example of the tactic of trying to reframe an argument over ideology as an argument over facts, same as posting the phrase BLATANT LYING again and again and again ITT.
Manchu wrote: The idea of leveraging national conversation against a guest speaker in a sex ed class is a great example of culture war and, more importantly, how completely overblown and socially destructive it is.
How exactly is it socially destructive to force a school to stop lying to students?
My argument is that the confrontation in question was a clash of values rather than facts.
And your argument is wrong because it clearly WAS a clash of facts, as demonstrated by the school obviously lying and having the facts indisputably against them.
Waving around internet print-offs is an example of the tactic of trying to reframe an argument over ideology as an argument over facts
Yeah, how dare people come to a discussion with supporting material to help justify their claims. Do you honestly think that this is supposed to be an impressive argument?
same as posting the phrase BLATANT LYING again and again and again ITT.
So then what should I call it when someone indisputably and shamelessly lies about something for ideological reasons?
So let me get this straight: in your bizarre world pointing out the probable reason that someone is lying magically transforms the argument from "they're lying" to "I don't like their ideology"?
Teaching that abstinence is one of many options is reasonable, teaching abstinence at the expense of informing properly about contrraception and other related issues is a failure of sex education. What exactly are the lessons for? It should be about informing them of the subject so they can make informed decisions, it shouldn't be about trying to force them down one choice by using scare 'statistics' and games. Fundamentally there's a lack of respect to pupils in teaching them in this manner, it's about imposing ideology on them, it's not teaching them anything.
A heavy bias on abstinence education typically is from a religious right agenda, and it's going to be Christian in most western countries, that's just common sense. That said, in the UK sex education can be opted out of and I recall its Muslim parents that are more likely to do this. Personally I don't think it should be optional, the sorts of parents that take them out are the very sort too cowardly or wrapped in their own beliefs that their children will be kept in ignorance. Chemistry and maths aren't optional, nor should sex education be.
The problem with thinking you can sell a version of fact twisted to your agenda is that children aren't quite so dumb as to take it all in. If condoms failed 18% no one would use them. Many children can tell when they're being told lies to force a certain type of behaviour from them, and as soon as they pick on on one thing they ignore the rest. Some of the things in this class were ridiculous, the odds are that any worthwhile content in the lesson will be ignored. Clearly abstinence education doesn't work because there are still plenty of teenage pregnancies in the US because people are still going to have sex. Instead of telling them to control their urges, you equip them with the knowledge to have sex safely.
Sex education cannot avoid being an issue of social values. Here's an exchange I doubt few people would find problematic:
Teacher: Abstinence is not having sex, even in situations where you and your partner desire to do so. If you don't have sex, and by that I mean heterosexual vaginal intercourse, you can't get someone pregnant or get pregnant yourself. In a wider sense, abstaining from sex also means you have effectively no chance of developing a sexually transmitted infection.
Student: I want to have sex despite the risks you mention. Plus, the contraceptives you also taught me about significantly reduce those risks. And even if I develop an STI, I can be treated. Similarly, if I become pregnant or get someone else pregnant, there is always abortion.
Good so far. But that's incomplete. And here's where values come into the matter:
Teacher: It's key to remember that contraceptives reduce those risks but do not eliminate them. And while pretty much every STI can be treated, treating a STI is not the same thing as never having one to begin with. Even those that can be cured can have serious consequences for your health after the infection itself is treated. Similarly, having an abortion is not the same thing as never having become pregnant. And of course whether to have an abortion is not your decision unless you are the one who is pregnant. It is up to you to weigh your desire to have sex against the possible negative consequences of doing so.
Young people need more than interest group generated statistics ("FACTS") to deal with these issues. What I have posted above is as far as I think it is appropriate to go in a public school sex education program. That is, even at this superficial level, the teacher cannot avoid demonstrating that choices about sexual behavior ultimately relate to personal values. In the best cases, young people can turn to many resources when it comes to thinking more deeply about the personal values they currently hold or would like to develop. But even without going into that, sex education itself implies some values: A sense of control over and ownership of one's body arises from learning about it, and along with that comes a vague notion of responsibility. And of course teaching about consent is purely a matter of values.
Manchu wrote: Sex education cannot avoid being an issue of social values.
Of course it can't, because right-wing Christians believe that any sex education besides "sex is sin, if you have it (or even have lustful thoughts) outside of marriage you will burn in hell" is unacceptable. That doesn't change the fact that there are honest lessons that are supported by facts, and dishonest scare tactics that care more about obeying Jesus than letting people make informed decisions.
And here's where values come into the matter:
No it isn't, because you don't have to endorse any particular choice. You simply present accurate statistics on the risks and let the student make their own choices. Saying "here's the best information we have on the subject, you can use it to make the decision that is right for you" is a value-neutral answer unless your values include deliberately keeping people ignorant. There's no need to add your not-so-subtle hinting at how abstinence is the best option.
Young people need more than interest group generated statistics ("FACTS") to deal with these issues.
Nice job dismissing our best information on the subject as "interest group generated statistics". Perhaps if it seems like this is a "culture war" issue it's because you've decided to make it one?
That is, even at this superficial level, the teacher cannot avoid demonstrating that choices about sexual behavior ultimately relate to personal values.
So what? Nobody is disputing that people choose to have sex or not have sex based on their personal values. This has nothing to do with how you're framing this as a "culture war" issue where there are no facts and everyone is just arguing about their opinions.
What sex means, what role it plays in our individual lives and in our society, how we conceive of ourselves and others -- these are the key issues of sex education. And none of them have anything to do with statistics. In our story, mom (and therefore son) object to the values the guest speakers conveyed. The classroom is in some ways the ideal place for discussion of values.
But in our story, the classroom has already been subverted into an ideological battleground. As far as I can tell, these abstinence guest speakers are only present to deploy an ideological counterpoint to the standard health class, which reflects dominant social norms (focusing on contraceptives and STIs). Mom and son have planned their own ideological counter-assault. As data-armed son carries out the standard "but what about the facts" confrontation tactics, mom is busy leveraging social media to mobilize the troops and bring down the gak storm of internet opinion. Then mom moves in to vent her righteous fury. This will make a great blog post or editorial!
Manchu wrote: What sex means, what role it plays in our individual lives and in our society, how we conceive of ourselves and others -- these are the key issues of sex education.
That's a very optimistic way of looking at it when in reality sex "education" at its best is usually little more than 15 minutes of straightforward facts about birth control and disease rates stuck in the middle of a random PE class. And very often it's even worse.
In our story, mom (and therefore son) object to the values the guest speakers conveyed.
Well yes, because the primary value of the guest speakers is "it's ok to lie to people if it will help you manipulate them into doing what you want". Mom's main objection to the class isn't that abstinence is portrayed as a good option, it's that the speakers are blatantly lying and trying to scare people into obedience.
As data-armed son carries out the standard "but what about the facts" confrontation tactics
I love how you present "what about telling the truth instead of lying to manipulate people into doing what you want" as nothing more than culture-war "confrontation tactics". Have you forgotten that the goal of education is supposed to be teaching accurate information instead of ideologically-motivated lies?
mom is busy leveraging social media to mobilize the troops and bring down the gak storm of internet opinion.
Yeah, how dare people publicly criticize someone for being a manipulative liar. Clearly this is all just culture war bullying and we should all feel sympathy for the poor abused speakers who had to be shamed for their lying.
I find it totally improbable that the guest speakers in question went to the classroom with the intent to lie to kids. "Today I am going to lie to some kids on behalf of my GOP masters." That just doesn't make sense, except as a piece of culture war rhetoric. What probably happened, as far as the numbers sideshow goes, is these people saw some data somewhere that they believed because it shored up their preexisting values. That is how most people deal with statistics, even people with lots of education. Far from being liars, it is probable that these guest speakers are motivated by the notion that they tell kids the truth about sex. I mean, the only reason to assume bad faith on their part is because you already think they are bad people ... probably because you think they have bad values.
The important part of good quality sexuality education is the teaching of relationship values not just contraceptive methods, as is done in The Netherlands which has a very good success rate of later first intercourse and lower rate of teenage pregnancies than countries that tend to rely on pure abstinence education or mechanical risk education, or no education.
This is probably most apparent when it comes to the topic of consent. TBH I don't remember getting much if any information on that. But I would argue it is pretty crucial, certainly as important as information on anatomy, reproduction, and disease.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Although -- thinking about it -- I am not sure how you explain to minors how to give consent when this is legally impossible.
The important part of good quality sexuality education is the teaching of relationship values not just contraceptive methods, as is done in The Netherlands which has a very good success rate of later first intercourse and lower rate of teenage pregnancies than countries that tend to rely on pure abstinence education or mechanical risk education, or no education.
Right, but when you have the people who are lying about how effective contraception is and only mentioning one form (condoms) whilst basically ignoring: 1) either type of the pill (admittedly they mentioned the pill in one of their scare stories but completely failed to mention that, when taken correctly, it has less than 1% rate of failure) 2) the injection 3) the implant 4) IUDs
or in other words, every type of contraception that is available to women, whilst at the same time completely fething up the whole idea of how a healthy relationship will go (if she says no then she's the one you want and you should put her on a pedestal) then that is in no way conducive to any kind of effective education program on the mechanics or the values aspect.
The whole sex-ed course would be better without this lesson ever having taken place as no information of any worth to the children came out of it.
Also, on the subject of consent, apparently the only lesson the kids had on it was a policeman coming into the class to tell them not to rape.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Manchu wrote: I find it totally improbable that the guest speakers in question went to the classroom with the intent to lie to kids. "Today I am going to lie to some kids on behalf of my GOP masters." That just doesn't make sense, except as a piece of culture war rhetoric. What probably happened, as far as the numbers sideshow goes, is these people saw some data somewhere that they believed because it shored up their preexisting values. That is how most people deal with statistics, even people with lots of education. Far from being liars, it is probable that these guest speakers are motivated by the notion that they tell kids the truth about sex. I mean, the only reason to assume bad faith on their part is because you already think they are bad people ... probably because you think they have bad values.
So, they lied. If you're going to go and teach some kids about a topic which can potentially have a huge impact on their lives then you should probably make sure your information is accurate, rather than just supporting your preconceived ideas. They failed to mention that sex is pleasurable, that combining forms of contraception is the safest way to have sex, that proper use of condoms brings the failure rate down to 2%, not 18%, that it is okay to have sex if you and your partner choose to, that there are support programs for pregnant women so they don't need to be ashamed to tell people if they are pregnant etc.
They offered no constructive information about sex, at all.
Manchu wrote: Culture warriors always present ideological battles as their FACTS versus their opponents' OPINIONS.
And now we're right back to you denying that the school was blatantly lying. Failure rates for birth control are not an opinion, and the school lied about them. No amount of "SJW CULTURE WAR BULLYING" complaining is going to change this.
Manchu was accusing the mother of making those claims, not making said claim against the mother.
Again, Manchu never said the mother didn't have any facts to bring to the table.
The point about Manchu's argument is that the mother basically did a grandstand play aimed at her own audience. She wasn't primarily interested in finding out about the curriculum or getting it changed, she wanted just to pander to various pre-conceptions.
I agree that the abstinence programme is basically useless, and the version presented was tantamount in various areas to blatant lies. However to oppose it any way you like does not necessarily put you on the side of the angels.
If you truly care about children's health and life skills, you need to tackle the issue in a non-confrontational way as you will never achieve buy-in from opponents by slagging them off as idiots and fanatics.
Manchu wrote: Culture warriors always present ideological battles as their FACTS versus their opponents' OPINIONS.
