Arkansas Blog

Will the religious community never learn that scarlet doors, pledges and threats and chastity belts don't work. Enlightenment, education and open minds do work the best.

The findings make perfect sense. Don't you know faith in the Lord prevents pregnancy and STDs ?

The problem here is these kids are pledging with one part of their body while the other part of the body controls what they do. Even at my advanced age, I get a whole lot of advice from down in my pants. When I was young, I couldn't hear anything over the all the trouser chatter that was going on.

I'd be thinking bout Jesus and all of a sudden ole trouser voice would pop up...LOOK AT THAT ONE! LOOK AT THAT BUTT! OHMAGOD THE BOOBS ON THAT ONE. LONG STRAIGHT IRONED HAIR! Man, I wish all women could experience an out of control erection for just 1 hour of their lives, then they'd understand why men are like they are.

I remember in the 6th grade I got up to sharpen my pencil and something about pushing my pencil into the that Apsco Giant pencil sharpener at the front of the room caused me to think about Cheryl Cook and how fine she looked that day. And boing......I was trapped like a rat by my own body. There was no way I could turn around and march back to my seat. So I cranked and cranked and had nearly sharpened my new pencil down to a nub when my erection finally subsided. I thought about Ma, my grandmother, old ladies at church and hubcaps......hubcaps finally did it and down he went, so to speak.

Looking back on all that, it's a wonder girls and women aren't attacked left and right...I don't know how I ever controlled myself. And the next year window pane hose came into style and most of my blood was gathered below my belt for the next couple of years.

God may be powerful, but teenage hormones are more powerful. That's why the minute our oldest girl quit looking like a little boy...we started giving her a pill to take with her morning Coco Pebbles. Better safe than sorry. Give em a pill and THEN tell them to put their trust in Jesus...that works too.

I question this survey for a less obvious reason.

"more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage"?

I guess 95% IS more than half of youths but other than possibly a Duggar, no one is a virgin at marriage if they get hitched at 10 or at 100. (Except maybe "Death" and we need to do the math on his oldest daughter)

I know the article is about the lack of difference in numbers of chastity pledgers and the general population but I was a late bloomer as a teen back in the 70's and even I was "active" before marriage. After the teen years I was very active but even if married as a teen I would have had "carnal knowledge".

The only people I knew getting married as teens were not only active but PREGNANT!

DBI, as usual, your exposition is right on.

I have a brother-in-law who made a big deal out of his daughter's purity ring (he is a youth minister of sorts). Well, she got pregnant during the purity time, and he then insisted on a Huckster style covenant marriage. Three children later, she is trying to divorce an abusive husband and the covenant marriage is throwing up roadblocks all over the place.

I don't know the answer, but I do know that no amount of ceremonial hullabaloo will compensate for the natural urges of youth. You can be forgiven for almost anything, but you do have to live with the consequences. Education is the only way to illuminate those consequences and that doesn't always work.

For those who grew up during the time when we were admonished not to have premarital sex because it might lead to dancing, it is quite the conundrum.

back in my day, if you got pregnant in high school you didn't get to stay in school. It would Ruin Your Life. You got married, and the baby "came early," even if he was a 10-pounder. But there was much more pressure NOT to have sex when I was in high school than anything else. sex education didn't exist. it was just understood that you were not going to take a chance on Ruining Your Life. this was before you could get the pill, and if any of my friends or I had asked our parents to get it for us they would have promptly dropped dead of shock. And then I think they would have just said No. or Hell No.

It was ok for boys to fool around with the sluts because boys were expected to be experienced on their wedding nights, while all girls were supposed to be virgins, so someone had to know how things worked.

I promise to take a virginity pledge on my 85th birthday.
Exactly 31 years from today.

Happy birthday Rick, may you see the next 31 and beyond.
Our twins were 9 yesterday.

No comment about sex, virgins, DBI's erections....................:>)

Happy 54th birthday, Rick.

My Dad turned 91 today, and I'm fortunate to have had him in my life all these years. Wish he lived close enough that I could give him a big birthday hug (a phone call with congratulations will have to do).

We do not expect a mass murderer to suddenly change (with the exception of Ted Bundy). Why is it that when the lunatics' excuse is "god" that reason is miss-placed? Is religious insanity contagious?

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
Friedrich Nietzsche

Lordy, DBI and I must have been occupying the same body back in our youth. Every word true!

