They told me I was everything. ‘Tis a lie, I am not ague-proof. – William Shakespeare, King Lear (IV, vi)
Adults in Western countries often say that teenagers think they’re immortal and invulnerable, and to some degree that’s true. Really, how could it be otherwise? They have the energy and optimism of youth, their bodies are generally as healthy as they’re ever going to be and very few of them have seen a peer die. And unless they grew up in extreme poverty, they generally haven’t been ground down by the world and developed the permanent mental stoop that most adults have, the attitude Thoreau referred to as “quiet desperation”. Young men are generally far more eager to go to war than are experienced campaigners, and young women far more likely to take the sort of risks that make their mothers cringe. Add to that raging hormones and inexperience, and it’s not remotely surprising that teens have the highest STD rate of any demographic group (35% of all cases in the US), or that a small percentage of teenage girls end up pregnant when they absolutely did not want to be.
But does it have to be that way? Certainly their inexperience is a major factor; people of any age who aren’t used to something (sex included) are more apt to make mistakes than those with plenty of experience. And the fact that cognitive skills continue to develop until the mid-20s probably has something to do with it as well. But if you look at the first paragraph above again, you’ll see that several of those factors can be summed up in a single word: ignorance. The most important reason adolescents get in trouble over sex is that they don’t really understand that bad things can happen to them, nor how to reduce the chances of negative outcomes. And the primary reason they don’t understand is that adults not only refuse to explain it to them, but in many cases actively block access to sex information…or even worse, actually lie to adolescents about it. And the most egregious of these lies, such as “sex is better if neither of you knows what you’re doing on your wedding night”, are so patently false that they cause teens to doubt everything else adults are telling them – including the things that are true.
The teenage birth rate in the US is 34.3 births per 1000 girls aged 15 to 19, down from a 20th century high of 61.8 in 1991. Proponents of “abstinence-only sex education” claim the credit for this, since that fad started in 1992 and became popular in 1996. But when one considers that the present figure is still far greater than that of any other industrialized nation, in fact fully eight times the rate in the Netherlands, any rational person is forced to conclude that maybe keeping kids ignorant of sex isn’t exactly the best way of preparing them for life, and that perhaps we should worry more about protecting their health and futures than their imaginary “innocence”. This becomes even more clear when one reads interviews with teen mothers in which they express shocking ignorance of the mechanics of menstruation and conception, and often state that they believed they were somehow immune to pregnancy. The same goes for STDs; American teenagers seem completely unaware that they’re in the highest-risk group for infection and proceed as though their “love” will create a magical shield protecting them from all disease (and possibly pregnancy as well).
The reason for the drop, if you ask me, isn’t the increasing tendency of adults to try to “protect” teens by keeping them in ignorance, but rather the increasing inability of adults to keep them in ignorance, thanks to the internet (which has grown as teen pregnancy rates have dropped). But it’s still not remotely enough; even if proper sex-education programs were implemented from coast to coast tomorrow our STD and teen pregnancy rates still probably wouldn’t drop to those of Europe due to our deep cultural weirdness about sex; we are, after all, the only Western country in which sex work is so thoroughly equated with pathology and criminality. In other words, mere sex education isn’t enough; learning about biological mechanisms and potential problems is only half the picture. Few of the people reading this were as thoroughly supervised and spied on as modern teens are, and governments in a number of countries (especially the US) want to increase that so as to keep them from discovering any information about sex other than what “authorities” choose to provide. Not that this can ever be effective, any more than bans on prostitution or drugs are. But just as drug criminalization leads inevitably to dangerously impure substances, and just as criminalization of prostitution allows sleazy characters to thrive on both the service and customer sides of the business, so does suppression of information reduce the quality of that which gets past the ban. A recent op-ed by Michelle Griffin in the Brisbane Times proposes that we do the exact opposite and actually encourage teens to read porn (the operative word here being “read”); since they’re thinking about it anyway and can see crappy internet porn at the click of a mouse, access to non-clinical descriptions of sexuality will help to educate them just as Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden helped to educate Griffin (and me), discovering Dad’s stash of Playboy educated many young boys and watching farm animals educated kids for the past 10,000 years.