And now we're right back to you denying that the school was blatantly lying. Failure rates for birth control are not an opinion, and the school lied about them. No amount of "SJW CULTURE WAR BULLYING" complaining is going to change this.
Manchu was accusing the mother of making those claims, not making said claim against the mother.
Again, Manchu never said the mother didn't have any facts to bring to the table.
Except he repeatedly said that this was an ideological argument, rather than factual. It is only ideological on the side of the abstinence teacher, the mother and son both have arguments based on facts.
If one side is arguing with facts and the other is not, that does not make the factual argument an ideological one.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kilkrazy wrote: The point about Manchu's argument is that the mother basically did a grandstand play aimed at her own audience. She wasn't primarily interested in finding out about the curriculum or getting it changed, she wanted just to pander to various pre-conceptions.
I agree that the abstinence programme is basically useless, and the version presented was tantamount in various areas to blatant lies. However to oppose it any way you like does not necessarily put you on the side of the angels.
If you truly care about children's health and life skills, you need to tackle the issue in a non-confrontational way as you will never achieve buy-in from opponents by slagging them off as idiots and fanatics.
These opponents will never buy-in anyway. When actually presented with evidence which disagreed with her preconceived conclusions what did the speaker do? Dismiss it out of hand without even looking at it.
By confronting the issue in a public way you can show this and put the actual facts out there at the same time.
Hordini wrote: We had a student put a regular condom on their entire forearm.
Just because they can stretch that far doesn't mean it will feel comfortable at that tension, the truth of the matter is men's penises come in all shapes and sizes and for some the standard ones are too tight and it makes sex too difficult.
Hey, if you want to buy into the marketing, I won't stop you.
A Town Called Malus wrote: ... lots of quoted text...
These opponents will never buy-in anyway. When actually presented with evidence which disagreed with her preconceived conclusions what did the speaker do? Dismiss it out of hand without even looking at it.
By confronting the issue in a public way you can show this and put the actual facts out there at the same time.
The teacher is not the person who needs to be engaged with. The professor needs to engage with the school governors and parents to change their minds about the best curriculum to achieve the desired outcome.
This is not going to be done by Tweeting smarmily about the stupid provincial sex ed class, however "public" the Twitter forum theoretically may be.
A Town Called Malus wrote: ... lots of quoted text...
These opponents will never buy-in anyway. When actually presented with evidence which disagreed with her preconceived conclusions what did the speaker do? Dismiss it out of hand without even looking at it.
By confronting the issue in a public way you can show this and put the actual facts out there at the same time.
The teacher is not the person who needs to be engaged with. The professor needs to engage with the school governors and parents to change their minds about the best curriculum to achieve the desired outcome.
This is not going to be done by Tweeting smarmily about the stupid provincial sex ed class, however "public" the Twitter forum theoretically may be.
And yet doing so has got this issue a lot of attention. The problem goes way beyond the individual school. It goes to the government which is giving schools extra funding as long as they put these abstinence classes in the curriculum, rather than just giving that funding to a sex-ed curriculum that actually works.
Hordini wrote: We had a student put a regular condom on their entire forearm.
Just because they can stretch that far doesn't mean it will feel comfortable at that tension, the truth of the matter is men's penises come in all shapes and sizes and for some the standard ones are too tight and it makes sex too difficult.
Hey, if you want to buy into the marketing, I won't stop you.
That's not marketing (obviously magnums are unnecessary), you want the condom to be snug but not so tight where you can't feel anything or are having erection/orgasm difficulties.
http://www.theyfit.co.uk/pages/condom-myths
Except he repeatedly said that this was an ideological argument, rather than factual. It is only ideological on the side of the abstinence teacher, the mother and son both have arguments based on facts.
Where did Manchu say that the mother didn't have any factual arguments? If you are not claiming he said the mother's argument was ideological rather than factual please clarify.
If one side is arguing with facts and the other is not, that does not make the factual argument an ideological one.
Does using facts in an argument preclude it from being ideological?
Manchu wrote: Thankfully, mathematics has not become ideologically charged just yet.
Yes, which is why we don't get any outrage over it. Since there's no right-wing ideology to protect bad math teachers they're just dealt with long before it gets any national-level attention. That doesn't mean that there's some kind of double standard for outrage. If the 1+1=3 teacher somehow didn't get fired and kept teaching that 1+1=3 we'd get the exact same kind of outrage that we see in this case.
But an attack on the person is only fallacious when it substitutes as an attack on the person's argument. My argument is and has been that the mom's behavior was poor and not at all justified by her ideological outrage. I have never argued that the mom's ideology is wrong because she acted like an donkey-cave.
All you've done here is complain about how horrible the mother is and rant about "bullying culture" or whatever. You've completely ignored the fact that the school is blatantly lying to students and the political opinions of the person pointing out the lying are irrelevant to that issue.
A non-ideological lesson on abstinence is very simple: You do not have to have sex. If you do not have sex, you or your partner cannot become pregnant. Not having sex also means your chances of contracting a sexually-transmitted infection are nearly zero, all other things being equal.
Which is fine, as long as it's not all the information students are given. Lying by omission is still lying, and any complete discussion of the risks of having sex must include honest information on ways to reduce the risk. And that includes the fact that those options are very effective and can reduce the risk to near-zero levels when used properly.
But of course we're never going to see that complete lesson in a situation like this because the entire point of abstinence-only "education" is to promote right-wing Christian ideology.
If I was going to disagree with anyone IRL (unlike on the internet), especially someone in authority over me like a teacher, I would only do so if there was a reasonable chance the conversation would be productive. My rule of thumb is, ideological debates are almost never productive.
So your opinion is that we should put up with blatant lying in schools because it wouldn't be "productive" to have a debate about it?
Kilkrazy wrote: The point about Manchu's argument is that the mother basically did a grandstand play aimed at her own audience. She wasn't primarily interested in finding out about the curriculum or getting it changed, she wanted just to pander to various pre-conceptions.
I agree that the abstinence programme is basically useless, and the version presented was tantamount in various areas to blatant lies. However to oppose it any way you like does not necessarily put you on the side of the angels.
If you truly care about children's health and life skills, you need to tackle the issue in a non-confrontational way as you will never achieve buy-in from opponents by slagging them off as idiots and fanatics.
Precisely. Had this mother wanted an actual constructive resolution she could have met with the teacher/principal/school board and explained her background, her expertise, where she felt there was room for improvement etc. so that way the students could have benefited and been able to make informed decisions.
von Hohenstein wrote: Did this happen in the US, a so called "free" country, or somewhere in Pakistan?
No way. An adult trying to get into a high school would be stopped at the office. They're hardcore about that, even keeping out the helicoptering soccer moms.
We in the US do you live. A parent has the right to sit in on their kids class. They do need to check in with the office but they can't be legally denied.
Sure they can be denied. In this case, for example, mom is now banned from doing so because she swore in front of the kids while ranting at the guest speakers after the class.
Dreger said today that Fletcher has banned her from the high school except for her freshman son's events because she swore in front of students at the end of the class. She says she's really being punished for shining a light on the use of a curriculum that's driven by a conservative agenda.
Manchu wrote: Sure they can be denied. In this case, for example, mom is now banned from doing so because she swore in front of the kids while ranting at the guest speakers after the class.
Dreger said today that Fletcher has banned her from the high school except for her freshman son's events because she swore in front of students at the end of the class. She says she's really being punished for shining a light on the use of a curriculum that's driven by a conservative agenda.
Manchu wrote: Sure they can be denied. In this case, for example, mom is now banned from doing so because she swore in front of the kids while ranting at the guest speakers after the class.
Child safety and parents rights are two different thing. You notice it wasn't until after the event she was denied. One trump the other, just like I can't smoke in my yard if my house is next to a school do to the 100yards rule despitet it being private property .
Dreadclaw69 wrote: Precisely. Had this mother wanted an actual constructive resolution she could have met with the teacher/principal/school board and explained her background, her expertise, where she felt there was room for improvement etc. so that way the students could have benefited and been able to make informed decisions.
She did not choose to do this.
Yeah, because the kind of dishonest right-wing zealots that let this stuff into schools in the first place are genuinely interested in doing the right thing for their students and willing to consider alternatives if someone just politely suggests them...
Manchu wrote: Again -- she herself sees this as a battle of ideological agendas.
And it's a battle in which one side has facts and is indisputably correct, while the other side is a bunch of shameless liars. Pointing out that the people you're opposing are biased doesn't mean that you have nothing more than ideological opinions of your own, or that you only care about scoring points in some "culture war" battle.
Manchu wrote: I mean, the only reason to assume bad faith on their part is because you already think they are bad people ... probably because you think they have bad values.
No, my reasons for assuming bad faith are:
1) I don't think it's at all plausible that nobody has ever said "your facts are wrong, here are the real numbers". It's just like the "debate" over evolution: a creationist speaker says something obviously wrong, someone tells them they're wrong and shows them evidence that proves it beyond any reasonable doubt, and the next day they're right back to the same false statements as if nothing happened.
2) Even a basic google search for information will provide the correct answers. So either they're lying, or they have such a reckless lack of concern for the truth that the end result is the same. Deliberately avoiding evidence that might prove you wrong so that you can say "this is all I know" is still dishonest.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Although -- thinking about it -- I am not sure how you explain to minors how to give consent when this is legally impossible.
Same as you explain to a 14 year old what the traffic laws for cars are and how a vehicle works even if they can't legally drive yet...
Manchu wrote: Your side is indisputably correct while the other side is a pack of shameless liars ... yeah you don't sound anything like a culture warrior.
I see, so if the facts clearly favor one side and anyone dares to point this out they're a "culture warrior"? Is it also "culture war" to criticize a (hypothetical) flat earth theorist teacher, or a math teacher that is teaching 1+1=3?
Manchu wrote: The premise of driving education is not that kids are already driving. But that is a premise of sex education.
No, it isn't. The premise (to continue your driving analogy) is that they will be driving in the future (which there is a good chance they will) and if you give them preliminary advice and, most importantly, accurate information (automatic vs manual gearbox, diesel vs petrol, the highway code etc.) you will make it much easier and safer for them when they actually come to driving that first time.
It is idiotic to say that sex education assumes that they are already sexually active and if that were the case then abstinence teaching would be even more of a waste of time and taxpayer money
As parents we have to face the fact that our children are going to become pubescent and get into potentially sexual relationships.
Therefore we have to consider the best ways to help them avoid early intercourse, pregnancy and STDs.
No sex education, and abstinence based sex education, have proven less effective in achieving good results compared to pragmatic sexuality education that includes relationship counselling.
A Town Called Malus wrote: It is idiotic to assume that sex education assumes that they are already sexually active
Why? Do you really find it hard to believe that minors are having sex?
My question goes to the legality: Minors are incapable of consent and therefore any intercourse they have is illicit. So has the lesson changed from "don't have sex until you are married" to "don't have sex until you are eighteen years old" or whatever the jurisdiction recognizes as the age of majority?
A Town Called Malus wrote: It is idiotic to assume that sex education assumes that they are already sexually active
Why?
Because that is not how it is taught.
You don't need to think that someone is already sexually active to think that they might, in the future, want to know how to put a condom on or what types of contraception are available and how effective they are, or warning signs of an abusive relationship and what constitutes consent.
My question goes to the legality: Minors are incapable of consent and therefore any intercourse they have is illicit. So has the lesson changed from "don't have sex until you are married" to "don't have sex until you are eighteen years old" or whatever the jurisdiction recognizes as the age of majority?
A lot of these children will have underage sex. Is it better that they know about contraception and how to stay safe when doing so or that they feel they must hide it and so expose themselves to more risk?
Also, these lessons will often also cover physical and emotional changes that they will undergo or are undergoing during puberty.
