That looks like something that came out of a religious school teaching abstinence. I truly hope so at least.

It has little touch with reality for about 80% of the teens I grew up with.

This pretty much sums up my sex life:

http://imgur.com/gallery/cIrNx

I understand the concept but I'm not sure that's the best way to promote your message.

Does anyone know if it's real? Does shit like that actually happen in schools?

I must admit that the column title was kinda scary...

as to if it happens in schools... there are 40,000+ high schools in the US. Seems like the odds would be pretty good of it happening once at least. Even back in the day, I had teachers force change ideas of mine that they didn't like. In retrospect, that is a combination of them wanting me to think a certain way, and them wanting me to realize that you must choose when to say some things, versus others. When you are a punk, you just aren't subtle.

I like the punk.

I hate the school. A neighborhood of parents who'd let the schoolmarms present assignments like those to their own dear children deserves the emotional dislocation depicted in his drawings.

Jesus.

Y'know, kids, back in my day, we didn't have goth and Ipods. We had to take drugs.

And let's be clear: They're not teaching abstinence, they're teaching "absitnence". The incompetent emotional manipulation means more to these educators than do ABCs.

Love to find out where it came from. Jokes like this bubble up on the internet all the time, so we'll probably never know. But if it turned out to be a public school, I'd mail the school board a fart in a jar.

And for the record — A teenager who responds to such witless entreaties for abstinence with the depiction of violent suicide is being all kinds of "subtle"!

Eric, I liked your cartoon a lot better!

Y'know, kids, back in my day, we didn't have goth and Ipods. We had to take drugs.

Right? We were "hippies" or "freaks" or "potheads" or "jocks" or "gearheads". And we pretty much all got high, at least with alcohol, and pot. Pot was my drug of choice, pretty much, although I liked blotter acid too, before people started making it with strychnine. I gave that shit up altogether the first time I got sick. Sex was better back then, too, because the boys didn't have to worry about being busted and labeled as a sex offender, like they do now. How sad is that? And there wasn't the threat of AIDS back then. And birth control was easily available at Planned Parenthood. And we all pretty much liked each other back in the day. Women's Lib hadn't progressed to the psuedo-feminism it pretends to be now.

When I was a teen, my abstinence education came from Sunday School, and it worked . . . surely the fact that I was an antisocial nerd had nothing to do with it.

God, Darlin', you make it sound so good. There were bad parts, too... Nixon, network TV on Trinitrons, the Captain and Tennille

It turns out that man and woman have sex for the same reason. Lust....

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/20059548/

Nixon, network TV on Trinitrons, the Captain and Tennille

Yeah, but those have pretty much gone the way of the dodo, and sex is still here to stay, baby! Want some? o.O

OK, but no 69... Some disco trends died for a good reason... We grew up and learned to concentrate.

The best pair of shoes I ever had looked like this. No, really. 8½, bay-beeee. Exactly that color, and exactly that cub-foot tuck over the toes. In the time of Carter, this did not look fey. You could wear them to school, on dates, out to picnics, whatever. Got a year 'n two-thirds out of 'em.

Bigger. Seriously, look at that shit.

I wonder what it would be like to be a young teenager today. I saw my first porno ("Kate and the Indians") in college, about 7 years after I started having sex. (5 years after sex with other people.) Before that it was pretty much Playboys and the occasional Penthouse. The kids today are exposed to so much via the internet that they've seen everything under the sun before they've gotten to first base.

As a parent, how do you tell your child that double penetration and bukakes are not a normal state of affairs?

"And we all pretty much liked each other back in the day. Women's Lib hadn't progressed to the psuedo-feminism it pretends to be now."

Flynne, you're making me all misty-eyed. I remember those days fondly, myself. Mutual affection and respect did make a difference, didn't it? Oh well, easy come, easy go, I guess ... Too bad for the young-uns. It's cold and vicious out there now.

> As a parent, how do you tell your
> child that double penetration and
> bukakes are not a normal state of
> affairs?

Can't speak as a parent, but I'd guess that you'd have to do it as a parent. There are lot of things that parents prepare their kids for that they (the parents) won't actually be present to supervise. You won't watch your boy write his first check to the gas company or the Dept. of Water and Power, either, but I'd wager he won't be late with his payment. I'm guessing that whatever your private time is like, when you're in front of your little boy, you respond to your wife (and other women) in a manner that's respectful to her moods and her own responses. Those little fuckers are always watching.

But yes, the internet deeply en-weirdens things. It's kind of the way I feel about the collapse of prudery in post-war America generally: On the whole it's a good thing, but the scales are tottering wildly. Especially when you consider divorce... AND Aids... AND all those abortions... etc etc etc.

PS- West LA is incredibly beautiful this afternoon. Nyah; verily, nyah.