Happy Birthday Rick! I did not have sex with your 1st cousin until we were 21 and had been married for 3 full days, so I guess we were not normal Arkansas teenagers. In those years I didn't want to disappoint God or my Mom, and of course I'm still scared of your aunt. She stuck a rifle barrel in my belly 2 times to make her point. And we both know she would pull the trigger.

Honestly, I graduated in 1973 and I didn't personally know of any of my classmates having sex...there were rumors, but no hard proof...no pun intended. Maybe it was a school-wide conspiracy to keep me in the dark? It was a different time...but the urges were just the same. Thank Allah for masturbation!

If the religious right was headed up by women, you know they'd be screaming their heads off about boys and men killing millions of sperm alone in their rooms at night. That's an angle they haven't thought of yet....but you can bet they will someday. Why...I killed more sperm in one week when I was young than Hitler killed Jews in all of WWII. And my apologies to any Jewish people for me making such an analogy, but someone had to do it.

"Thank Allah for masturbation!"

World's 2nd biggest lie: "I've never masturbated."
World's biggest lie: "I've quit."

And I neglected to say, Happy Birthday Rick!
Many more for you, sport.

If little boys were given a very simple vasectomy at birth instead of the other snip snip... the world would be a much much better place.

Yes, Eureka, for a while.

How dare some little 14 year old naive skank sign a virginity pledge. I mean all little girls are going to fuck their brains out before they get married, how stupid for them to even try to make such a ridiculous vow.
I why not screw...condems protect you from...well HIV and pregnancy? And if it slips just go on to the doctor to take the baby out. I mean it's not like it hurts...you are only more likely to suffer drug/alcohol abuse, depression and more likely to commit suicide. But who cares?
And who CARES that most STD's are not stopped by condems because condems only cover a small portion and many STD's are spread skin to skin?
And why even encourage abstinence for as long as possible? 80% of schools provide condems and no abstinence talk. 80% folks yet the pregnancies and STD's keep on climbing. 50% of black children have an STD...50%!!!! and one in four sexually active teens has an STD.
So let's just keep pushing condems and stop with the silly little "wait for a while" talk. Obviously that is working so well!

Geez...I just cannot believe these silly little teen thinking they might just try and hold on to their virginity. I mean I did till I was twenty, I was in love, I was smart and I was careful and some how I managed to not get pregnant, never had an STD, never even had to worry about. It's weird how that happened. Waiting to have sex kept me from pregnancy, STD's....just weird.

Condoms work only if applied.

The pill works only if applied.

The virginity pledge works only if applied.

Sex education works only if applied.

The problem is not in the method. The problem is in the application.

Abstinence--in sex, alcohol, tobacco, and several other realms--worked perfectly for me, but only because I applied them.

How long did you take the pill Sky?

Rick, today is my late father's BD too! Raise a glass to you.

.

eLwood: Never took the pill.

Read the last sentence again.

Sky

>>because condems only cover a small portion and many STD's are spread skin to skin?<<

Ut oh. Sounds like some one is getting conned, or been conned.

Latest up heah in non-sexually educated Chickenopolis is that smoking pot means you cannot
get preg when high. Nurses learn so many things going around.

Other Chickenopolis News is undercovers must now work the City park. Seems my partner was involved in a health crisis prevention and learned that high school girls were doing $25 bjs after school. I axed WTF! and was told they despise taking after-school jobs so a couple of trips around the park and Viola! $50 in tax free earnings in one afternoon and they were home before the job would have let out.

.

The more education, the more likely the good practices are to be applied. The more restrictive rules and promises, the more sex becomes forbidden fruit and all the sweeter for seeming so bad.

Nothing fails quite as well as meaningless blather.

If God didn't intend for teenagers to have sex, He wouldn't have made them so horny.

The urge to reproduce is right up there with the urge to eat and drink. You can't stop it, you can only hope to manage it for the best.

I will never forget hearing about the daughter of someone who worked at a local fundamentalist church. She took a pledge, but got pregnant, and ended up having a baby in the closet because she was afraid to tell her parents. Having taken a vow before God, you know. And so the baby dies.

It's funny how in trying to please God we often facilitate the work of the devil.