Manchu wrote: [Why? Do you really find it hard to believe that minors are having sex?
Nice job missing the point there. You claimed that the premise is that they are already having sex, they pointed out that the actual assumption is that they may be currently having sex or may be having it in the near future.
Minors are incapable of consent and therefore any intercourse they have is illicit.
Not true. Most states have an exception to "under 18 = no legal consent" laws that include minors within a certain age rage of each other. Also, let's not forget the difference between the legal definition of consent and the ethical one. The two are often the same, but not always.
Well obviously. Hence my question when it comes to teaching about consent.
Because even if they do not have underage sex, it would probably be worth their while to be taught that someone who is very drunk is not in a fit state to give consent, or that if someone pressures you into having sex then that does not mean that you gave consent etc.
In response to your earlier question about age of consent laws, these classes will typically, in my experience, say that you should not have sex until you personally feel that you are ready. If you are in a relationship with someone and you want to have sex with that person then you should wait until you are both ready.
Peregrine wrote: the difference between the legal definition of consent and the ethical one
That's a very good point and should play a major part in sex education.
A Town Called Malus wrote: it would probably be worth their while to be taught that someone who is very drunk is not in a fit state to give consent, or that if someone pressures you into having sex then that does not mean that you gave consent etc
Do you think we disagree?
Manchu wrote: This is probably most apparent when it comes to the topic of consent. TBH I don't remember getting much if any information on that. But I would argue it is pretty crucial, certainly as important as information on anatomy, reproduction, and disease.
A Town Called Malus wrote: It is idiotic to assume that sex education assumes that they are already sexually active
Why?
It's idiotic to assume that they are definitely having sex. It's not idiotic to assume they might be having sex. Regardless, them currently having sex is completely irrelevant to the fact that you can teach them about how consent works. Heck, you can even put into the lesson that legally there is no way that a person of certain age can give consent to another person.
Also, a phrase about everyone's favorite wookie comes to mind...
"Put up" a condom? I somehow doubt what you learned is correct.
Not a problem coming from sex ed, but likely a problem from our English courses, I guess. What would the correct expression be?
Peregrine wrote: Since when is opposing blatant lying and scare tactics "bully culture"?
Since it has been contradicting the teachings of a guy with a funny hat? Seems obvious to me. You are Kultural Kombating the Man in White. That is… evil!
Manchu wrote: Culture warriors always present ideological battles as their FACTS versus their opponents' OPINIONS. That's a rhetorical tactic. You have used it in pretty much every one of your posts ITT, for example.
In our story, mom taught this tactic to son. Son dutifully carried out mom's plan and the abstinence culture warrior immediately tried the same tactic in response, except she hadn't even bothered to come armed with internet print outs. Poor planning!
I get your point. Facts are only rhetorical points and teaching them correctly rather than making them up is not something that matters beside Kultural Kombat. feth facts, who cares about them beside angry ideologues?
If one Kultural Warrior Justice Kombatant (of Death) comes armed with truthful, relevant useful facts and another Kultural Warrior Justice Kombatant (of Death) comes armed with approximations and lies, well, one of them is giving truthful, relevant useful facts to the children (which is good) and the other one is giving them approximations and lies, which is bad. Now if the second Kultural Kombatant was mandated by the state to give truthful, relevant useful facts, it makes him or her giving approximations and lies instead super bad. End of the match, the Mother Kombatant is doing good things, and the Teacher Kombatant is doing terrible things. Finish him/her!
Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote: End of the match, the Mother Kombatant is doing good things, and the Teacher Kombatant is doing terrible things. Finish him/her!
That is exactly how mom and some posters here see things.
Peregrine wrote: Yeah, because the kind of dishonest right-wing zealots that let this stuff into schools in the first place are genuinely interested in doing the right thing for their students and willing to consider alternatives if someone just politely suggests them...
And cursing in front of students and being confrontational is better? Because of this person's actions are the school reviewing the teaching of sex ed?
Manchu wrote: If I was ever taught about abstinence in sex ed, I have totally forgotten. We were taught about fundamental facts about anatonmy, pregnancy, disease, and contraception. I don't think there was much on the subject of feelings or mutual respect or whatnot.
Gotta say, the mom here sounds like a serious donkey-cave.
In what way is cursing in front of students, and letting the Twitterverse know that you want to use your sex life as an anecdotal point of argument better than a discussion with the people who implement the curriculum?
I thought you were asking if it was better to be a jerk while correcting errors in school content or be someone who legislates the sex-ed curriculum to match your beliefs but fails to make sure said legally required teachings are accurate.
There are a lot of better ways to do what she did and I hate that we can find so many examples of people doing that across the country. I also think some of the people in this thread attacking people for attacking her are being ridiculous.
Manchu wrote: Your side is indisputably correct while the other side is a pack of shameless liars ... yeah you don't sound anything like a culture warrior.
I think we should start sacrificing infants to Shhllrrrg, God of Doors and Tables, who opens the Great Door in the Sky so that the Sun rises every day. You say there's no such door? CULTURE WAR!
If one side of a "debate" (and I use that term quite wrongly) is spreading false information about a subject, either out of ignorance or out of malice, then they're wrong by definition. Full stop, end of.
What I am finding interesting about this thread is that the info is entirely one sided.
One highly partisan blogger states their opinion and paraphrased what the opposed viewpoints were from their own perspective, with added ridicule.
The visiting teacher could have said anything, the info given is so blatantly one sided that no conclusions or judgement calls can be made from it.
In school systems they will allow people into the school if they are passed through and are wearing an identification badge that identifies them properly as a Visitor. Every school has this and parents are allowed to enter into a school if there kids are aware of it and the school has been properly informed.
On the sex educational thing. I agree with the mother but believe it could of been handled much better. The fact that sexual abistience is still taught and is still a thing. Makes me remind myself that it doesn't work.... At all.Maybe 5% of people actually follow that line of thinking and they are mostly from religious strict orders.
Asherian Command wrote: In school systems they will allow people into the school if they are passed through and are wearing an identification badge that identifies them properly as a Visitor. Every school has this and parents are allowed to enter into a school if there kids are aware of it and the school has been properly informed.
On the sex educational thing. I agree with the mother but believe it could of been handled much better. The fact that sexual abistience is still taught and is still a thing. Makes me remind myself that it doesn't work.... At all.Maybe 5% of people actually follow that line of thinking and they are mostly from religious strict orders.
Yeah, most research on abstinence only education has found that it delays sexual activity by about 6 to 12 months. However it also made it that once they did become sexually active they were less likely to use contraception.
The states with abstinence only education are also more likely to have higher rates of teenage pregnancy and repeat teenage pregnancy (ie the same person has got pregnant twice).
Asherian Command wrote: In school systems they will allow people into the school if they are passed through and are wearing an identification badge that identifies them properly as a Visitor. Every school has this and parents are allowed to enter into a school if there kids are aware of it and the school has been properly informed.
On the sex educational thing. I agree with the mother but believe it could of been handled much better. The fact that sexual abstinence is still taught and is still a thing. Makes me remind myself that it doesn't work.... At all.Maybe 5% of people actually follow that line of thinking and they are mostly from religious strict orders.
Yeah, most research on abstinence only education has found that it delays sexual activity by about 6 to 12 months. However it also made it that once they did become sexually active they were less likely to use contraception.
The states with abstinence only education are also more likely to have higher rates of teenage pregnancy and repeat teenage pregnancy (ie the same person has got pregnant twice).
I thought so
Glad I am right on this.
And people agree with me on it.
Because the "think of the children!" line of thinking is doing oh so well. Parents being protective of their children will only harm them, than help them
skyth wrote: The thing is, the report cooberates other stories that have been told.
Stories about these speakers? Please post them.
You guys keep talking about abstinence-only education. Did you just miss that this story is not about that or are you "blatantly lying" and/or "spreading false information about a subject out of ignorance or malice"?
The environment I was taught in taught that masturbation and sex in general was a bad thing.
If you masturbated it was consider a crime against god!
Though I don't think my experiences line up with everyone elses experiences.
Or maybe they do. As life is sonder that way. (real word!)
Before I went to university all my education was through Catholic schools. When it came to sex ed we were taught about reproduction, contraception, the rhythm method, abstinence, etc. and while it was mentioned that sex outside marriage was considered a sin, it was done without fire and brimstone and with the reminder that sins could be confessed and absolved
Was your sex ed really a Monty Python skit?
NSFW warning
skyth wrote: The thing is, the report cooberates other stories that have been told.
Stories about these speakers? Please post them.
You guys keep talking about abstinence-only education. Did you just miss that this story is not about that or are you "blatantly lying" and/or "spreading false information about a subject out of ignorance or malice"?
Even within a comprehensive program this sort of abstinence lesson has no place. It is based on incorrect data, hearsay, scare stories and is deeply misleading and aimed at shaming and scaring children into not having sex.
None of those tactics have worked in curtailing drug use so why would they work in curtailing sex?
Manchu wrote: You guys keep talking about abstinence-only education. Did you just miss that this story is not about that or are you "blatantly lying" and/or "spreading false information about a subject out of ignorance or malice"?
Even within a comprehensive program this sort of abstinence lesson has no place.
Fine but again why are you acting (blatantly lying?) as if this story is about abstinence-only education?
Well its terrible for many because most often people who wait till marriage, it is usually a one sided thing, one person didn't but the other did. Abistence was made in a time when people were getting married at an early age. So it was seen as abit more feasible.
Manchu wrote: You guys keep talking about abstinence-only education. Did you just miss that this story is not about that or are you "blatantly lying" and/or "spreading false information about a subject out of ignorance or malice"?
Even within a comprehensive program this sort of abstinence lesson has no place.
Fine but again why are acting (blatantly lying?) as if this story is about abstinence-only education?
Because this abstinence lesson took that approach. Hence why, in this lesson, they totally ignored all forms of contraception but 2. They used the failure rate of an incorrectly used condom to try to justify condom use as not being reliable (along with a completely bs story about an entire pack of condoms being leaky which, as I pointed out earlier, has a probability of 1 divided by all the stars in the universe of occurring) and had a completely anecdotal, with no supporting evidence, story about a girl who got pregnant while on the pill.
The pill has, when taken correctly, a failure rate of less than or equal to 1%. Condoms have a failure rate, when used correctly, of about 2%. They didn't mention, at all, combining these forms or even mention IUDs, the implant or injections. Or the emergency contraception pill.
In the point of view of the talk the only contraception was condoms with an inflated 1/5 chance of failure and if it broke you would get pregnant and you had to have that baby so the only way to not ruin your life was to not have sex.
All that needs to be said about abstinence in sex-ed is this: "Not having sex is the only 100% effective way of not getting pregnant or catching an infection from sexual contact." That's it. No paper babies, no scare stories. Give the kids the facts, not bs political agenda and religious ideology.
Manchu wrote: The guest speaker came to talk about abstinence. That doesn't make the school program abstinence-only sex education.
But the guest speakers talk was not based on facts or evidence. I stand by my statement that a sex-ed course without that lesson is qualitatively better than one with it, due to the misinformation spread by the speaker which can foster distrust of the whole of sex-ed.
It's like having someone say that if you smoke a joint then you will instantly die. Kid then smokes pot and doesn't die. Why should the kid trust anything else that person said about other drugs when they wouldn't even give them the basic facts about pot?
Manchu wrote: Again, fine. My question is about why you are misrepresenting this story as being about abstinence-only education.
Where have I ever claimed that this is about abstinence-only? Where did the article claim it was abstinence-only? Nobody has claimed that.
