One Utah

The Trib today published another hacktackular op-ed piece by another member of the conservative stable of writers who are just offended at the gone to hellness of our world. Kathleen Parker is offering yet another dreary denouncement of what hideous sluts kids are today.

What happened to your dearly beloved? He - and she - disappeared with coed dorms and the triumph of reproductive health ideology. While coed dorms replaced obstacle with opportunity, ideologically driven sex-education programs promoted permissiveness and experimentation.

Because, you know, before coed dorms no college student ever had sex.

Jessica at Feministing responds with appropriate snark:

Kids are fucking! Women are fucking! And they’re not even demanding flowers for it anymore!!

But Parker isn’t done with her simple analysis. She declares:

Because sex ed is based on the assumption that young people are sexually active with multiple partners, kids have been led to believe by mainstream health professionals that casual sex is OK. That’s a delusion, says Grossman, because scientific data clearly indicate otherwise. Casual sex is, in fact, a serious health risk.
Rather than spread that word, sex educators have tweaked their message from urging ‘’safe sex” to a more realistic ‘’safer sex,” any elaboration of which would defy standards of decency. Interested parents can find out for themselves by visiting one of several university-sponsored sex advice Web sites, such as Columbia’s GoAskAlice.com.

Parker has apparently never actually reviewed anything other than abstinence only education - which actually does presume that kids are a bunch of sluts and whores who just can’t help themselves.

Parker’s article, however, isn’t just fevered imaginings about the grotesque wrongs of imaginary sex education prorams. No, she includes a series of sad paeans to the long lost of and virginal days of dating . . .

once upon a time, dating was something men and women did as a prelude to marriage, which - hold on to your britches - was a prelude to sex.

Parker commits the fundamental error (supported by good old fashioned wingnut pseudo-science with references to scientific sounding hormones) of presuming that sex is the problem. She refers to the wingnut sponsored book Unhooked which supposedly chronicles the horrors of people having sex before marriage and concludes the poor innocent college women are being destroyed - destroyed I tell you! - by their own slutitude:

Miriam Grossman, author and psychiatrist at UCLA and one of five women, including Stepp, who spoke recently at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center about sex on campus.
Grossman is most concerned that politically correct ideology has contaminated the health field at great cost to young lives. As Grossman sees it, when the scientific facts contradict what is being promoted as truth, then ideology has trumped reality . . . Speaking to a packed room of mostly women, Grossman noted that while some in the audience had attended college during the free-love days, the world is far more dangerous now. Today there are more than two-dozen sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) - 15 million new cases each year - some of which are incurable.

The line about the std’s today is a wingnut favorite - pretending that STD’s didn’t exist in the past. HIV is new, yes, but let’s be honest, most of the others have been around for pretty much forever and we’re just more honest that they exist now.

Parker gets it wrong at so many levels, it’s difficult to know if she’s actually living in the same world as the rest of us. Parker, like so many conservatives, is convinced that if only we could go back to how things were in the good ole days then everything would be just fine. If only girls wore poodle skirts and kept their knees safely glued together and their saddle shoed feet firmly planted on the floor. If only boys wore cardigans with letters on them! If only girls demanded flowers and chocolate and marriage ceremonies before giving it up! Alas, those whorish dirty girls on our campuses! They’re the problem with their hormones and sexual honesty! how dare they!

In all seriousness, Parker manages to commit a fundamental error - she identifies the wrong problem and sets out to solve it. If two consenting adults - even if they are very young adults - wish to engage in sexual behaviors, that’s not a problem - if they are informed, free to say no if they wish, and take appropriate precautions. Having defined the problem as people having sex, Parker (and Grossman and Stepp and the whole host of anti-sex conservatives) get it wrong. The good ole days weren’t so good - just ask people who lived through them.

A few years back, PBS had a great documentary about The Pill - they interviewed a number of women who had come of age during the 50s - without exception those women said they wished they had had the pill and the options it represented. Average age at first marriage was something like 8 years younger than it is today (I think it was 19 for women at 21 for men). One women in the PBS documentary reported that when she was teen, it was well established that many people got married just to have sex. The sudden surge in divorces in the 70s was people who had married at 19 and realized they weren’t mature enough at 19 to make a lifetime commitment. Not only have divorce rates declined since then, so have marriage rates. More couples are choosing to live together (and while not a representative example, in my groups of friends, very few did not live together before getting married). Marriage (as chronicled in Stephanie Coontz’s, Marriage: A History) is a primarily social institution which has never conformed to a single model for long. The 50s model of the working husband and stay at home wife, kids, and end of life spent together in Sun City Arizona, actually held sway for a exceedingly brief and unique period. Otherwise, marriage has long been a flexible and unstable institution, often one limited to those in the upper echelons of society.

Prior to the mid 60s, it was illegal for single persons to get contraception. I don’t want to go back to those days and I don’t think most Americans do either. In those days, sex was an exceptionally expensive experiment and yet the price didn’t stop lots of people. The pregnancy scare was such a cliche that even the nauseating cloying and rose colored musical Grease included it. FWIW, American historians recorded attitudes among native born Americans in the late Victorian era and discovered that even though many delayed marriage until their mid to late 20s, it was an accepted practice for engaged couples (either formally or informally engaged) to engage in discreet sex with the understanding that a wedding would be required in the event of a pregnancy. The attitude, generally, was that they were going to marry anyway so there was no real harm done. (Such attitudes weren’t talked about much, but historians found them in letters, diaries and so forth.)

Parker in her screed is calling for a return to the imagined standards of the 50s when a bit of over the sweater action (second base) was a major milestone, when imagined boys brought flowers to blushing girls who considered holding hands a bit racy. It’s a bit of sepia tinged nostalgia with no connection to the real world.

This entry was posted Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 9:12 am and is filed under 4th Estate (Media), Conservative Sell-Outs, Conservatives, Contraception, Sex, Society, This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.