I'm not surprised you were a virgin till 20, MAK...what with that charming personality and all. (It's New Years and I'm letting the wickedly nasty zelda out to play.) But even if this was some great accomplishment you'd achieved, you're just one example that flies in the face of human behavior. Teenagers screw...a lot and it's fun. They always have and always will. So it's up to us grownups to prepare them to defend themselves against disease/pregnancy; and that's best done through REAL science, not by blathering on about some mythical abstinence crap...or by giving them false information about condoms/etc.

Happy Birthday to Rick and elwood's dad!

Education works, huh!!!!! Then please explain to me why homosexuals who have been exposed to about the most education that you can give any group now practice unsafe sex to a great degree? Education does not give you a reason to refrain from behavior that is destructive. High rates of STDs---some fatal---and high rates of unmarried motherhood for the most sexually educated generation that ever existed does not ring as an endorsement of education. The 50s didn't exactly personify a time when people had a great deal of sexual education but the illegitimate birthrates and STDs were very low. How do you explain that?

THANK YA'LL for the kind birthday wishes.
It's 7:30. I just got in from WORK, and now I think I'll go get drunk & gamble. And, at some point, worry about how to get back home.
Happy burrday eLwood's daddy, & anybody else born on the last day of the year.

Happy Birthday, Rick, and please call a cab or a friend for a ride home.

I bought condoms and gave them to my son. I once got a rolled-up blanket out of his car trunk that had about four sets of clothes in it and of course to a mother that looks like it came straight from an orgy. He denied all knowledge of the clothes or the blanket. what, you really think I'm THAT stupid?

I knew he wasnt going to ask at school and its my responsibility anyway, not the school's. I told him that sex was meant to be an expression of love & intimacy and that it was much more meaningful that way, and I didnt expect him to wait until he was married, but I hoped he would wait until he was in love and the feelings were mutual. They gave the safe-sex talk at school but Im not sure how much reality was involved in it. He didnt die of embarrassment but he was surprised, but he took the condoms and said ok, whatever. Which was one of his 3 responses to all questions: OK, whatever; I dont know; and some nonspecific grunt. I didnt die of embarrassment. My mother never told me one damn thing about sex, not once.

If I had had sex before I got married, I would not have made that mistake & married that person. It just didn't work out, and I was too young and stupid to know that it was because there was no real intimacy in the relationship and no real respect or love for each other, just in love with the idea of love and marriage but not based in reality. If I'd just given it a trial run I could have saved myself and my family a lot of heartache. his, too, but thats his damn problem.

I also have a nice sermon on pornography and how it can be damaging to men becasue it gives them unrealistic expectations but nobody ever wanted to listen to that one. It was right nice, too, I thought so anyway.

one of my friends did the purity ring thing with his daughter, 8th grade, but up until that time I had never heard of it. Now she has two illegitimate children by two different fathers, and her parents are the only stability the kids have ever known because she always has to have a man, and she doesnt bother to check for quality or a functional brain cell before she hooks up with one. She HAS to have a man in her life.

I say, quit babysitting those kids all weekend, every weekend, and she wont have time to go out and get pregnant again. Nobody ever said raising children was supposed to be all for fun. Sure, babysit and give her a break now and then, but not permission to go out and party every weekend. we are too old to chase 2 toddlers around for a whole weekend anyway, or so I have been told.

She flatly refused to give the kid up for adoption the first time and that would have been so much better, IMHO. she has no education, no skills, no desire to obtain any, and even if she did, as I see it, that would be tremendously difficult - trying to go to college while raising two preschoolers. she could've made it with one kid but not two. Of course, the fact that she flunked out of college and vocational school three times and can't get readmitted to any sort of higher education program now is a problem too. You have to go to class. Turning in your work is good too. Her GPA was 0.0 all through school, quite an accomplishment. She didnt want to be there, obviously.

Im not saying the purity ring ceremony and all that has anything to do with her circumstances, Im just saying thats my only personal experience with it. I asked point blank, as I tend to do, if her parents had ever talked about sex to her or her brother, and they said no, only that it was best to wait until you were married. That doesnt give a kid any information to work with and it doesnt exactly give them the notion that they can ask you questions or come to you for help.

Actually, DBI, women DO experience that drive too.

Consider the barriers they have: abuse from men to the point of death (don't we hear almost weekly about some ex killing a woman and her family?), possible STDs that can harm them much more than men, disdain from everyone if they indulge, and unwanted pregnancy.

They still go for it, even in the face of all THAT. Tells me that they have just as strong a drive as the boys, they just have far more problems/issues connected with sex so they have more pain involved with it, not just pleasure.