People have pointed out that abstinence-only education has a higher rate of failure, both in cases of pregnancy and STD prevention, than a comprehensive course. Considering that the groups that give these abstinence talks are typically going to be very similar whether it is abstinence-only or if they're just a speaker as part of a more comprehensive course, I think their impact should be considered.
I have always maintained, throughout this whole thread, that a comprehensive sex-ed course which covers relationships and the mechanics is the best thing for young people. These kinds of abstinence talks, whether on their own or as part of a broader course, offer nothing of value to the young people. They only serve to muddy the issue by introducing incorrect data, emotionally charged anecdotes and to create distrust between young people and the teachers.
Manchu wrote: Again, fine. My question is about why you are misrepresenting this story as being about abstinence-only education.
Where have I ever claimed that this is about abstinence-only? Where did the article claim it was abstinence-only?
I pointed out that abstinence-only education has a failure rate greater than comprehensive sex-ed. With that in mind, abstinence education adds nothing to a comprehensive sex-ed course and could in fact detract from it.
So abstinence-only education has a failure rate greater than comprehensive sex-ed. How does it follow that abstinence education adds nothing to a comprehensive sex-ed course? Is a sex-ed course really comprehensive if it doesn't include some talk of abstinence?
A Town Called Malus wrote: I pointed out that abstinence-only education has a failure rate greater than comprehensive sex-ed. With that in mind, abstinence education adds nothing to a comprehensive sex-ed course and could in fact detract from it.
Ah the heart of the matter. You make an argument about abstinence-only education and then pretend it also applies to any sex education program that mentions abstinence, as if that program was also abstinence-only.
A Town Called Malus wrote: I pointed out that abstinence-only education has a failure rate greater than comprehensive sex-ed. With that in mind, abstinence education adds nothing to a comprehensive sex-ed course and could in fact detract from it.
Ah the heart of the matter. You make an argument about abstinence-only education and then pretend it also applies to any sex education program that mentions abstinence, as if that program was also abstinence-only.
No, any comprehensive sex-ed course will already include the required information about abstinence which is basically: "Not having sex is the only 100% effective way of not getting pregnant or catching an infection from sexual contact."
It takes one sentence to go over the benefits of abstinence.
So abstinence-only education has a failure rate greater than comprehensive sex-ed. How does it follow that abstinence education adds nothing to a comprehensive sex-ed course? Is a sex-ed course really comprehensive if it doesn't include some talk of abstinence?
Because these abstinence talks are not based on scientific evidence (as demonstrated clearly many times throughout this thread by debunking the claims of the abstinence speaker). A comprehensive course will already have covered abstinence in an impartial and scientifically accurate way which doesn't rely on spreading misinformation about the effectiveness of contraception, or scaring children into thinking that if they get pregnant all of their friends will abandon them and they'll have to struggle through on their own.
Abstinence is not really as simple as not having sex; it is choosing not to have sex when you otherwise could. As demonstrated ITT, sex education is principally a matter of values.
Manchu wrote: Abstinence is not really as simple as not having sex; it is choosing not to have sex when you otherwise could. As demonstrated ITT, sex education is principally a matter of values.
And knowing how to have safe sex does not make you any more likely to have sex in the first place. It just means that when you do, you are more informed.
Sex-ed is only a matter of values for those who wish to impose their values onto the children, which is typically the abstinence crowd.
No-one on the comprehensive side is saying that we should encourage kids to have sex. Just that they should be taught how to have sex and be in an adult relationship safely when they do decide to take that step.
So I guess it does come down to values. One side values children making their own decisions based on facts and reasoning, the other side values making children do what they want based on lies and scare stories.
A Town Called Malus wrote: Sex-ed is only a matter of values for those who wish to impose their values onto the children, which is typically the abstinence crowd.
Let's get real. Imposing values on children is what all of education is about. I guess you have been reading this thread on a very selective basis. A great example of a sex ed issue that is purely a matter of values is consent.
A Town Called Malus wrote: One side values children making their own decisions based on facts and reasoning, the other side values making children do what they want based on lies and scare stories.
A Town Called Malus wrote: One side values children making their own decisions based on facts and reasoning, the other side values making children do what they want based on lies and scare stories.
More culture war rhetorical nonsense ...
If your culture is "lie to children so they do what they're told" (and yes, the speaker did lie to them) then it deserves to have war declared on it. How is giving the children the facts and telling them to make their own decision war against anybody's culture unless that culture assumes that they cannot make that decision themselves? If these people are so worried about their children's values and assume that they will sleep around unless you scare them out of it, then they have absolutely no faith or trust in their children choosing to uphold those values on their own. In which case the kid never truly held those values to begin with.
Consent is not about values but about respect. Considering that those who are pro-abstinence are also often those who come out with things like "legitimate rape" and magical female bodily functions that can identify rape and so don't get pregnant I don't think anybody really wants them to be determining what constitutes consent and teaching that to kids.
Keep religion and politics out of the classroom when it comes to sex and science.
A Town Called Malus wrote: One side values children making their own decisions based on facts and reasoning, the other side values making children do what they want based on lies and scare stories.
More culture war rhetorical nonsense ...
If your culture is "lie to children so they do what they're told" (and yes, the speaker did lie to them) then it deserves to have war declared on it. How is giving the children the facts and telling them to make their own decision war against anybody's culture unless that culture assumes that they cannot make that decision themselves? If these people are so worried about their children's values and assume that they will sleep around unless you scare them out of it, then they have absolutely no faith or trust in their children choosing to uphold those values on their own. In which case the kid never truly held those values to begin with.
Consent is not about values but about respect. Considering that those who are pro-abstinence are also often those who come out with things like "legitimate rape" and magical female bodily functions that can identify rape and so don't get pregnant I don't think anybody really wants them to be determining what constitutes consent and teaching that to kids.
Keep religion and politics out of the classroom when it comes to sex.
Damn. Malus laying down the facts and the law.
I agree completely with that idea.
There is no reason to lie to your kids or tell them something stupid because you don't want to tell them the truth.
It is better to know the truth than to know a lie.
A Town Called Malus wrote: Sex-ed is only a matter of values for those who wish to impose their values onto the children, which is typically the abstinence crowd.
Let's get real. Imposing values on children is what all of education is about. I guess you have been reading this thread on a very selective basis. A great example of a sex ed issue that is purely a matter of values is consent.
A Town Called Malus wrote: One side values children making their own decisions based on facts and reasoning, the other side values making children do what they want based on lies and scare stories.
More culture war rhetorical nonsense ...
Sorry, but I'm going to side with rationalism and science above religious dogma every time of the day. If that's culture war then so be it.
What is there to say about abstinence beyond the one-sentence description that's already been provided that isn't wholly subjective?
Manchu wrote: Consent is about respect ... and not values? Oh dear ...
Yes. You don't need to value sex after marriage or after a certain age or whatever over just plain sex whenever the person feels they are ready, to teach about consent (ie both partners must be in a fit state to give consent, these things are not consent etc.)
Consent is built upon a mutual respect shared between the two sexual partners which will result in neither side taking advantage of the other. A blanket "say no sex without marriage" does not carry that message. At all.
For example, in the dudes story he said that he chose abstinence to stay with his girlfriend until they married (and then they had sex). What is the difference between that and a teenager staying with their girlfriend until they feel ready to have sex, whether they're married or not? In both cases one partner has respected the feelings and wishes of the other. So why then add in that whole "wait until you find someone who says no" thing in there too, which the speaker did? That is purely about attempting to impose your own religious beliefs onto others and demean those who do not follow them by implying that if someone wants to have sex, they're not worth it.
Manchu wrote: Consent is about respect ... and not values? Oh dear ...
consent is about respect and values. IF you value someone and you respect them.
If they are marrying to have sex then that is a problem and sadly that is what some people see as a reward for getting married.
IT is basically as bad as just using someone for sex. Actually there is no difference. They are still using them for sex even if they do not mean to. If they see sex as a reward after marriage. Then that persons priorities are screwed up.
Manchu wrote: You make an argument about abstinence-only education and then pretend it also applies to any sex education program that mentions abstinence, as if that program was also abstinence-only.
The program as a whole may or may not have been. The speakers were abstinence-only. Their whole point was that birth control doesn't work, having sex will ruin your life, and you'd better wait until marriage. Even if the school later discussed other methods having those speakers was still entirely inappropriate.
Manchu wrote: More culture war rhetorical nonsense ...
It's awfully convenient how any criticism of your side is "culture war rhetorical nonsense".
If they are marrying to have sex then that is a problem and sadly that is what some people see as a reward for getting married.
Who?
I've never heard of a single person that got married just so they could have sex.
You'd be surprised.
Some people have gotten married an broken up because of sexual incapability. So people are dreadfully simple, but at the same time complex.
It does happen. Especially between teens. Yes it is possible. I know of a few. Who married simply for sex. Because having sex outside of marriage is seen as bad.
People in marriage still use contraception. We're not all devout Catholics. I've never understood the thinking behind abstinence-only education that you don't need to know about sexual health once married.
Manchu wrote: My side lol ... exactly the trouble with being a culture warrior --your zealotry goes beyond simple myopia to inventing enemies.
I see, so now it's "culture war" to use the word "side" to refer to "you and anyone who happens to agree with you" or "your position in the debate"?
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Howard A Treesong wrote: People in marriage still use contraception. We're not all devout Catholics. I've never understood the thinking behind abstinence-only education that you don't need to know about sexual health once married.
But, according to many of the people who support abstinence-only "education", you're not supposed to use birth control once you're married. You're supposed to make lots of babies to train into soldiers for Jesus. If you take away the opportunity to produce a child then you're defiling the sacred act of reproduction and you're probably going to hell.
(Yes, this is really stupid, but you have to be completely out of touch with reality to support abstinence-only "education" in the first place.)
I still think the most hilarious thing was when Sarah Palin was standing giving a speech about how she supports abstinence only education and how it works whilst her unmarried teenage daughter was standing behind her, pregnant.
Howard A Treesong wrote: People in marriage still use contraception. We're not all devout Catholics.
Devout Catholics also use contraception, both before marriage and as married people. In the US especially, practically no one has ever accepted the idea that it is wrong much less intrinsically evil for married couples to use contraception.
Peregrine wrote: I see, so now it's "culture war" to use the word "side" to refer to "you and anyone who happens to agree with you" or "your position in the debate"?
Manchu wrote: And what exactly do you think is my position?
That this is "culture war bullying", that it's a clash of values where neither side has indisputable facts, and that the mom's actions were not justified.
A Town Called Malus wrote: I still think the most hilarious thing was when Sarah Palin was standing giving a speech about how she supports abstinence only education and how it works whilst her unmarried teenage daughter was standing behind her, pregnant.
And?
Peregrine, it's really hard to take you seriously when you grind that axe so hard with your heavily chipped shoulders.
cincydooley wrote: Peregrine, it's really hard to take you seriously when you grind that axe so hard with your heavily chipped shoulders.
What axe, that lying to students is wrong? Or that abstinence-only "education" is complete nonsense that has been pretty clearly shown to be ineffective and is only taught because of right-wing ideology?
Peregrine wrote: Or that abstinence-only "education" is complete nonsense that has been pretty clearly shown to be ineffective and is only taught because of right-wing ideology?
Now you're just being disingenuous.
Less effective? Yup. Ineffective? Nope.
Further, the school isn't even teaching abstinence only sex ed. So, you know, there's that.
You obvious, militant bias makes you really hard to engage in a conversation. It's a shame, really.
Not bad, except the part about facts. Now how is what I quoted Malus posting a criticism of either the position that the mom should not have had a tantrum in front of the kid or that her tantrum, smug tweets, and ideological screed of a blog post loaded down with ad hominem not culture war bullying?