I have absolutely no hope that this sensible attitude will catch on in the United States any time soon; if the manufactured “controversy” over birth control and abortion is any indication, this country is moving backward rather than forward. But we’d best do something soon; though HIV may soon be preventable, gonorrhea is rapidly becoming immune to all antibiotics, and a third of all infections are in teenagers. People used to say (and some still apparently believe) that rape was worse than death; in a world of incurable venereal diseases, American parents will soon have to decide if preserving their kids’ so-called “innocence” is more important than preserving their lives.
One Year Ago Today
“Godwin’s Law” discusses the ways people use and misuse the familiar internet principle, and argues that sometimes Nazi analogies are entirely appropriate.
Another aspect of this is the debate over the HPV vaccine. A lot of parents don’t like it because it implies (Gasp!) that their daughter — and increasingly son — may one day be sexually active. Better not to tell them and risk cervical cancer, I guess.
I believe the studies of abstinence-only education have show that kids are no less likely to have sex but are much less likely to use protection. And this means that the anti-sex education is spreading disease. Take the frightening prospect of resistant gonorrhea. Such a strain may not have arisen and certainly wouldn’t spread without the ignorant coupling of young, gullible people raised under the idea that ignorance and prayer are a better defense than condoms. The thing about venereal diseases is that they are only spread by the most intimate contact. Theoretically, it should be possible to isolate and destroy them. But this push for deliberate ignorance stands in the way of that.
Maggie, do you think there is a bit of a vindictiveness behind this? Venereal disease was long seen as a divine punishment for promiscuity. Do you think that the ignorance being pushed is, in some measure, motivated by the idea that sleeping around should be punished by disease and unwanted pregnancy?
(PS – Nice Star Trek reference in the title. I hope.)
The penultimate link above leads to “An Ounce of Prevention”, wherein I discuss (among other things) wrongheaded parental opposition to the HPV vaccine. And yes, I definitely think that the idea of disease (and pregnancy) as punishment for “sin” has a lot to do with it.
As for the title: thank you, and you betcha. Now I just have to figure out what I could put in a column entitled “The Doomsday Machine”. 😉
Just about every episode up to Corbomite Maneuver seems ideally suited to the subject. The rest of season 1 works nicely except The Galileo Seven, Squire of Gothos, The Return of the Archons, A Taste of Armageddon… And I’m sure you could work something out for those, too.
Fully understandable for trends in the Southeastern US. where unwed black teenage girls have always gotten knocked up left and right and since integration it has moved into the white population as well. As for the down turn that is due to the large percentage of abortions among black girls. Racist statement, yes, but also true, like it or not.
Hi Maggie,
When I commented that my ex had claimed an “accidental pregnancy” at 16 (not to me) a Czech lady friend of mine said to me “there is no such thing as an accidental pregnancy. Women know how they get pregnant. They know when they can get pregnant. When a woman gets pregnant is it almost ALWAYS planned by her. You men are so stupid. You will believe anything a pretty girl tells you.”
Of course. In the case of my ex she was correct. Jennifer confessed that her pregnancy at 16 was deliberate FIFTEEN YEARS into our marriage. She said it had been “eating her up inside” that she had lied to EVERYONE about that. My fav#1 was quite open that her pregnancy at 17 was deliberate to get the boy to marry her. Two from two.
I went and checked that statement with about 5 or 6 other eastern European women. They ALL said the same thing. Pregnancy is almost NEVER accidental. The girl or woman knows she is running that chance and often quite deliberately to trap the boy into marriage by shaming him and playing victim.
In my own case my mum promised to take a sharp knife to a certain piece of my anatomy if I got a girl pregnant before marriage. A fair deterrent I can tell you.
What we do NOT tell our boys is that LOTS of girls and women deliberately get pregnant to trap the boy or man into marriage and child support. They talk about it quite openly. My fav#1 also told me cuckolding is accepted by women. They ALL know it happens and they never denounce a woman they know to have cuckolded a man. This is so pervasive that on blogs women will openly laugh at a man who has been successfully cuckolded.
We do not tell our boys that stealing sperm from used condoms is so common that Daily Mail feminist writer Liz Jones admitted to stealing sperm TWICE and yet still keeps her job as a feminist writer. This compared to two male sports commentators who questioned a lines womans call in a PRIVATE conversation being fired from sky sports. Like sports commentators never question the decisions of MALE referees openly when broadcasting.
A little honesty around sex and “unwanted babies” towards young boys is well and truly over due.
The other thing you see nowadays is young women are rewarded for having babies if there is no man about. No less than Adele, the most successful female british artist of recent times, said words to the effect that for most teen girls she knew the plan was to “get pregnant and sponge off the government”.
