PDA Police?

Sodahead

I remember an older calculus teacher in high school, we're talking 1975-78, who would run up behind kids holding hands and and separate their hands--I saw him do it once with a sort of soft karate chop.  The same teacher would say "Put away the dirty books" when he caught a student reading something unrelated to the class (not me, ever; I was too busy playing Battleship).


I suspect the poor guy had some issues, and maybe he would have been happier were he teaching today in Tennessee.  The Tennessee state legislature just passed a law mandating abstinence-only sex education in its public schools, what the law calls "family life curriculum."  This mandate applies only to those schools (what Tennessee calls "Local Education Agencies," or LEAs) in counties where the pregnancy rate among 11-18-year olds is over 19.5 per thousand.  Given that the birthrate among 15-19 year-olds (the rate is drastically lower among those <15, thank god) ranges from 32 to 98 among 94 of the 95 counties, almost every LEA is likely under the mandate. The exception are those in Williamson County, a white, wealthy suburb of Nashville, where the rate is a remarkable 14 (2012 data available here).

LAURENCE MOUTON / GETTY IMAGES

What's stirring the most controversy in this law is the notion of a "gateway to sexual activity."  The law defines it as

sexual contact encouraging an individual to engage in a non-abstinent behavior. A person promotes a gateway sexual activity by encouraging, advocating, urging or condoning gateway sexual activities (Sec. 2, 49-6-1301, pt. 7)

The law then states that the

instructor of the family life curriculum shall not. . .Promote, implicitly or explicitly, any gateway sexual activity or health message that encourages students to experiment with non-coital sexual activity (Sec. 2, 49-6-1304, pt. c.1)

The law then gives parents and legal guardians the right to formally complain about teachers or other kinds of instructors who they think are not complying with the law, and it's up to local school boards to adjudicate those complaints (Sec. 2, 49-6-1306, pt. a).  Moreover, they can sue those temporarily contracted instructors or organizations they believe are promoting "gateway sexual activity."

If a student receives instruction by an instructor or organization promotes [sic] gateway sexual activity or demonstrates sexual activity, as prohibited under this part, then the parent or legal guardian shall have a cause of action against that instructor or organization for actual damages plus reasonable attorney's fees and court costs; provided, however, this subdivision (b)(1) shall not apply to instruction by teachers employed by the LEA.

The subtext here is Planned Parenthood.  A main proponent of this legislation, the Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT), makes this clear in its FAQ sheet on the bill.  It doesn't want Planned Parenthood to have anything to do with sex education because its "approach to teens about sex is simple: anything goes, just don’t contract a sexually transmitted disease (STD) and use 
condoms if you don’t want to get pregnant."


That characterization isn't completely off base. Planned Parenthood's information on "Outercourse" is sexually explicit, though of course its message is much more complicated, and I would argue that Planned Parenthood's goals are the same as those opposed to any sort of sexual contact prior to (heterosexual) marriage: the safety and emotional security and happiness of young people.  They just radically differ over the means.  Planned Parenthood's approach rests on the assumption that the vast majority of adolescents are going to engage in some sort of sexual experimentation no matter what kind of local rules are in place; the other, like FACT, presumes that enforced norms of sexual abstinence can work.


As FACT complains, though, the law has been unfairly framed in terms of a loose understanding of "gateway to sexual activity." For example, one Tennessee legislative opponent said, "Gateway sexual activity is so vaguely defined it could be holding hands, hugging, anything that teenagers do like that." This may have been the sound bite provoking parodies like that of Stephen Colbert, who after listing a variety of ways teens sexually distract one another, said

You know what really leads to leading to sex?  Eye contact.  That's what it is. And because the subtlest glance could lead to sexual activity, that is why I believe every child should be fitted with a pair of horse blinders. . .

 Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me's Peter Sagal joked that the law "prompt[ed] many students in Tennessee to ask ‘Where is this gateway and how soon can we get there?’"  He then offered this suggestion: 

Peter Sagal: Exactly. We were thinking about this, and we, we have a message for the people of Tennessee. If you want to encourage abstinence. . .in your students. . .this is what you do. You mandate explicit education, but you also mandate that it be taught to the students by their parents, okay?
Kyrie O’Conner: Ewwww.
Peter Sagal: One thing I’ll say about your Mom, son, she is a wildcat.
Roy Blount, Jr.: Awww, no!