It's so much less effective that calling it "ineffective" is entirely appropriate. If you're sick and you buy medicine that works 1% of the time you're not going to hesitate to label it "ineffective". If the best argument you have is nitpicking the difference between "ineffective" and "less effective by a huge margin" then I think it's safe to say you've lost the debate.
Further, the school isn't even teaching abstinence only sex ed.
The speakers were. The fact that the school might have, at some other time, presented better information doesn't change the fact that dangerously inaccurate information was taught in the first place.
You obvious, militant bias makes you really hard to engage in a conversation. It's a shame, really.
I see, so acknowledging that the evidence is very clear in this situation is "militant bias"? Would it also be "militant bias" to argue against flat-earth theory or mind control in the chemtrails without adding constant disclaimers about how the other side makes some very good points and we should respect their opinions?
cincydooley wrote: You obvious, militant bias makes you really hard to engage in a conversation. It's a shame, really.
And that is not the only problem with being fanatical. His arguments are not only polarizing but premised upon the preexisting notion that every conversation is a battle between indisputable truth and shameless lies. Zealots have always claimed they are only standing up for what is right when they burn witches. But it sure seems like they are really in it to burn people. Note for example mom was already tweeting insults before she started listening to the speakers.
Peregrine wrote: Or that abstinence-only "education" is complete nonsense that has been pretty clearly shown to be ineffective and is only taught because of right-wing ideology?
Now you're just being disingenuous.
Less effective? Yup. Ineffective? Nope.
Further, the school isn't even teaching abstinence only sex ed. So, you know, there's that.
You obvious, militant bias makes you really hard to engage in a conversation. It's a shame, really.
No, it really is ineffective if we're going off the viewpoint that sex ed should be about keeping young people safe in their sex lives and sexual relationships, rather than making sure they don't have any. It delays sexual activity by 6 to 12 months but also increases the chance that they will have unsafe sex when they do become sexually active.
Which in turn leads to more teenage pregnancies and the continued proliferation of STDs which has been leading to some (such as gonorrhoea) to become resistant to the common treatment antibiotics such as penicillin.
The school may not be abstinence only, but the guest speakers definitely were. What happens when students ask why their regular teacher told them that condoms only fail 2% of the time when the guest speaker said they fail 18% of the time?
Manchu wrote: His arguments are not only polarizing but premised upon the preexisting notion that every conversation is a battle between indisputable truth and shameless lies/
In this case it is. Birth control failure rates are not something that is up for debate. The speakers were either shameless liars or so willfully ignorant that it might as well be lying. It's not my fault that conservative zealots keep taking positions that are so clearly wrong (see also: evolution, gay marriage, etc).
Zealots have always claimed they are only standing up for what is right when they burn witches. But it sure seems lime they are really in it to burn people.
I see, so now we're going to pretend that the poor oppressed abstinence-only idiots are the equivalent of murdered witches?
cincydooley wrote: You obvious, militant bias makes you really hard to engage in a conversation. It's a shame, really.
And that is not the only problem with being fanatical. His arguments are not only polarizing but premised upon the preexisting notion that every conversation is a battle between indisputable truth and shameless lies. Zealots have always claimed they are only standing up for what is right when they burn witches. But it sure seems lime they are really in it to burn people.
This battle is. The kid and his mum had factual evidence. The speakers had none.
Also, people burned witches based on unscientific beliefs and nothing more than anecdotal hearsay, "confirmed" by performing tests designed to prove what they already knew (retractable pins and the such). So in this scenario the witch burners would be the guest speakers whose entire ideology is based on nothing more than anecdotes and misrepresented data.
It never starts with murder. The first step is moral denigration to dehumanize. You have to portray the enemy as something like shameless liars attacking children. You have to make sure everyone feels comfortable hurling vitriol around. You need to get to the point where it is a matter of good against evil. In the past, this led to stoning, burning, lynching, etch. These days, it is about public shaming, harassment, trying to get people fired, and of course playing into the vanity and self-righteousness of the culture warriors who are so outraged.
Manchu wrote: It never starts with murder. The first step is moral denigration to dehumanize. You have to portray the enemy as something like shameless liars attacking children. You have to make sure everyone feels comfortable hurling vitriol around. You need to get to the point where it is a matter of good against evil. In the past, this led to stoning, burning, lynching, etch. These days, it is about public shaming, trying to get people fired, and of course playing into the vanity and self-righteousness of the culture warriors who are so outraged.
Wow...
1) Nobody is advocating murder 2) Nobody is dehumanizing anybody. These people are very much human. They're just idiots, like many humans. 3) If you don't want to be portrayed as lying to children then you probably shouldn't lie to children. 4) Stoning, burning and lynching were all perpetrated based on religion or bigotry, which are never based on scientific, factual evidence. They often are claimed to be but are always proven false. 5) If you can be "shamed" by having your viewpoint be proven wrong by scientific evidence then you shouldn't be saying that thing in the first place, especially if you are meant to be educating people.
If you actually feel like commenting on the topic, perhaps by showing how the talk contained factual information which was not misrepresented in any way, then that would be great. Otherwise could you take your nonsensical "culture war" rants into their own topic? Thank you.
The school may not be abstinence only, but the guest speakers definitely were. What happens when students ask why their regular teacher told them that condoms only fail 2% of the time when the guest speaker said they fail 18% of the time?
Which is with "perfect usage."
Planned Parenthood cites that 40% of COLLEGE AGE MALES use condoms incorrectly.
And again, from Planned Parenthood:
Condoms are an effective, inexpensive form of birth control. Of 100 women whose partners use condoms inconsistently or imperfectly, 18 will become pregnant in the first year of use.
I'll assume that's where the 18% comes from.
But if you want to assume that 100% of teenagers are using their condoms correctly, you're perfectly entitled to believe that.
5) If you can be "shamed" by having your viewpoint be proven wrong by scientific evidence then you shouldn't be saying that thing in the first place, especially if you are meant to be educating people.
So what happens when the 18% statistic exists? And is supplied, freely, by Planned Parenthood?
Manchu wrote: It never starts with murder. The first step is moral denigration to dehumanize. You have to portray the enemy as something like shameless liars attacking children. You have to make sure everyone feels comfortable hurling vitriol around. You need to get to the point where it is a matter of good against evil. In the past, this led to stoning, burning, lynching, etch. These days, it is about public shaming, harassment, trying to get people fired, and of course playing into the vanity and self-righteousness of the culture warriors who are so outraged.
Wow. Are you trying to become a parody of yourself?
The school may not be abstinence only, but the guest speakers definitely were. What happens when students ask why their regular teacher told them that condoms only fail 2% of the time when the guest speaker said they fail 18% of the time?
Which is with "perfect usage."
Planned Parenthood cites that 40% of COLLEGE AGE MALES use condoms incorrectly.
And again, from Planned Parenthood:
Condoms are an effective, inexpensive form of birth control. Of 100 women whose partners use condoms inconsistently or imperfectly, 18 will become pregnant in the first year of use.
I'll assume that's where the 18% comes from.
But if you want to assume that 100% of teenagers are using their condoms correctly, you're perfectly entitled to believe that.
5) If you can be "shamed" by having your viewpoint be proven wrong by scientific evidence then you shouldn't be saying that thing in the first place, especially if you are meant to be educating people.
So what happens when the 18% statistic exists? And is supplied, freely, by Planned Parenthood?
The 18% which is when it is used incorrectly? Well I guess that's why we have sex ed to teach people how to put one on properly (make sure condom is right way up (should be like a sombrero), pinch tip, unroll over penis, let go of tip, done http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception-guide/pages/how-do-i-use-condom.aspx) which brings the effectiveness up to 98%
If used correctly every time you have sex, male condoms are 98% effective. This means that two out of 100 women using male condoms as contraception will become pregnant in one year.
And then it's not like there are other alternatives to male condoms...
On the 40% of college males thing. Well that is just highlighting the massive need for a comprehensive sex ed program to bring that number down. Teaching a man abstinence is not gonna make him better at putting a condom on. Teaching him how to do it better, is.
As to the 18%. That figure was given without the information that it was only when used incorrectly. If I missed out that piece of information when citing numbers in a scientific paper my work wouldn't even make it to print.
A Town Called Malus wrote: Otherwise could you take your nonsensical "culture war" rants into their own topic?
Culture war is on topic ... considering this is a thread about a woman having an ideological dispute with guest speakers at her son's school. Did you even read the mom's editorial? Or ... this thread? The woman spends nearly all of the article decrying the values of the speakers in contrast to her own sex positive values. You and Peregrine have desperately blown the question of stats beyond all proportion to its importance to the mom's arguments because you want to make it a debate between yourself and advocates of abstinence-only education, which NO ONE either in the situation in Michigan or in this thread actually supports.
Peregrine wrote: Wow. Are you trying to become a parody of yourself?
This is my thought every time you deny being a culture warrior ... and then decry the guest speakers as BLATANT SHAMELESS LIARS and your declare continued commitment to the INDISPUTABLE TRUTH.
cincydooley wrote: So what happens when the 18% statistic exists? And is supplied, freely, by Planned Parenthood?
1) The speakers presented it as an inherent failure rate, not poor usgage. "Condoms fail 18 percent of the time, according to this woman."
2) The 18% failure rate includes failures like "let's not bother with one tonight", and potentially even deliberately having a baby. So the actual failure rate for people who are making a serious effort to do it right is going to be less than 18%, even if it isn't quite the perfect rate.
3) The failure rate for incorrect use is something that probably depends very heavily on being taught how to do it right. So essentially the speakers are saying "the failure rate is 18%, and we'd like it to be higher".
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Manchu wrote: This is my thought every time you deny being a culture warrior ... and then decry the guest speakers and their BLATANT SHAMELESS LIARS and your declare continued commitment to the INDISPUTABLE TRUTH.
Yes, because the speakers are lying. Seriously, this is not a subject that's open for debate. Your ridiculous attempt at a slippery slope leading to murder is off in its own special category.
Manchu wrote: The woman spends nearly all of the article decrying the values of the speakers in contrast to her own sex positive values.
Well yes, since trying to understand and explain the reasons why they're lying is much more interesting than a one-sentence statement that it's a lie and a link to the evidence.
You and Peregrine have desperately blown the question of stats beyond all proportion to its importance to the mom's arguments because you want to make it a debate between yourself and advocates of abstinence-only education, which NO ONE either in the situation in Michigan or in this thread actually supports.
Nobody except the speakers the school invited, you mean.
And no, I haven't blown it out of proportion, you just want to minimize its importance because it's easier to portray this as a case of "culture war bullying" if the factual argument (which the speakers indisputably lose and deserve to be criticized for) is only a tiny part of the issue. And TBH I suspect you have religious reasons for doing this, but I know you're never going to admit it.
On the 40% of college males thing. Well that is just highlighting the massive need for a comprehensive sex ed program to bring that number down. Teaching a man abstinence is not gonna make him better at putting a condom on. Teaching him how to do it better, is.
I guess we'll have to teach them how to not be drunk, high, or excited to get laid, too!
As to the 18%. That figure was given without the information that it was only when used incorrectly. If I missed out that piece of information when citing numbers in a scientific paper my work wouldn't even make it to print.
I'm really impressed at your confidence in teenagers to put condoms on correctly
Manchu wrote: So in addition to being BLATANT SHAMELESS LIARS, they also want more kids having unplanned pregnancies and developing STIs ... ?
Maybe not explicitly*, but that's the inevitable and entirely predictable result. I'd say it's more accurate that they want the failure rate to be as high as possible to scare people into being obedient Christians, and the lives destroyed in the process are just an unfortunate side effect. Their ideal world is one in which the failure rate is 90% and hardly anyone has sex outside of marriage because they're too afraid of the consequences.