Every society that disenfranchises fathers collapses. Just look at Russia and the Ukraine to see how bad its going to be in the west soon enough. STDs will be the least of womens problems when there are packs of roaming disenfranchised young men. As one commentator put it. “In the future the biggest risk to public safety might very well be young disenfranchised males.”
They will kill or injure women far quicker and more seriously than any STDs will. For some reason women do not know this is what is coming and do not want to know and do not want to do anything about it.
Pregnancy is not generally accidental among intelligent, educated women, but it definitely can be among stupid teenage girls. I have met a few who believed the stupidest rot imaginable, like the idea that one can ONLY get pregnant during or near menstruation.
And the idea that cuckolding is generally accepted by women is pure nonsense. There are some groups and subcultures that accept it, and others that don’t; I’ve never and would never belong to one that did because I consider it both reprehensible and self-destructive. You are mistaking a desire not to get involved in a personal matter for “acceptance”; they’re not at all the same thing. Telling a person of either sex that his/her spouse is cheating never goes over well; most people still “kill the messenger”. But that doesn’t mean those who said nothing “accepted” the behavior; it simply means there was nothing they could do about it.
Hi Maggie,
“And the idea that cuckolding is generally accepted by women is pure nonsense.”
Sorry. I have to disagree with you. If you go onto forums like the relationships blog of the sydney morning herald with Sam Brett you will find that the VAST MAJORITY of women there openly condone cuckolding. They even laugh about it and make fun of men who are bringing wrongful child support payment cases in Australia. That being paternity fraud. They openly laugh at men whos children are kidnapped and houses stolen. Indeed, if the man puts up a fight they will openly HATE on him. You can go over and ask for yourself the womens opinions of peterSMH which is me. They will tell you openly how much they hate me for putting the truth into the SMH blogs. Less than half the posts I wrote over an 18 month period made it while lies about me by women were allowed to stand breaking their own house rules.
To put that in perspective. The sydney morning herald is the “newspaper of the year” and Sam Brett is supposed to be a “relationships expert”. Yet paternity fraud is laughed at and the man “got what he deserved”.
Indeed, in my case of 5% vs 95% and my children being kidnapped and abused there is only ONE WOMAN in all of Australia assisting me. Funnily enough she is grand mother whos daughter will not let her see her grandchild. She has been up before the same criminal magistrate as me, David Dunkley. So she knows EXACTLY how badly I have been treated.
Tom Lykis did an entire one hour show on cuckolding. Woman after woman called in and told how she cuckolded a man. NOT ONE of them was apologetic about it. The young men calling in were ropeable. I read one report claiming that the daughter of martha stewart claimed martha told her cuckolding was ok as a girl. I do not know if that is true. I just read a report about it. It is supposed to be in the girls autobiography or something.
One estimate puts 2 MILLION men in the US paying child support for children they KNOW are not theirs. You will not find ONE woman publicly denouncing the women who commit the crime of paternity fraud. You can’t find ONE web site run by a woman doing that. In Ireland paternity tests are meaningless as even if it shows you are not the father the court will order child support against the husband. Women support this practice.
In Australia a woman who committed PERJURY to commit paternity fraud was given a 200 YEAR repayment scheme. Other WOMEN did not object to this lunacy.
Here are the facts.
1. 100% of females in the Australian and Irish Parliaments openly condone the crimes of perjury, kidnapping, extortion, theft and child abuse.
2. 100% of the 250 women of the International womens club of dublin (nearly ALL of whom have millionaire husbands) openly condone the crimes of perjury, kidnapping, extortion, theft and child abuse.
3. 99% of the 300 women on the Irish free man group which has the BASE ASSUMPTION that all people are due the protection of common law openly condone the crimes of perjury, kidnapping, extortion, theft and child abuse. So apparently the base assumption does not apply to men.
Based on these facts I can, with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY, make the claim that 99.9% of western women openly condone the crimes of perjury, kidnapping, extortion, theft and child abuse. (I do have a degree in math. I do know how stats works)
Now, if they condone these crimes, you think they do not condone cuckolding?
By the way? 99% of western MEN also openly condone the crimes of perjury, kidnapping, extortion, theft and child abuse when committed by a woman…the whole “white knight” thing. But they are a little less sure on cuckolding.
