Teen Sex: The New After-School Special?

The news about teen sex these days just keeps getting more and more alarming. When it all comes down, it’s on Bush’s watch.
Earlier this year, studies showed that an average of one out of every four (26%) of teenage girls are now carrying an STD in the great USA. Never mind the teen pregnancies. These are sexually transmitted diseases, people.
The news is alarming now, but imagine five, ten years from now when the fallout of the STDs exchanged between today’s youths are really felt and known.
It’s been a few months now since the story came out. I’ve been quietly waiting around for the shitstorm to unleash, for when parents start screaming in outrage that their baby girls having a 25% likelihood of carrying an STD, and soon… But the shitstorm never came. The anger never rose.
I don’t understand. I can’t fathom how American parents can calmly abide by this bullshit of teaching abstinence only in schools, or how news like this doesn’t make parents horrified.
I understand that the parents who are most outraged are instead taking it upon themselves to school their own kids, but in a society where parental attention seems a luxury rather than commonplace, we absolutely cannot assume parents will take the responsibility they ought to, because this isn’t just a question of morals. This is a question of public health!
I mean, the number one STD they’re finding right now in teen girls is the HPV virus, which can cause cervical cancer. The number two? It’s the leading cause of infertility.
Probably the most depressing statistic is: it’s more than half of black teenage girls who are carrying an STD, versus about 20% for whites and Hispanics.
You want to know something surprising? I actually support abstinence-only education, but only within a framework that allows for the possibility of being human and shagging when weakness rolls in, you know? Absolutely must teach about condoms. Absolutely!
When you’re talking about teens who, as we’ve known for almost five years or more now, consider oral sex to actually NOT be sex, and therefore give head like it’s a party-favour because “it’s not sex” and therefore there are no STDs (WRONG, kids), then the time is fucking nigh to get some edumacatin’ on the go. And fast!
But here we are, more than three years after a report that more than half of 15-19 year old teens are engaging in oral sex, and regularly, and yet what has really been done?
Nothing. NOTHING. It’s the status quo. Worse yet, it doesn’t get discussed — not with passion, not with angst, not with anything.
But these people don’t fucking get it. STDs are a big deal. It’s not just yeast infections or genital warts. It’s AIDS, viruses that cause cancer, syphillis, and more. Diseases that can lie dormant, that can spread easily, and diseases that can kill.
I mean, we’re talking about AIDS, something the Red Cross wants to see declared a “disaster” in some regions of the world, something that has literally almost wiped out an entire generation of Africans. But even worse is, AIDS is on the rise in North America, and most alarmingly: amongst women!
You know how epidemics start to become epidemics? By becoming clusters first. All you need is one kid to start spreading HIV in smalltown America, a cluster forms, a couple kids take off to different universities, start having unprotected sex, and boom, 10 years down the line we’re in a whole new scary ballgame against a disease capable of laying waste to entire generations. Hot zones, as they’re termed in the viral world, just need the right conditions and the right players. You can’t tell me America today isn’t producing the both the conditions and the players.
We have an entire generation of teens engaging in unsafe sex because no one wants them to learn about condoms. (Hmm, sounds like Africa, no?) If a school district teaches about condoms, then they often don’t get the abstinence funding that makes such a difference in the cash-strapped school budgets of today.
But if it’s so reprehensible to see such lack of education in Africa, where poverty is the norm, corruption often rules the day, and tribal traditions often still linger, then how fucking disgusting is it that the one of the richest, most powerful, best educated, most modern countries in the world fails to educate their own young in the Information Age?
COME ON! Where’s the outcry? Where’s the concern about what future might come tagging along with these STDs being exchanged so freely amongst teens? Where’s the panic that one of these kids is going to luck into AIDS or HIV and is going to start a wildfire spread of the deadliest epidemic known in the world today?
It’s nowhere I can fucking see. Have McCain or Obama talked about these issues? Not that I’ve heard.
It’s a different time out there. Even when I was in my teens, oral sex was getting to be a bit different. We were just starting to have oral sex before sex, but it was still a big deal. Most of us understood diseases spread that way, too. Now, though, ignorance is bliss, but it’s also an epidemic in the offing.
I may sound like an alarmist now, but I’d rather be prematurely alarmed than right, but methinks I’m cruising towards being both. And that’d be a real fucking shame.
It’s a mad, mad world, baby. A mad, mad world.
A couple articles referenced for this posting: MSNBC, USAToday. The image is from MSNBC as well.

1 thought on “Teen Sex: The New After-School Special?

  1. hans

    Don´t you know it?
    Girls are empowered to do anything they want nowadays, because they are born princess. Never mind they all go for the 10% of boys who are Jocks/Assholes/Deviants.
    ALL parents know their little cupcakes are good girls and don´t fuck the bad boys.

    Ha.

    What I find hilarious is that these little sluts will continue to do so till their 30ies and then they wonder where are the good men are gone.
    Sounds familiar?

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