*Some abstinence-only zealots do view that as well-deserved punishment for sin, but I'll concede that it's possible to support abstinence-only "education" without being quite that insane.
On the 40% of college males thing. Well that is just highlighting the massive need for a comprehensive sex ed program to bring that number down. Teaching a man abstinence is not gonna make him better at putting a condom on. Teaching him how to do it better, is.
I guess we'll have to teach them how to not be drunk, high, or excited to get laid, too!
That makes it more difficult, yes and raises the point about how to best curb people from getting so horrendously off their face that they lose all sense of risk management. On the other hand, if they're totally wankered then their equipment probably won't work either so the problem fixes itself
And really, tell a drunk/high person that a condom is a sombrero for their penis and they're gonna want to see that gak! Then it's just pinch, roll, let go
As to the 18%. That figure was given without the information that it was only when used incorrectly. If I missed out that piece of information when citing numbers in a scientific paper my work wouldn't even make it to print.
I'm really impressed at your confidence in teenagers to put condoms on correctly
Manchu wrote: Now that you have made it about my religion, are you ready to admit you are a culture warrior?
So now speculating about a person's reasons for holding a particular position is "culture war"? Who knew that such a simple little term could have such a broad definition...
Manchu wrote: Now that you have made it about my religion, are you ready to admit you are a culture warrior?
So now speculating about a person's reasons for holding a particular position is "culture war"? Who knew that such a simple little term could have such a broad definition...
When it comes to religions and anyone who disagrees with your rather leftist view, Peregrine, you're incredibly condescending. It's quite a bummer.
You are attacking my argument explicitly on the basis of my religion (or rather your bizarre misunderstanding of my religious beliefs). That is pretty much the definition of culture war.
Manchu wrote: You are attacking my argument explicitly on the basis of my religion (or rather your bizarre misunderstanding of my religious beliefs). That is pretty much the definition of culture war.
Kind of like how you're attacking the parent's argument on the basis of her beliefs?
And no, I didn't attack your religion on the basis of your religion, I explained very clearly why it's an absurd argument. Speculating about your motives for making such an absurd argument is not the same thing as saying "that argument is wrong because of your religion". Perhaps the difference would be easier to see if you weren't so eager to frame everything in terms of "culture war".
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cincydooley wrote: When it comes to religions and anyone who disagrees with your rather leftist view, Peregrine, you're incredibly condescending.
So now statistics and opposition to lying to students is a "leftist" thing? And why shouldn't I be condescending to people who are proudly and dangerously wrong?
No hilarity ensued for me. Sounded like a helicopter parent and a know it all student. I don't know why I keep coming back to OT, I somehow stumbled into here though.
Stormwall wrote: Sounded like a helicopter parent and a know it all student.
Yeah, how dare anyone object to bad "education". Students and parents should submit before the school and accept that mindless obedience is the only virtue.
I don't know why I keep coming back to OT, I somehow stumbled into here though.
Probably because you wouldn't get to make dramatic "ALL OF YOU SUCK" posts if you just quietly declined to read or post here?
Stormwall wrote: Sounded like a helicopter parent and a know it all student.
Yeah, how dare anyone object to bad "education". Students and parents should submit before the school and accept that mindless obedience is the only virtue.
I don't know why I keep coming back to OT, I somehow stumbled into here though.
Probably because you wouldn't get to make dramatic "ALL OF YOU SUCK" posts if you just quietly declined to read or post here?
Ah, way to twist something into something else. I never implied that getting a better education is bad. I actually agree with you on the subject of education thus far, with what little I have read. Oh Peregrine you.
That meme was in no way directed at you but, at the hostility that has opened up so far in the thread. Which never ceases to amaze.
Stormwall wrote: Ah, way to twist something into something else. I never implied that getting a better education is bad. I actually agree with you on the subject of education thus far, with what little I have read. Oh Peregrine you.
Then why did you call them a "helicopter parent" and "know it all student"? That pretty clearly implies that they were wrong and shouldn't have said anything.
PS: I see you're repeating your "mistake" of coming back here.
Stormwall wrote: Sounded like a helicopter parent and a know it all student.
Yeah, how dare anyone object to bad "education". Students and parents should submit before the school and accept that mindless obedience is the only virtue.
I don't know why I keep coming back to OT, I somehow stumbled into here though.
Probably because you wouldn't get to make dramatic "ALL OF YOU SUCK" posts if you just quietly declined to read or post here?
The 18% which is when it is used incorrectly? Well I guess that's why we have sex ed to teach people how to put one on properly (make sure condom is right way up (should be like a sombrero), pinch tip, unroll over penis, let go of tip, done http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception-guide/pages/how-do-i-use-condom.aspx) which brings the effectiveness up to 98%
If used correctly every time you have sex, male condoms are 98% effective. This means that two out of 100 women using male condoms as contraception will become pregnant in one year.
And then it's not like there are other alternatives to male condoms...
On the 40% of college males thing. Well that is just highlighting the massive need for a comprehensive sex ed program to bring that number down. Teaching a man abstinence is not gonna make him better at putting a condom on. Teaching him how to do it better, is.
As to the 18%. That figure was given without the information that it was only when used incorrectly. If I missed out that piece of information when citing numbers in a scientific paper my work wouldn't even make it to print.
I was thinking, and it's curious to me that these arguments are acceptable when it comes to condom use, but not to abstinence education.
Correct me if I'm wrong...but if abstinence is used perfectly, then it's more effective than a condom, right?
cincydooley wrote: I was thinking, and it's curious to me that these arguments are acceptable when it comes to condom use, but not to abstinence education.
Correct me if I'm wrong...but if abstinence is used perfectly, then it's more effective than a condom, right?
The difference is that proper condom use is something where better education is a plausible solution. The biggest problem comes from people who want to use them but just don't do it right. Abstinence, on the other hand, fails when people refuse to use it at all, not when they want to but don't know how. To make it work effectively you have to completely change what people want, and the evidence shows that this is almost certainly a doomed effort.
And of course the other side of the problem is that you're comparing the best option for the abstinence side to a mid-level option for the non-abstinence side. With non-abstinence the discussion doesn't stop at "18% failure rate", you can keep going and say "but there's this thing called an IUD that is nearly 100% effective at stopping pregnancy and has no risk of user failure". Or "but you can combine them with the pill and allow one method to catch the failures from the other".
Peregrine wrote: To make it work effectively you have to completely change what people want, and the evidence shows that this is almost certainly a doomed effort.
So what about all the people that don't want to use condoms?
they had used some of the tactics we had used in the intersex rights movement: blanketing the Web to make sure they set the terms of debate, reaching out to politically sympathetic reporters to get the story into the press, doling out fresh information and new characters at a steady pace to keep the story in the media and keep the pressure on, and rhetorically tapping into parallel left-leaning stories to make casual bystanders “get it” and care.
"I very much identify as a liberal feminist," she says. "That said, I get extremely impatient with liberals who want to rail about Republicans who won’t look at facts and then you get people who are making decisions based on identity and not on the facts. To me, that’s just a perversion of liberalism."
Dreger was part of a long history of transsexual imperialists, cissexual persons who have appropriated trans identity to control the flow of discourses that determine our lives
But my favourite thing in this mess was a random comment in the original article
My 1978 "sex ed" was from our wrestling coach who was a WWII D-Day veteran. The guy had forearm tattoos of anchors that were not ironic.
One of his choice quotes as he handed out condoms:
"If one of you little selfish donkey-caves manages to convince —God knows how — a real live woman to have sex with you, then for god's sake wear a condom. Don't you curse one these nice girls with your hell spawn... or what ever creeping crud crotch rot you got going on down there."
Manchu wrote: It's not surprising that she lost her temper considering she was looking for a fight. The proper thing to do in such a situation is not follow your kid into a class and make a scene. If your kids tell you they are getting taught something you consider ridiculous about sex ed, the adult thing to do would be clear that up with your kid at your home. With the example she sets, it's no wonder her kids walk into classes with statistics printed from the internet. That kids will probably grow up to be an donkey-cave, too.
Yeah, that'd be the way for her to stop this nonsense from affecting her kid. But her kid isn't the only kid in the world. Personally finding out what was really going in the class and then letting other people know, so that something can be done to reform sex education is a good and proper step forward. Stepping back, taking a high moral ground that you won't interfere with what gets taught in school, that's an easy position that lets people who want to peddle non-science in sex ed take control.
She was wrong to confront the teacher, and admits as much. Everything else was fine.
Like maybe a journalist that tracks down people in small town's to report on their "backward" attitudes.
I have absolutely no clue what that has to do with anything.
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cincydooley wrote: And I think she's stupid for saying so. IMO Abstinence ONLY is pretty ignorant, but there's no arguing that abstinence is the easiest way to keep yourself from getting pregnant.
If you as an individual choose abstinence and actually maintain it, then yeah its 100%. As a recommendation for other people, though, it's meaningless, because across a population you simply won't see any reduction in sex because people were told abstinence works. The sex drive is a really powerful thing.
Manchu wrote: It never starts with murder. The first step is moral denigration to dehumanize. You have to portray the enemy as something like shameless liars attacking children. You have to make sure everyone feels comfortable hurling vitriol around. You need to get to the point where it is a matter of good against evil. In the past, this led to stoning, burning, lynching, etch. These days, it is about public shaming, harassment, trying to get people fired, and of course playing into the vanity and self-righteousness of the culture warriors who are so outraged.
Wow. Are you trying to become a parody of yourself?
Nah man, but your thinking lying to kids is bad is on par with preparing some form of crusade-esque war in which your enemies (teachers or christians or I dunno, what ever the hell he's going on about)
kronk wrote: The article's narrative: My son took a proactive approach to taking his education in his own hands and stood up to the hierarchy "Footloose Style" for his good and the good of all his classmates. I'm so proud.
The actual story: Know-it-all, helicopter parent with a bone to pick disrupts a teacher while he's conducting the sex-ed program he's legally not allowed to alter for risk of losing his fething job.
Should the school teach abstinence only? feth no. That's dumb.
Is it the teacher's fault? feth no. That's the politicians getting involved in the fething schools.
Do I have any respect for this lady? feth no. She should pick on the school board, the state legislature, or even the principal. But leave the fething teacher alone. What-A-Bitch, indeed.
She didn't interrupt the class, she approached the teacher and aide after the lesson. She shouldn't have done that, but it didn't interrupt the class, and she admitted it was wrong.
Taking it up with the school board, based on 'what my son said was being taught' is worse than useless. The absolute fething way to reform anything is to base it on 'what people have said is happening'. Actually seeing the class and taking a proper adult account of the content is exactly the right thing to do. Now, armed with actual knowledge of the class, she and everyone else involved is in a position to meaningfully challenge the curriculum.
Manchu wrote: You are attacking my argument explicitly on the basis of my religion (or rather your bizarre misunderstanding of my religious beliefs). That is pretty much the definition of culture war.
He is attacking your argument on the basis that it is ridiculous, and then assessing that it was likely your religion that lead to you making such a ridiculous argument.
Let us sum up your argument. The facts were that the educators brought false and incomplete informations for ideological purposes, and the mother came, was angry about the biased informations, her child showed other students the informations were false and incomplete, and after the class the mother told the educators how false and incomplete their informations were.
Your argument is that because the mother was ideologically motivated too, this is terrible and a culture war and she was just as wrong, if not more wrong. You are judging her on her motivations rather than her actions.
Peregrine's argument is that because what the mother and her child did was only about correcting wrong and incomplete information, it was a good thing. He is judging her on her actions.
