One of the most useful things I learned from attending public high school was sex ed. It was taught to girls and boys separately (my first experience of single-sex education), discussed in an honest, factual, unabashed manner, and gave me all the information I needed about biology, pregnancy prevention, and sexually transmitted diseases, to make my choices in life.
My last two years of high school, and my year of high school teaching, were both in girls’ Catholic schools. My high school (in Monterey, California) was unusual in that the seniors were given a day off from lessons in the spring to spend the day (including a posh luncheon) with a gynecologist imported from San Francisco. She gave us a presentation about female sexuality, sprinkling her talk with humorous anecdotes from her private practice in The City. She told us everything we needed to know, and then the floor was open for questions. We were allowed to ask anything and everything we wished, and our questions were answered in full. Recognizing that we would soon be off to college and devoid of adult supervision or counsel, the blessed sisters made an effort to provide us with as much information as possible to keep ourselves safe and healthy.
Contrast this with the year I spent teaching in a girls’ Catholic school in Newton, Massachusetts, where sex education comprised lectures about abstinence. Please note that I was in high school in the mid-1980s, and was teaching fifteen years later. But the school where I taught espoused the much more traditional Catholic attitude toward premarital sex and, since it was not acting in loco parentis (as my boarding school was), perhaps the administration did not feel at liberty to offer advice that might run counter to some families’ values and parenting.
But I still remember the students filing into my US history class grumbling about the abstinence-only curriculum. “In two years we’ll be in college, and if we don’t know what we’re doing, we can get into trouble!” They were angry at the school for denying them the information they knew they would need in order to make their own choices. And given that one of my students (not in that class) was several months pregnant by graduation time, it’s clear that these girls were done a disservice.
All that came back to mind last week (as well as news of a 10 year old mother delivering her child in Spain recently) when a friend of the Cap’n’s who is a family physician sent him a link to a Slate Magazine article/slideshow on “The European approach to teens, sex, and love, in pictures.” It is compiled and written by a physician who works for Planned Parenthood, and examines and contrasts advertising and attitudes toward teen sexual activity in America and Europe. (In a nutshell, it shows that Europeans accept that many young people are sexually active and use humor to teach about condoms, encouraging young people to be prepared. Americans view youth sex as bad, carrying a condom is perceived negatively both for girls and boys, and Madison Avenue prefers fearful messages to sell condoms.) It should interest parents, teachers, media analysts, psychologists and health educators, as well as anyone else who takes an interest in the next generation.
Click here to view it. I’d be interested in comments from readers on both sides of The Pond.
Shimshonit 
My kids are the ones on the playground who have *all* the information. Although I have no idea if they share it.
Can teenagers feel love? Debatably yes (it’s often confused with infatuation).
Should teenagers have sex? Not outside of marriage. Condoms do fail on occasion both on birth control and an STD prevention. Loyal marriage is the best defense against STD’s apart from pure abstinence (which few will follow).
Should teenagers be allowed to get married? Only if they are actually in love (not infatuated) and understand the gravity of such a decision.
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What’s the point? The point is that there’s a balance in society. On the one hand, sex is something that helps keeps us healthy in body and soul. On the other hand, it’s irresponsible and reckless to have sex outside of marriage regardless of what kind of precautions you keep. As Jews, we’re supposed to get married early (relatively – around age 20) and have a ton of kids. But on the other hand, modern lifestyles force people in college to postpone marriage. People move to far off places for college and move around quite a bit with no financial independence with which to assure that they can raise a family while they get their education.
At the same time, while people postpone marriage, they still feel their sex drives cranking up. Abstinence is hard – you can’t sugar-coat that.
What’s the solution? Well… I don’t really have one. I’m about to hit 20 and I feel somewhat helpless. I don’t have a job – I jump around from Maryland to California for college while my parents pay tuition and give a small stipend for food and occasional trinket. I’m in Israel for study abroad and I don’t even know yet whether I’m going to be in Israel or California in January. I’d like to find a nice Jewish girl to settle down with and get married to but a) I plan to make aliyah and go into the IDF after I get my degree and b) even if I did meet someone who was willing to keep up with my…. ahem spontaneity, no one my age is even remotely considering marriage yet and of course c) I can’t in good conscience marry someone without being able to take care of them.
Sometimes, it really is a pity to be young ;)