These are facts Maggie. They have been proven. The evidence has been made public. This is how bad it is for fathers. We are even more poorly treated than sex workers. It is high time women started being honest to those men who are good men. Maybe sex workers can set the new moral standard for western women. Maybe sex workers can look at those facts and wonder if there might be some allies among the men who have been criminally abused just like sex workers.
You do realize that
A) people don’t always mean what they say in public;
B) mob psychology does not determine private behavior; and
C) people who comment on newspaper websites aren’t anything like a true cross-section of the population.
Right?
Hi Maggie,
A. Correct. B. Correct. C. Correct.
However, the fact remains “silence is consent”. When a crime is committed if a witness to the crime remains silent then they are consenting to the crime, and that means condoning it.
The public behaviour of 99.9% of women and 99% of men in Australia (and most english speaking countries) is to condone criminal acts by women against men. It is an indisputable fact.
Funnily enough, you are telling me, and I believe you, that 99% of women AND MEN condone criminal acts against sex workers. Please correct me if I am wrong on that point. I do not have sample sets from which to draw reliable stats. But as you point out. Sex workers are being criminally victimised and MOST other people who witness these criminal acts remain silent, right? That is what you are saying isn’t it?
I have never been witness to a crime committed against a sex worker. So obviously I have not condoned such criminal acts. But I am seeing evidence of this in your blog.
So I proposed that since we have the same enemy, women who like to make sure they dominate and control men via the criminal element called “the state” we might co-operate. My offer to co-operate was not accepted. So I made another offer.
My understanding of the situation of sex workers from reading your blog is that they are very similarly criminally victimised to fathers by the state. Again. Please correct me if I am wrong. MRAs are too pussified to take on the state. Maybe sex workers are fed up enough to take on the state. Yours is the only blog I have read were the writer really seems to get the way in which the mechanism of oppression of the state works.
The bit you do not seem to get yet is that you can simple turn your back on the state and operate outside its jurisdiction. The Armish do which is proof that it can be done. But you, more than MRAs, might be interested to actually learn about this and your fellow sex workers might be interested in doing this.
After all. With all the “good help” and “protection” the state has been providing you, you wouldn’t want to leave, would you?
You must have missed “Livng in Truth“.
“Liz Jones”
http://twitter.com/#!/lizjonessomalia
Best parody EVER!
Pete – my wife had two kids with me – both of them on the pill. 😛
WITNESS THE POWER !! 😀
As far as dienfranchising young men – just be patient. You’ll soon see that the Western governments can no longer continue in the “Daddy” role. What I’m more concerned about is this trend in “gender selection” which will result in many assbackward nations inflating their male populations and decreasing their female numbers. This has a very destabilizing effect on the global scale.
What do you mean ‘will’ result? I saw a news story recently about how, in India, it’s already happened. Girls are being aborted because their families can’t afford the dowries to get them married. But the men are already beginning to notice that it’s causing their society problems, namely there’s no one around to have children!
Krulac,
sounds like your wife lied to you and you are dumb enough to believe it.
Women RARELY get pregnant if they are taking the pill properly. It is far more likely she pandered to you ego and you swallowed it.
LOTS of women tell men they are taking the pill and dont in order to get pregnant. Just ask Tom Lykis.
Krulac,
“just be patient”.
In Australia about 80 men a week kill themselves one way or another due to the criminal abuse of women wielding the criminal family courts. About once a month a small child is murdered.
You can be patient all you like Krulac. I know you do not care about these men and these children.
A man found my CAF site. He is distraught. His position is that he was orphaned as a small by in south amercia. He managed to make his way to australia, I think on some form of refugee program. Starting with NOTHING he managed to learn english get a menial job start at the bottom rung and make his way in the world.
He worked hard for many years to prepare for his dream. To have a house and to have a wife and children and to provide for his children as a loving father. He wanted to give his children the chances he never had. He falls in love and marries and has a little girl.
Suddenly wify turns into BITCH FROM HELL. She is slapping the little baby around and injuring it. He tries to stop her abusing his child. She leaves with the child and shacks up with thug boyfriend. Child protection services do nothing. The child is battered and bruised. He even goes to his BROTHER IN LAW…..and his BROTHER IN LAW goes with him to the police over and over again. They go to the parliament over and over again trying to get someone to get an order to take the child from the criminal child abusing mother.
The little girl, three years old, is BEATEN TO DEATH.
