I know it's not exactly news that “virginity pledges” don’t work, but the fact that it actually makes kids more likely to have oral and anal sex is just priceless. The folks at True Love Waits wanted to keep the kids from being fornicating heathens, and instead they turned them into sodomites! Love it.
Clearly I’m not pleased that teenagers (who have been given bogus info and unduly pressured) are taking part in high-risk sex. Especially since a 2004 study reported that “pledgers were much less likely to use contraception the first time they had sex and also were less likely than other teens to have undergone STD testing and know their STD status.” But you have to admit, this latest study definitely unleashes a nice dose of poetic justice on the sex-haters.
The report, After the promise: The STD consequences of adolescent virginity pledges, is published in the April issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health and notes that "advocates for abstinence-only education assert that premarital abstinence and post-marital sex are necessary and sufficient for avoiding negative consequences of sexual activity, such as STDs...This assertion collides with the realities of adolescents' and young adults' lives." No shit.
Lead author and Yale prof Hannah Bruckner said in the Toronto Globe and Mail that "eventually, even the most abstinent adolescents, the great majority of them will have sex. ... We need to provide education that helps in dealing with it when they do it."
Tell that to Bushie. Who knows, maybe the idea of good Christian girls taking it in the ass will motivate him to provide some real sex education. Wishful thinking, I guess.
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This made my day. Great post.
I find myself quite curious as to what effect it has on divorce rates as well, since it is causing girls to marry earlier.
ahem. yes. as a one of our Nation's leaders I share your deep concern about the epidemic of oral and anal sex that is gripping our nation's youngest and tightest body cavities. However, I must disagree with those who prematurely think this initial setback should cause us to change course. Rather we should harden our resolve. It is my gut instinct that the promised Virgintopia could be just a few blowjobs away. The deplorably sumptious image of a young women channeling her sexual curiousity around a prominent local manhood is, I am afriad, one we must endure in the short-term. But endure we shall, whether it be in our neighborhoods, our airplanes, or whether we are personally faced with such dark realities in a tight skirt slightly bent over our office desks in a fashion that I would contend most rational heterosexual men would consider unambiguously suggestive.
Did any of you actually read the report??
"Almost 7 percent of the students who did not make a pledge were diagnosed with an STD, compared with 6.4 percent of the "inconsistent pledgers" and 4.6 percent of the "consistent pledgers." Bearman said those differences were not "statistically significant," although Robert Rector, who studies domestic policy issues at the conservative Heritage Institute, said he interpreted the data to mean that young people committed to the abstinence pledge were less likely to become infected."
7% compared to 4.6% thats just over 2/3rds right? a 34% reduction in STD's !!!!
I would think that would be a be considered a good thing, but for some reason, some of you choose to gloat that it wasn't as effective as.....what? Do you have a better solution? It doesn't appear to me that there is a better solution than supporting abstinance.
Give it time, t. This was only an 8 year study, which means that the people who took it are now 20-26 years old. They have a whole lifetime of screwing without protection to catch something. Turning 26 doesn't offer you magical protection against disease, believe me. Most people I know who've gotten one did so after that age.
tfreridge, that difference *is* statistically insignificant. "A 34% reduction" based on delta from 7% to 4.3% is not a meaningful statement when the study is a representative sample.
In large elections and large population studies (like the data collected by Alfred Kinsey) small percentage differences can possibly be quite meaningful. But this is a statistical sample, meaning the results from a small group of people are extrapolated to a much larger population. It's the difference between tracking a few hundred people for 8 years and many thousands of people for 8 years. This extrapolation leads to a level of innaccuracy. In reality, the true behavior of the much larger population could be off by a number of percentage points. This is why polls will often carry the disclaimer of "+/- 2% points" or "margin of error" information.
Since they both regard sexual behavior, it's useful to compare this to the Kinsey surveys where the goal was 100,000 interviews. Much of the criticism of that work is the fact his population was too large to be able to interperet any causation for the fluctuation of behavior. Additionally, in a study so large, it's very hard to apply normilization techniques to avoid bias as a result of survey repondants self selecting by the nature of the survey, or by the particular sub-cultures that were accessable in large numbers to the survey team.
These rudimentary survey concerns don't even take into account Amanda's point that the study was only moderately longitudinal, considering that people are taking the data to represent lifetime behavior.
So yeah. A 10% delta? In a representational study, a 10% delta is meaningful. But not a handful of percentage points. If anything, this data suggests that abstinance as public policy has a negligable effect. Perhaps actual sex education and realistic views of sexual habits would be a better starting place for finding effective solutions.
Now, public health policy geeking aside, when this site comes back up after it's recent overexposure, it's got some good satire on this whole virginity pledge:
http://www.technicalvirgin.com/
Tfreridge:
What indy said. In public health policy, statistical significance is a big deal. Folks that do public health research take stat very seriously, and do not attempt to draw conclusions from differences that could just as easily be data anomalies. When we're talking about STD rates, we're talking about just a single-digit slice of the sample. Little differences in who gets sampled could produce big swings in percentages. The science of figuring this out is just that: a science.
Even McIlhany, the guy standing up for the pledges, did not try to make your argument. He says the study neither proves nor disporoves anything, and wants one that includes more backward-looking data.
So here's where we are: there's no evidence that pledges reduce rates, even when taken consistently. There is evidence (a statistically significant finding) that "oral and anal" (which in my view should _not_ be combined) increases among pledgers.
Now, I think that if they disaggregated oral and anal, they'd learn a lot. Anal sex is higher risk than even vaginal for many STI's, while oral is lower for many, including HIV.
I think kids need to know that unprotected anal is very high risk behavior. The same is not true of oral.
Speaking of christians inadvertently encouraging high risk behaviour, go and read http://www.sexinchrist.com/
You can learn all about anal sex there. Hopefully this is a bad joke. My favorite part of the site:
“I thought the Bible said anal sex was a sin.�
This is a common misconception. Anal sex is confusing to many Christians because of the attention paid to the Bible’s condemnation of homosexual acts. However, it’s important to realize that these often quoted scriptures refer only to sexual acts between two men. Nowhere does the Bible forbid anal sex between a male and female.
In fact, many Biblical passages allude to the act of anal sex between men and women. Lamentations 2:10 describes how “The virgins of Jerusalem have bowed their heads to the ground,� indicating how a virginal maidens should position themselves to receive anal sex.
that seriously made me smile. especially the hilarious comment on Bush. haha