Heh. Spanks for the weather report, Crid, we had a tornado warning here in southern CT. It rained like the dickens but today it's sunny and warm (for October).

I had a pair of earth shoes too. A little darker brown than yours, size 7, baybeee! I loved 'em, wore 'em everyfreakinwhere. Even with dresses. Can't find 'em now.

I try to keep the lines of communication open with my girls. They know they can ask me anything and I won't bullshit them; they can talk to me about most anything they want. I try to keep this a judgement-free zone; they do respond to that. #1 has a boyfriend now, and I said to her "when you're ready to see the dr about birth control, let me know" and she said, "thanks, but we're not at that stage yet", so that's a good thing. She's not stupid by any means. (We just got her SAT scores back, and she's ranked 70 in a class of 251, I can deal with that)

I was sent to my church's sex ed class because my mother was too chickenshit to talk about it with me. Oh, except for when she'd tell me how disgusting my pervert of a father was for sticking his dick in another woman. Now THAT will give you a healthy perspective about sex being a normal, natural, healthy and loving thing.

The guy who taught the class was about 65 years old (to 6th graders this made him as dry and old as Methusela), one of the church elders. We were all too petrified to ask questions, for fear that he would report us to the pastor or our parents for having any thoughts about sex whatsoever. Needless to say, I got nothing out of that class...

I could be wrong, but personally I think kids seldom have sex because of peer pressure, they have sex mainly because it's *fun fun fun*. Same reasons we do. This always struck me as a glaring oversight in abstinence preaching - if you're so afraid to even admit that it's fun that you instead pretend that kids are merely 'being pressured into doing something they don't actually want to do', your program is *going* to be ineffective because it's based on completely flawed assumptions of motivation. And kids are not *that* stupid, I guarantee they'll figure out for themselves that sex is fun. If you really want them to abstain, you have to explain to them why they should do so *in spite of* it being fun ... not by thinking you can trick them into confusing fun and lust for peer pressure.

> I try to keep the lines of
> communication open with my girls.

I dunno. (REALLY don't, I'm not a father.) But I get the sense that parents teach kids not to do sexual misconduct through all the other lines of communication, not just by offering sex information. Maybe parents should be chummy and casual about everything, or maybe it doesn't matter. Again, Eric's not specifically teaching the boy to pay his water bills when he grows up, he's teaching him to take care of all his financial responsibilities promptly.

Sex is the big one, y'know. Paglia says "Sex is the natural in man." Figuring it out on our own is a big part of being alive. Parents who really. really bungle this probably have a few other large deficits on the ledger....

Well, the girls know about sex, obviously, and they know that's how they got here. They also know of girls their ages (13 and 16) who have had sex, and gotten pregnant, I mean, they don't live in isolation. But they also have seen for themselves that it's not fun being a mom when someone is still a child herself. I told them both, if a boy says to you, "If you love me you will..." just say to them "If you love me you'll wait until I'm ready" and if they don't want to wait, then they don't really love you, they just want to get off, and if they go do it with someone else, you're better off. I've told them that sex is a great thing that two people who love each other share with each other, and that as they get older they'll figure it out, but in the meantime, if they think they're going to be sexually active, they need to use birth control. The younger one is still grossed out by the whole idea, so I'm not so worried about her, and the older one seems to be smart enough to know what she needs to do. I know I can't control them all the time every time, but I can be here for them when they need me. That's certainly a part of what parenting is about, isn't it? A friend of mine used to say "If I can get them to the age of 18 without them getting arrested or pregnant, I've done my job" but there's so much more to the job than that. Another friend of mine says that we're just winging it about 90% of the time anyway.

My parents bungled "the talk" pretty badly, and it all worked out OK. For my dad, sex conversations with me did not happen. Ever. With mom, she thought she was giving me all the info I needed when I left for college and she said, "Don't come home with any luggage."

When I was 10, I borrowed a VHS on puberty from the library. It was a cartoon designed to teach kids the basics of human reproduction. I watched it in the dark, under the covers, terrified that Mom would bust me watching my "sex tape." And she did. Flipped out like she'd caught her 10-year-old watching a porn flick.

The trouble with both sex and abstinence is that either one can make you delusional. That is, either one can make you think you're in love when you're not. Which is why you can't use the agony of abstinence as an excuse to get married at, say, 18 or even 20.

I suppose another thing to remember is: Don't expect either one to make you happy any time soon. Your S.O. may or may not break up with you if you have sex, but abstinence does not guarantee that you will find a suitable marriage partner before age 30. If that.

And, chances are even a fundamentalist widower in his 40s is not eager to marry a 30-year-old virgin, for obvious reasons.

As Wendy Kaminer once wrote, the unspoken message is: Abstain until marriage or death, whichever comes first. Who would take that seriously?