The man is DEVASTATED. All he wanted in the world was raise his little girl. That was ALL HE ASKED FOR. The chance to raise his little girl.
So Krulac. If you want to? I will give you this mans number. You can call him up and tell HIM to “be patient”. And you can let me know how you get on with that.
Little children are being MURDERED. And you say “be patient”.
Sorry. I am all out of “patience” with child molesters, child rapists and child murders.
Obviously you are not.
Sorry to be off topic Maggie. But men like Krulac who do NOTHING while children are being raped, bashed and killed really get my back up. I am disgusted by such men. And they do not like it when I say so.
What an excellent post.
It has always bothered me how irrational some amateurs can be about taking reasonable precautions; almost like they take it personally, “Do you think I am a slut or something?!!!!111!!1”
Fortunately, an interest in medical matters from a young age saved me from the delusion of being invincible.
Thanks, Gumdeo! It never ceases to amaze me how people – kids and adults both – think of precautions as a sign of whoredom. You might as well say “I don’t need to wear a coat, I’m just playing in the snow for fun.” Incredible.
As long as the idea that “sex is bad, love is good” is promoted, this is going to continue. To take contraceptives or to bring a condom is an open admission, if only to yourself, that sex is “on the table”. It becomes much harder to tell yourself that you were overcome by love and the madness of the moment if one or both of you took cold blooded precautions before hand.
Hi Maggie, thanks for this piece as it really adds to the dialogue – or rather the dialogue that needs to be anyway. I actually took an approach to it this morning myself in “We Are the Outlaws That We Hunt”. Again thanks for your insight, wit and passion.
You’re very welcome, David. 🙂
Excellent post, Maggie. Right here in Provincetown MA. there’s a raging debate about teaching elementary school kids how to use condoms. This is important because a news report about Philadelphia last night explored the fact that increasing numbers of 10 year olds are having sex. I also read that in one demographic, that of poor black teen girls, that they were less likely to use condoms if their boyfriends gave them their spending money or had a car. In this case knowledge isn’t enough, the girls must be motivated as well, which is a more difficult task.
I don’t doubt that ten-year-olds sometimes do sexual things (I did). I’m not sure that I believe that there is a growing trend of full-on sexual intercourse among ten-year-olds, though again I don’t doubt that it happens sometimes. I’m willing to have my mind changed if somebody has a link to solid evidence.
Thinking it over, I have to say that I don’t have a problem with ten-year-olds doing sexual things up to and including intercourse, as long as that is what the ten-year-olds involved want to do, and as long as they take reasonable precautions. Seeing as there are ten year old rock-climbers, ten year old skin divers, ten year old stunt performers, and so on, I don’t see why somebody that age couldn’t take reasonable precautions.
Even with that, though, I have to admit that the thought of sex at that age squicks me a bit.
Antibiotic resistance is a major problem for gonorrhoea and TB, due to the emergence of drug-resistant strains and bad prescribing practices. Big Pharma isn’t much interested in developing new antibiotics because they are given for short courses, and rapidly become ineffective. Big Pharma prefers to research drugs for long-term conditions, where the profit is. And if the conditions for their drugs don’t exist, well just invent them.
In the UK there is now sex and relationship education in schools (and programmes on TV); a move to teach abstinence has been, so far, blocked. SRE was unnecessary in my time, because, as Philip Larkin explained, sex didn’t exist then either.
I understand your cynicism toward big pharma … but, they don’t have to invent a specific antibiotic for gono – their profits aren’t going to rely on that because usually these antibiotics are used to cure a range of diseases – not just specific ones.
Fact is – big pharmas ARE researching new “super-anti-biotics” and some have already been developed.
Don’t expect to see them until either (a) the situation actually becomes critical or (b) the public perceives the situation to be critical. At either of those points – you’ll see new antibiotics come on the market. I’m convinced the reason they aren’t there now is because profits will be so much higher when a critical need, or the perception of one exists.
Here’s one of the issues – Drug patents in the US last for 20 years. However, most companies want to patent the drug while it’s in development (makes sense since it’s intellectual property that could be stolen otherwise right?).
So if it takes 10 years to get that drug through clinical trials and the FDA approval process – they may only have 10 years left on the patent. Drug companies want that to be an awesomely profitable ten years.
This has caused drug companies to come up with unique strategies in releasing these drugs in order to maximize profits. Honestly – no one was talking about “resistant” gono in 1962 – so there was no market for a super antibiotic then. Doubtful one would have been released even it had been “invented” at the time.