Even some ostensibly neutral journalists framed the law this way.  A Tennessee TV news station topped its story "Teen birth rates drop, but Tennessee is still in top 10" with the image below, implying that the distance between the kiss and pregnancy is pretty short.

But as the bill's sponsor pointed out, the law does clearly identify "gateway" as "sexual contact," which in Tennessee law is already defined as the "intentional touching" of intimate parts "for the purpose of sexual arousal or gratification."  The problem with this is that the "sexual contact" the sponsor references is in criminal law (e.g. rape, incest).  In fact, there's a vague air of criminality in another section of the new bill that jives with goal of making teachers police their students' sexual conduct.


The bill links sexual activity to other illicit or criminal behaviors, and mandates that sex education teachers 

Discuss the interrelationship between teen sexual activity and exposure to other risk behaviors such as smoking, underage drinking, drug use, criminal activity, dating violence, and sexual aggression (Sec. 2, 49-6-1304, pt. 9)

I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.  We've long associated with sex with bad, wrong, and meriting punishment.  Our equation of sexual desire with guilt comes out in teen slasher movies that routinely destroy the sexually active kids in whatever group happening to wander into horror's way (Joss Whedon and Drew Gordon deliciously subvert this trope in the recent film Cabin in the Woods).  Still, I don't get it.  A high school guy making second base will end up sucking on a beer bong (and third base inevitably leads to snorting some lines)?  The girl smoking a J is at greater risk of pregnancy (and probably an abortion since she's obviously an immoral lout)?


I agree that high teen pregnancy rates are more than lamentable.  They too often mean tragedy for both the mother and the child.  But I doubt trumpeting another 'Just Say No' type of campaign will work (or, just say nothing--which Utah has begun with legislation prohibiting schools from teaching anything about contraceptives or homosexuality, and permitting schools to opt out of any sex education).  Churches and schools that repeat "no to sex" to teens only remind them of the topic of sex, just as much as a comprehensive sex ed program.  On top of that, teens are surrounded by public figures--politicians, religious leaders, athletes, celebrities, and teachers--who repeatedly demonstrate an inability to restrain their sexual desire.  And there are all the shows and advertisements that equate sexual desire (or fulfillment) with material consumption and personal satisfaction (you'd think a new car is one of Woody Allen's orgasmatrons), there's the prurient fascination with sex crimes in the media, not to mention the accessibility of internet porn.


I'm not arguing that abstinence-only folks are fighting a losing battle, and that therefore they should give in to the inevitable.  I'm saying they're fighting the wrong battle.  Teaching sex education to teens by trying to turn them into ascetic monks and nuns, resisting "evil" urges until they can doff their chastity in marriage, is not just impractical.  It replaces the simplistic biological determinism (kids are meant to march through that "gateway," no matter what) with an equally simplistic behavioral determinism (training and punishment will stop up that "gateway").  It turns an ubiquitous feature of the adolescent world into a toxic characteristic (if Friday the 13th's Jason puts an ax into your adolescent head just after you had sex, well, maybe your poisonous self deserved it).


That said, of course there are people who have been hurt or damaged by sexual activity at a young age.  But continuing to try to invent different ways to excise sexual activity among youth isn't the way to reduce that hurt and damage, or teen pregnancy rates.


Consider two relevant findings by the Guttmacher Institute (a think tank focused on sexual and reproductive health):

 •Strong evidence suggests that comprehensive approaches to sex education help young people both to withstand the pressures to have sex too soon and to have healthy, responsible and mutually protective relationships when they do become sexually active. 

•There is no evidence to date that abstinence-only-until-marriage education delays teen sexual activity. Moreover, research shows that abstinence-only strategies may deter contraceptive use among sexually active teens, increasing their risk of unintended pregnancy and STIs.

Sex is an incredibly complicated matter, not just because we're still not sure of all the factors that drive sexual behavior (the nature vs. nurture thing), but because our identities, our emotional security, and our moral universes are so tightly connected to the topic.  While the Tennessee bill doesn't turn teachers into PDA police, it does turn schools into agencies of a sex education policy that has a dubious track record, an overly dark view of human sexuality, and makes up for both by trying to silence contrary voices with the threat of lawsuits and fines.