Manchu wrote: This is my thought every time you deny being a culture warrior ... and then decry the guest speakers as BLATANT SHAMELESS LIARS and your declare continued commitment to the INDISPUTABLE TRUTH.
Your argument would hold more weight if Peregrine did not have a direct example of them actually misrepresenting a statistics for ideological purpose. I would love to know, how in your opinion should non-culture warrior people describe someone who misrepresent statistics for ideological purpose when teaching children how to be safe?
Caught up with this thread... I agree with peregine, sebster, malus...
Someone... please hold me!
Edit: and Hybrid too!
I think there's issues with "SJW" / "Culture Warriors" these days... but, like I said earlier, she's an ass for confronting the teacher that way, but that doesn't mean she's wrong.
Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote: He is attacking your argument on the basis that it is ridiculous, and then assessing that it was likely your religion that lead to you making such a ridiculous argument.
Right, that would be an indirect attack on my faith. It's like saying, you're ugly and I suspect that is your parents' fault. I thought it over, slept on it, and have concluded the closest thing to a polite response to this kind of attack, and of course the fact that he then immediately blamed me for him attacking me in this way, is disengagement. So I'll be signing off after correcting your summary of my argument.
Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote: Your argument is that because the mother was ideologically motivated too, this is terrible and a culture war and she was just as wrong, if not more wrong. You are judging her on her motivations rather than her actions.
I am judging her actions in light of her motivations. My argument is the mom acted like an donkey-cave because she was spoiling for a fight. It was not a slip up in the heat of the moment. Alice Dreger is not just some random "helicoptering" mom. She is a committed activist specializing in sex topics. She wrote a book called "Galileo's Middle Finger" that Salon sympathetically describes as:
a trench-level account of several hot scientific controversies from the past 30 years, told with the page-turning verve of an exposé
From those same trenches, she engineered the confrontation in her son's classroom in order to spin it into a story about battling evil right-wing liars:
She says she's really being punished for shining a light on the use of a curriculum that's driven by a conservative agenda.
Souce. Unsurprisingly, our own culture warriors have received the signal and are re-broadcasting:
Peregrine wrote: an informative example of what happens when right-wing ideology is allowed to control educational content
Notwithstanding misleading implications to the contrary, I actually never defended the content of the guest speaker's presentation or even said that they should be allowed to be guest speakers. Here's what I actually said about them:
Manchu wrote: Personally, I don't like the idea of having guest speakers on abstinance. They are only present for ideological reasons. A non-ideological lesson on abstinence is very simple: You do not have to have sex. If you do not have sex, you or your partner cannot become pregnant. Not having sex also means your chances of contracting a sexually-transmitted infection are nearly zero, all other things being equal. That's it. No need for any kind of guest speaker.
The fact that there was in this case a discussion about the efficacy of teaching abstinence during the time when abstinence was supposed to be taught is pretty telling.
I even used an analogy to clarify that it is not Dreger's values about sex that I object to but rather her invented self-righteous outrage and how it is socially destructive:
Manchu wrote: My comments are founded on a concern about public rhetoric. To change up the example, it is increasingly OK here in the US to attack anti-vaccination folks at a personal level and with an extreme amount of vitriol. I personally have no sympathy whatsoever with any part of the anti-vaccination agenda. I would like to see that movement fade away completely. What I actually see, however, is an entrenchment of anti-vaccination beliefs fueled by a persecution complex. It seems like there is a positive correlation between commitment to the anti-vaccination beliefs and feelings of personal persecution. And giving vent to abusive, self-righteous behavior is simply not OK ... that point seems to be slipping away.
So that is where it will have to stand, as far as I am concerned.
Manchu wrote: Personally, I don't like the idea of having guest speakers on abstinance. They are only present for ideological reasons. A non-ideological lesson on abstinence is very simple: You do not have to have sex. If you do not have sex, you or your partner cannot become pregnant. Not having sex also means your chances of contracting a sexually-transmitted infection are nearly zero, all other things being equal. That's it. No need for any kind of guest speaker.
The fact that there was in this case a discussion about the efficacy of teaching abstinence during the time when abstinence was supposed to be taught is pretty telling.
Of course, not having sex also means that you miss out on a huge part of the whole human experience and by actively repressing the completely normal sexual urges on teenagers you could actually be forming less than stable adults, but that is a small price to pay... right?
Of course, not having sex also means that you miss out on a huge part of the whole human experience and by actively repressing the completely normal sexual urges on teenagers you could actually be forming less than stable adults, but that is a small price to pay... right?
I assume you'll be substantiating that claim with some data?
In fact, I'd wager if one were so inclined to do the research, you'd find the opposite is true. If one were so inclined.
Manchu wrote: Unsurprisingly, our own culture warriors have received the signal and are re-broadcasting
This is kind of unintentionally ironic, isn't it? Either you agree with me, or you disagree, in which case you're a robot without original ideas just regurgitating the party line. Heh, OK.
Of course, not having sex also means that you miss out on a huge part of the whole human experience and by actively repressing the completely normal sexual urges on teenagers you could actually be forming less than stable adults, but that is a small price to pay... right?
I assume you'll be substantiating that claim with some data?
In fact, I'd wager if one were so inclined to do the research, you'd find the opposite is true. If one were so inclined.
A gentleman by the name of Sigmund Freud (and many, many, many more Psychoanalysts and Psychologists), disagree with you. But I'm looking forward to reading your research on the subject.
A gentleman by the name of Sigmund Freud (and many, many, many more Psychoanalysts and Psychologists), disagree with you. But I'm looking forward to reading your research on the subject.
Kids who can make abstinence decisions do better in school, too, even when the comparison group was matched for social background and the desire to pursue education. Abstinent teens are far more likely to attend and graduate from college than those who are sexually active, based on an analysis of the NIH-supported National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health by Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson, researchers at the Heritage Foundation. Seems obvious: less distraction and more time to study.
and
...But maybe it's more. The researchers identified eight personality and behavioral traits that were associated with both abstinence and academic achievement—traits that to some extent may be inborn but can also be taught and reinforced regularly at home and at school:
Future orientation, with a focus on long-term goals
Willingness to postpone current pleasures for larger future rewards
Perseverance, as in the ability to stick to a task or commitment
A belief that current behavior can positively affect the future
Impulse control, including ability to control emotions and desires
Resistance to peer influence
Respect for parental and social values
Sense of self-worth and personal dignity
I wouldn't really recommend using anything from the last article as an argument.
At the bottom she refers you to two other articles she's written and provides no citation of scientific references to support her hypothesis. In fact, most of the links she puts in her article link to more of her articles which are, again, lacking in scientific references.
Also, the American College of Pediatrics is very clearly a conservative organisation, as can be seen in their About us page and in their opposition to same-sex families, emergency contraception (morning after pill) for teenagers and abortion for teenagers whilst supporting a doctors right to conscience (refuse treatment based on personal beliefs, regardless of if it is the best course of action for the patient), abstinence-only approach to sex-ed and parental notification in adolescent cases (effectively nullifying doctor-patient confidentiality for teenagers).
The first link is not only looking at sexual behaviour but also drug and alcohol abuse. They found that those whose brains were wired to be high risk takers were more likely to engage in sexual activity, drug and alcohol use, which would affect their mental development.
In fact, that first report did not actually look at data concerning sexual activity on its own but rather the combined effects of multiple risky behaviours. This can clearly be seen in the citations, the majority of which are about the effects of drugs and alcohol on brain development, not sexual activity.
It appears that she has taken that data and extrapolated it to include sexual activity, due to similarity in chemical releases from the behaviour.
The second report says, very clearly in its abstract:
There was no significant association between number of sex partners and later anxiety and depression. Increasing numbers of sex partners were associated with increasing risk of substance dependence disorder at all three ages.
The report did not claim that the link was causal. In fact it only suggested further study to investigate the link.
A Town Called Malus wrote: I wouldn't really recommend using anything from the last article as an argument.
At the bottom she refers you to two other articles she's written and provides no citation of scientific references to support her hypothesis
The first link is not only looking at sexual behaviour but also drug and alcohol abuse. They found that those whose brains were wired to be high risk takers were more likely to engage in sexual activity, drug and alcohol use, which would affect their mental development.
In fact, that first report did not actually look at data concerning sexual activity on its own but rather the combined effects of multiple risky behaviours. This can clearly be seen in the citations, the majority of which are about the effects of drugs and alcohol on brain development, not sexual activity.
It appears that she has taken that data and extrapolated it to include sexual activity, due to similarity in chemical releases from the behaviour.
The report did not claim that the link was causal. In fact it only suggested further study to investigate the link.
You're welcome to disassociate sex from the "high risk behavior" category; I believe it should be firmly planted there.
Additionally, from the 2nd article:
The nature of casual sex relationships may, however, present a risk factor in and of itself. These relationships may be particularly likely to be impersonal, lacking in the potential to provide emotional fulfillment. People having a string of these relationships may turn to the self-medication provided by alcohol or drugs. As the authors point out, drinking alcohol to cope with feelings of loneliness and despair can pave the way for later substance dependence.
Definite causation? No. But there's certainly correlation.
The second report says, very clearly in its abstract:
There was no significant association between number of sex partners and later anxiety and depression. Increasing numbers of sex partners were associated with increasing risk of substance dependence disorder at all three ages.
You're right. You don't see a problem with the 2nd part of the abstract, which I've put in bold....?
A gentleman by the name of Sigmund Freud (and many, many, many more Psychoanalysts and Psychologists), disagree with you. But I'm looking forward to reading your research on the subject.
Kids who can make abstinence decisions do better in school, too, even when the comparison group was matched for social background and the desire to pursue education. Abstinent teens are far more likely to attend and graduate from college than those who are sexually active, based on an analysis of the NIH-supported National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health by Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson, researchers at the Heritage Foundation. Seems obvious: less distraction and more time to study.
and
...But maybe it's more. The researchers identified eight personality and behavioral traits that were associated with both abstinence and academic achievement—traits that to some extent may be inborn but can also be taught and reinforced regularly at home and at school:
Future orientation, with a focus on long-term goals
Willingness to postpone current pleasures for larger future rewards
Perseverance, as in the ability to stick to a task or commitment
A belief that current behavior can positively affect the future
Impulse control, including ability to control emotions and desires
Resistance to peer influence
Respect for parental and social values
Sense of self-worth and personal dignity
That first report, like Malus says is focusing much more on drug and substance abuse.
That second report seems to directly contradict the first one, you might wan't to remove it from your list.
As for the third one, its from the Heritage Foundation and that alone is reasons to disqualify it from any kind of serious discussion.
The second report says, very clearly in its abstract:
There was no significant association between number of sex partners and later anxiety and depression. Increasing numbers of sex partners were associated with increasing risk of substance dependence disorder at all three ages.
You're right. You don't see a problem with the 2nd part of the abstract, which I've put in bold....?
As for the third one, its from the Heritage Foundation and that alone is reasons to disqualify it from any kind of serious discussion.
Healy was "Health Editor for U.S.News & World Report and wrote the On Health column. She was a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and served as director of the National Institutes of Health and president and CEO of the American Red Cross."
I feel pretty comfortable listening to her as an authority.
You're right. It doesn't. But it doesn't mean it's appropriate to ignore it, either.
But why isn't it the other way around?
Substance dependency disorders are much more likely to be the reason for an inordinate number of sex partners than for it to be the other way around.
Also the original premise was sexual repression vs normal sex life. The alternative to abstinence is not downright overindulgence in sex practices, its having a normal and healthy sex life.
Manchu wrote: Right, that would be an indirect attack on my faith.
Indeed.
No denying it, he is of the opinion your faith could lead you to have silly ideas about sex, birth control and abstinence. I can personally see why.