I think that US Drug patent law should be revised so that Drug Companies can enjoy their patents for 18 years AFTER they release their drugs. People who are against profits for drug companies don’t like this idea though.
Maggie,
On the antibiotic resistant gonorrhea …
Well, evolution applies to ALL living organisms and, since organisms like gono reproduce so quickly – the mutations come along quickly – so it’s not just a problem with gono – but with basically all infections like this.
Last I heard – Rib-X Pharma was testing their super-antibiotic on gono – don’t remember the name of it but the trials were supposed to begin last year I believe. They supposedly have the “Death Star” of all new-generation antibiotics.
There are also people working on a vaccine. This would be the ideal route but I think … that it’s going to be a hard row to hoe because moralists don’t want to eliminate the scourge of God known as STD’s. It’s okay to CURE them, after the victim has suffered from their consequences and is duly remorseful for their bad conduct leading to contracting an STD – but it’s not okay to remove one of the arrows used to wreak vengeance on “sinners” from God’s quiver.
Having said that, Maggie – my cousin happens to be a nationally known PhD who works in a peculiar field of alzheimer’s research. I get a chance to talk to him about one every two years and the discussions are fascinating. I am convinced, that just as the latter half of the 20th Century produced the Information Technology Revolution … we are now on the precipice of the Medical Technology Revolution. It’s already going on and it’s soon going to explode with new developments. STD’s … they don’t stand a chance. 😉
Thank you for this, Maggie. Teenagers, no matter how smart, stupid, or average, cannot be expected to make good decisions using bad information. Even pure logic only ensures that one does not draw false conclusion based on valid premises. Notions that “whores are dirty and diseased” don’t help the non-whore who assumes that, since she’s not a whore, she won’t get a disease.
I would be remiss if I did not point out that this teen brain stuff is more controversial than many care to let on. There are people calling to raise the driving age and the voting age to twenty-five and such, based on the belief that teenagers have be “scientifically proven” to be incapable of making good decisions. But what’s actually been shown is that adolescent brains look different in MRIs than adult brains. What these differences mean, and how much is due to age and how much to experiences, is hard to say. Difference X is clearly there, and “everybody knows” that teenagers are reckless, so maybe Difference X leads to reckless behavior. But of course Difference X might just as well be caused by reckless behavior, or it might instead have something to do with the fact that teens are much less likely to die from a drug overdose than a middle-ager, or to the decreasing ability to learn languages.
Ray Kurzweil predicts that a computer equal in processing power to the human brain will be available on the market by 2030, and that we will have enough understanding of the human brain to model one at about the same time. But now is not 2030, and today we do not have the sort of understanding of the human brain that would justify changing laws, especially laws about what rights what people should have.
Not aimed at Maggie, she didn’t advocate any such thing, it’s just something which needed to be said.
I’ve been a school nurse in a small town in the Bible Belt, where parents can choose to tell their kids nothing and prevent the school from saying anything. And yes, kids show appalling ignorance when it comes to sex. Most young girls badly want to please the boy that they are in love with, most young boys just want it badly.
They *want* to believe the misinformation. I’ve been told quite seriously that you CANNOT get pregnant the first time. Or you cannot get pregnant if you do it standing up…Because of gravity, see? Or if you do it in a pool–the chlorine kills the sperm!
And the abstinence kids? The worst–they’ve been told it’s evil and that they must remain pure…Abstinence vs. Teen Hormones? Knockout in one.
So what happens? Oh, they get ‘carried away’! They just…couldn’t ….help it…! Or plan for it, or buy condoms in advance, or anything else. Because getting carried away is less of a sin than actually planning to fornicate. Abstinence is pro-disease, pro-teen pregnancy and pro-poverty. What it isn’t is pro-abstinence.
I think that “carried away” thing is also the reason adult amateurs often skip protection; weak-headedness is somehow seen as more virtuous than “cold-blooded” intelligent preparations. The former just means a woman was “emotional”, while the latter means she’s a “slut”…or in the eyes of the police, a whore.
I’ll be glad when we have a male pill. The double standard will then work to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Because a boy, you see, can take a pill everyday and it doesn’t make him a slut, it makes him a stud.
I personally hate the “sluts and studs” double standard, but as long as we’ve got it, it means that one sex can be proactive, if the technology is there. I hope it gets there soon.