One night over winter break, I was left with nothing better to do than watch television–something that happened quite a lot, frankly. I ended up watching the made-for-MTV movie, Everybody’s Doing It, which revolved around a public school that made the switch from teaching safe sex in school to only teaching abstinence in health class. I laughed; I cried; I sought hired guns.
The movie revolved around a teenage girl who was trying to decide whether or not to “go all the way” with her boyfriend. At the same time, she was enrolled in health with her boyfriend. The first subject of the health class: sex. This was the first year that the school is implementing an “abstinence-only” policy when dealing with sex education, so the class becomes controversial for students and faculty alike.
In conjunction with the new policy, the local youth organization hands out abstinence pledge cards to all of the students, who in turn sign them under the pressure of the organization’s leadership. A bit over done? Certainly, but subtlety is not one of MTV’s strong suits. Things start to go awry when our main character starts to question the abstinence-only stance of the teacher, who refuses even to speak of safe sex. Eventually, people start deviating from their pledges, and the school is forced to look at why. I’m not sure whether or not the girl ever did “go all the way,” simply because I couldn’t handle watching the movie long enough to see the end.
I actually found myself in a situation similar to that of the main character. In my senior year of high school, I took the obligatory health class, which included sex education.
It was the first year that the school board implemented an “abstinence-only” curriculum, and my liberal public high school was in a tizzy. Teachers and students alike saw this as governmental fat-cats pushing their conservative agenda on the youth of the nation without any choice. Apparently, high schoolers depend on the public education system to teach them how to put on a condom.
The section on sex was a joke; the text book each student received was filled with slogans and cartoons that would make ’50s television producers giggle, and we had a speaker from a crisis center that got quite a kick out of showing us slides of genital herpes in its many, many stages. However, my teacher did allow students to bring in information on safe sex, as long as the teacher himself didn’t pass it out. One of my fellow students took up my teacher’s provocation and went to Planned Parenthood to pick up booklets for everyone.
It turned out to be just as hilarious as the abstinence book: besides instruction on how to turn Saran-Wrap into a dental dam, there was a flipbook cartoon of how to put on a condom.
Overall, the section was a blast to sit and observe (except for the live action video on how to do testicular self-examinations–that was disgusting). I doubt that it affected many of the kids, most of whom were still looking forward to their learner’s permit, but I gained a new appreciation for the idea of abstinence.
There are two things to be learned from these two events in my life. The first is that abstinence education is not something to be feared. Some see it as an exercise in futility because they think kids will have sex, no matter what is taught, so we might as well teach them how to do it right. With that sort of attitude, kids will have sex, and think it is the normal thing to do because the teachers taught them how to do it. I would much rather have the schools teach a good idea like abstinence badly than to simply give into their pupils’ raging hormones and work only on damage control.
The second thing to be learned from this is that MTV has no authority to try and educate the youth on anything except for the likes and dislikes of O-Town. The day I take advice on sex from Iann Robinson is the day I move to Montana and become a mountain man. Instead, bring back Anna Quinn or J.J. Jackson as the sole on-air personality for the station, and play some videos for once!
Drew Ewing is a sophomore studying aerospace engineering.