Manchu wrote: I am judging her actions in light of her motivations. My argument is the mom acted like an donkey-cave because she was spoiling for a fight.
Yet what she did was showing how the information given was wrong and incomplete, right? Good actions coming from bad motivations are still good actions, right?
Manchu wrote: She is a committed activist specializing in sex topics.
I am sure that helped her to correct everything wrong or incomplete the educators could have said.
Manchu wrote: Unsurprisingly, our own culture warriors
PhantomViper wrote: Of course, not having sex also means that you miss out on a huge part of the whole human experience and by actively repressing the completely normal sexual urges on teenagers you could actually be forming less than stable adults, but that is a small price to pay... right?
I assume you'll be substantiating that claim with some data?
In fact, I'd wager if one were so inclined to do the research, you'd find the opposite is true. If one were so inclined.
You would wager actively repressing the sexual urges of teenagers would form more stable adults? Do I look stable to you ?
You're right. It doesn't. But it doesn't mean it's appropriate to ignore it, either.
Though it's used to draw firm, yet spurious, conclusions.
Seems obvious: less distraction and more time to study.
Most kids in school are not having sex regardless of their abstinence choice. Further, lots of kids making these pledges still have boyfriends and girlfriends, they're still being distracted socialising, it's not a pledge to be a shut-in.
cincydooley wrote: You're welcome to disassociate sex from the "high risk behavior" category; I believe it should be firmly planted there.
And you are wrong. Sex, when done right, is a fairly low-risk activity. Giving out car keys is way more dangerous than the inherent risks of sex. It only becomes high-risk behavior if you ignore the options that minimize risk (like not wearing a seatbelt). And that means that, rather than a futile effort to stop people from having sex at all, education should focus on effectively using those options to minimize risk.
Additionally, from the 2nd article:
The nature of casual sex relationships may, however, present a risk factor in and of itself. These relationships may be particularly likely to be impersonal, lacking in the potential to provide emotional fulfillment. People having a string of these relationships may turn to the self-medication provided by alcohol or drugs. As the authors point out, drinking alcohol to cope with feelings of loneliness and despair can pave the way for later substance dependence.
Definite causation? No. But there's certainly correlation.
Except now you're talking about casual sex, not sex in general. And the issue isn't the sex, it's the lack of supportive relationships. Presumably that same risk of drug and alcohol abuse would apply to someone who has no relationships (or sex) at all.
There was no significant association between number of sex partners and later anxiety and depression. Increasing numbers of sex partners were associated with increasing risk of substance dependence disorder at all three ages.
You're right. You don't see a problem with the 2nd part of the abstract, which I've put in bold....?
The issue is that:
1) It's only evidence that they both happen together. Does sex cause drug abuse? Does drug abuse cause sex? Are both caused simultaneously by something else?
2) It probably doesn't follow a nice linear graph from zero to infinite sex partners and zero to 100% risk of drug addiction. Going from zero to one sex partner, or from one to two, probably has very little connection to drug addiction risks. If the rise in addiction risk doesn't happen until you're talking about a significantly higher than average number of sex partners (going from "we're in a relationship now, let's have sex" to getting drunk at parties and sleeping with random strangers) then it has very little relevance to most people.
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PhantomViper wrote: Also the original premise was sexual repression vs normal sex life. The alternative to abstinence is not downright overindulgence in sex practices, its having a normal and healthy sex life.
PhantomViper wrote: A gentleman by the name of Sigmund Freud (and many, many, many more Psychoanalysts and Psychologists), disagree with you. But I'm looking forward to reading your research on the subject.
You know that Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis is incredibly outdated, right?
PhantomViper wrote: A gentleman by the name of Sigmund Freud (and many, many, many more Psychoanalysts and Psychologists), disagree with you. But I'm looking forward to reading your research on the subject.
You know that Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis is incredibly outdated, right?
PhantomViper wrote: A gentleman by the name of Sigmund Freud (and many, many, many more Psychoanalysts and Psychologists), disagree with you. But I'm looking forward to reading your research on the subject.
You know that Freudian psychology and psychoanalysis is incredibly outdated, right?
Yeah, Freud is a hack.
I wouldn't call him a hack. He was extremely influential and wrote some very important works. But nowadays he probably has more influence in the fields of German Studies and Literary Analysis than current practices and therapies in clinical psychology. In any case, he doesn't really have a meaningful place in a serious discussion of high school sex ed.
PhantomViper wrote:As for the third one, its from the Heritage Foundation and that alone is reasons to disqualify it from any kind of serious discussion.
cincydooley wrote: ...I feel pretty comfortable listening to her as an authority.
I have very little interest in the OP but would like to mention that the Heritage Foundation is a right-wing infographic crap factory and you should seriously reconsider your trust in anything they say. For example, today they sharted out a brief that said that states recognizing gay marriage is likely to increase abortion rates using science numbers.
Unfortunately the current state of science is that it's sometimes a whore who will service whoever leaves the money for the grant on the dresser. After all, the tobacco companies have had scientists looking for a link between cigarettes and cancer for 50 years now, and geez, wouldn't you know, they just couldn't find one.
Nonetheless, what does your common sense tell you about the likelihood of gay couples and how it will impact abortions? If you come to the reasonable conclusion that gay couples are significantly less likely to need an abortion, then what do you then think about the foundation that would commission, fund and then publish such a study - would you consider them to be trustworthy? Does your critical thinking tell you that someone who describes themselves as a conservative think tank is likely to be conservative first in a way that trades heavily in confirmation bias?
Some of the things they say are clearly going to be true but you should definitely look at them with a very skeptical eye.
Isn't the American College of Pediatrics the one that pushed the idea that same sex attraction is a curable illness?
They sound like good people to listen to.
Actually... reading about their founding being in response to the American Academy of Pediatricians deciding not to be bigots over gay people, I'm liking them a lot more.
Starting it in the first place given when they were founded... (after the 90s)
A number of prominent researchers have complained that ACPeds mischaracterized or misused their work to advance its agenda.[1][9] Gary Remafedi, a pediatrician at the University of Minnesota, found his research being cited by ACPeds to argue that schools should deny support to gay teenagers. Remafedi complained that ACPeds had fundamentally mischaracterized his work, saying: "It's obvious that they didn't even read my research. I mean, they spelled my name wrong every time they cited it." The organization refused to correct or retract its assertions, leading Remafedi to state that ACPeds had "deliberately distorted my research for malicious purposes."[1] Responding to claims by ACPeds that same-sex attraction could be "cured", Francis Collins, a geneticist and director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, denounced ACPeds' use of his work, noting it was "disturbing" to see ACPeds use his scientific work in a "misleading and incorrect" way by taking work from one of his books out of context to "support an ideology that can cause unnecessary anguish and encouraged prejudice" against schoolchildren.[9] Warren Throckmorton, a therapist who specializes in sexual orientation issues, similarly complained that his research had been misused, saying of ACPeds: "They say they're impartial and not motivated by political or religious concerns, but if you look at who they're affiliated with and how they're using the research, that's just obviously not true."[1]
Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times, described ACPeds as a "political organization peddling homophobic junk-science."[12] In an amicus brief, the National Association of Social Workers described ACPeds as a "small and marginal group" which was "out of step with the research-based position of the AAP and other medical and child welfare authorities."[3] PFLAG identifies the American College of Pediatricians as an anti-equality organization, describing the group as a "small splinter group of medical professionals who do not support the mainstream view of the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) that homosexuality is a normal aspect of human diversity."[13]
Edit: Holy gak, going around reading more about the ACP, citing them as evidence or whatever is on par with using Alex Jones. Wow. The only time it's worth linking to them it seems is if you want a laugh.
Well their page still lists their belief that a mother/father household provides the best start for children, with no evidence to back it up.
As to gay marriage increasing abortions, did they think that all of these homosexual men and women were going to suddenly start getting pregnant randomly after they were married?
If anything homosexual couples could be better than heterosexual couples when it comes to children, as the likelihood of them having a child accidentally is slim to none. Which means that when they do have a child they've thought long and hard about it and have had to undergo surrogacy, IVF etc. or passed the criteria to be able to adopt.
It is like saying that the high coefficient of correlation between drunkenness and car crashes shows that bad drivers are likely to compensate for their inadequacy by heavy drinking.
PhantomViper wrote:As for the third one, its from the Heritage Foundation and that alone is reasons to disqualify it from any kind of serious discussion.
cincydooley wrote: ...I feel pretty comfortable listening to her as an authority.
I have very little interest in the OP but would like to mention that the Heritage Foundation is a right-wing infographic crap factory and you should seriously reconsider your trust in anything they say. For example, today they sharted out a brief that said that states recognizing gay marriage is likely to increase abortion rates using science numbers.
But Healy wasn't associated with the Heritage foundation, and she's the author of the article.
The Age of Autism anti-vaccine group named her 2008 Person of the Year[2] for her support of the discredited[3][4] hypothesis that vaccines are linked to autism.
Healy became the focus of controversy when she questioned the 2004 finding of the Institute of Medicine that the evidence refuting a link between childhood vaccinations and autism was conclusive. She suggested a government conspiracy against further research in a nationally televised CBS interview with Sharyl Attkisson.[12]
Anyways, just to bring some meat to this discussion I would like to point out, that while saying that correlation = casuation would be silly, equally silly would be to say that correlation is irrelevant, as correlation implies that there must be a factor that either influences both, or that one of the subjects affects the other.
MrDwhitey wrote: http://www.tylervigen.com/ is always a fun website to look at.
That site is just silly. What I was talking about was comparing two different things and seeing their correlation. What that site however does is, that it compares two trendlines, which have a tendency to look like lines if there is correlation, and therefore it is very easy to make graphs like that.
Healy became the focus of controversy when she questioned the 2004 finding of the Institute of Medicine that the evidence refuting a link between childhood vaccinations and autism was conclusive. She suggested a government conspiracy against further research in a nationally televised CBS interview with Sharyl Attkisson.[12]
Healy became the focus of controversy when she questioned the 2004 finding of the Institute of Medicine that the evidence refuting a link between childhood vaccinations and autism was conclusive. She suggested a government conspiracy against further research in a nationally televised CBS interview with Sharyl Attkisson.[12]
Cool.
So....she questioned a study.
The rest of her record seems pretty sterling....
No. She supported, after it was proven scientifically wrong and found that the author had falsified his research, the study which caused the entire Autism-MMR scare.
The author of that study had his medical licence revoked, to put it into perspective of how bad that research paper was.
To then suggest some government conspiracy when your whole argument was proven to be completely without proof is not good science and suggests a complete lack of impartiality.
So, what exactly is the relevance of this little tangent about which other beliefs she might have had? The fact that she was obviously wrong about some unrelated thing doesn't change anything about the situation in the OP.
Peregrine wrote: So, what exactly is the relevance of this little tangent about which other beliefs she might have had? The fact that she was obviously wrong about some unrelated thing doesn't change anything about the situation in the OP.
If I remember correctly it was about finding evidence that sexual activity has a detrimental effect on teenagers.
Most of the posted evidence seemed to lead back to similar sources, who were unreliable and some of which had been accused of misrepresentation in the past.
MrDwhitey wrote: http://www.tylervigen.com/ is always a fun website to look at.
That site is just silly. What I was talking about was comparing two different things and seeing their correlation. What that site however does is, that it compares two trendlines, which have a tendency to look like lines if there is correlation, and therefore it is very easy to make graphs like that.
It was in response, I believe, to this part of your first post;
as correlation implies that there must be a factor that either influences both, or that one of the subjects affects the other
Because you neglected the third possibility, that they both just happened to be acting that way and while variables were impacting upon the numbers of both issues we are concerned with, they are doing so in a way that is unrelated to the other one.
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