Category Archives: Media

Succeeding at Failure

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

September 5, 2005

Timken High School in Canton, Ohio, has succeeded in setting a new record.  Sixty-five of the girls attending Timken are pregnant.

This record is matched by another startling local statistic.  According to the Canton Health Department, out of 586 babies born through July at local hospitals, 104 of the babies had mothers between the ages of 11 and 19.

Nationally, last week, radio and television talking heads picked up this story and ran with it.  Outrageous, they shouted.  Outrageous!  What a dismal record of failure!

Failure?  Really?

Think about it.  Timken girls and boys have succeeded at one thing.  They have succeeded in absorbing the messages of modern American culture and incorporating those messages into their lives.

Reality television validates casual sex between “consenting” guys and gals.  So Timken guys and gals consented.

Popular entertainment idols jump in and out of bed so fast that we lose count.  So Timken teens played like they are stars of the silver screen.

“Sexperts” insist that teens are incapable of resisting sexual temptations.  So Timken teens didn’t.

“Sexucators” go into classrooms and use false promises of “protection” and “safe sex” to downplay the true failure rates of condoms.  Sex is fun, not risky.  So Timken teens reach for promises of good times.

Rap and sports heroes brag about the number of women they conquer…and leave.  So Timken males fade into the background as the girls are counted by statisticians.

And sadly, American culture runs away from defining marriage as an expected standard for raising children.  So Timken teens will be unmarried parents.

If you consider what we are teaching our children, it appears that Timken teens have simply excelled at learning what they have been taught.  They are not alone.

Stella is a pregnant teen who doesn’t attend Timken.  She and her boyfriend were really “serious.”  So they had sex.  Now he’s gone and Stella is pregnant.

Sure, her feelings are hurt at being dumped by her boyfriend.  But Stella likes being pregnant.  She looks forward to being a mother and having a baby to hold.  And maybe, just maybe, her boyfriend will come back.

Next week, Stella’s friends and family are throwing her a baby shower.  Her aunt has brought over a baby bed and stroller.  And everyone is getting excited, anticipating her approaching due date.

Statisticians will count Stella as an unfortunate unwed pregnant teen.  But in the real world where Stella lives, she is making a family using the pattern she has been given.

She had sex because she was serious with her boyfriend.  And she is having a baby because she is pregnant.  Stella has grown up in a world where babies enter our lives as casually as new cars and prom dresses.

If you talk with Stella and her friends…and I suspect the young girls of Timken high…they have the same eternal dream of women going back thousands of years.  They long to be mothers and raise children.   And they are.

They have learned what “sexucators” have been teaching.  Babies are no longer the expected product of a married couple committed to each other for life.  Marriage, sex, love, infatuation, fun, babies and families…all of it is up for grabs…depending on the mood of the day and the luck of the dice.

Is it failure when 65 girls at Timken High School are pregnant?  Not if they have succeeded in learning what we have been teaching them.

 

October 29, 2004 – Food for the Brain

See Archives for more past editorials.

 

Pelvic Thrusts

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

July 25, 2005

All around me, body parts are in motion.  From the moment I push open the giant glass doors, give my card for the greeters to slide through the computer and head to the locker room, the signs of body action are everywhere.

On my left, exercise clothes hang from racks and are piled on shelves.  To the right, through shelves of protein powder, I watch a tall tanned woman approach the juice bar. Wearing cheap comfortable clothes and expensive white shoes, everyone walks at a brisk clip, their bodies tired with sweat and faces flushed from action.

This is not a world where I belong.  I am more at home walking down a dusty road looking for lizards darting through clumps of grass.

But I live in the hottest zone on the weatherman’s map…a red zone at this time of the year.  Not only is it scorching outside, but my body is doing things I used to see happen to other people…older people.

This is the year I must deal with the boxes in storage.  Either I get my body back into the work skirts and favorite designer jeans, or I pass them on to smaller, younger people.

Over the months I have found ways to delight in this stainless steel and polished glass playground.  Parents come with their children in tow because there is something for everyone: swimming pools, tennis courts, basketball, rock climbing, yoga and kick boxing.  In the weight room, there is a machine for every muscle I have.

I started simple.  Walking.  My pace is 2.9, my daily routine 30 minutes.  All around me, bodies are walking, running, climbing, rolling, pushing and pulling.  To pass the time, I close my eyes and imagine my blue mountain lake with clouds rolling in.

Time passes quickly today.  Finally finished and showered, I sit in the MegaGym lobby, waiting for my husband.  A big screen television entertains us.  Or should I say…Sean and The Babes entertain us.

Sean struts and bobs across the television screen, pointing and rapping.  Behind him the Babes gyrate.  Rap and gyrate, bodies in motion, bobbing and pointing and thrusting.

Honestly, I sit in a MegaWorld of body parts thrusting, and not one of them is a pelvis.  Except for Sean and his Babes.

A mother walks over with her young son, and they each settle into a brown leather chair.  Clearly, like me, they are just passing time.  For lack of something to do, their eyes turn to Sean.  He gyrates with a Babe.  He gyrates with another Babe.  Two babes at once.  And then they do a round of pelvic thrusts.  I want to cover her son’s eyes.

Sean bumps and grinds while his ten Babes get in a tight chorus line.  In time with the music, in unison they do pelvic thrusts.  A mother and her two toddlers walk behind me heading for the family locker room.  I am embarrassed for them.

I want to go to the Customer Service desk and ask why we are not watching a basketball game.  Or what about ballet, Nureyev or Baryshnikov doing power leaps across the stage?  Or swing dance?  Or ice skating?  Of all the wonderful things we humans can do with our bodies, in a MegaWorld that exercises every muscle known to man without needing one pelvic thrust…why are we subjected to big screen Sean and his Babes?

They lick their lips and shoot us sultry glances.  She against him, him against her…and her…and her.  A chorus line of pelvic thrusts, and I suddenly want this song to end.

Was it only half a life ago that Elvis provoked national outrage with one twitch of a nervous leg?  Yet, with a career built on body motions, I never remember Elvis doing one pelvic thrust with a babe onstage.

Pelvic thrusts are common fare in America these days.  Most people would consider them no big deal.  MTV and Internet porn have given us bigger things to worry about.

But, if little things don’t matter, I wouldn’t be here in the MegaGym trying to undo the damage of an extra ten calories.  Big things are grown from little things.

Elvis certainly knew what we used to know…this kind of body motion is a private thing.  On stage, performed by a crowd of people we don’t know, it degrades the very essence of what makes human beings special.

Customer service needs to hear from us.  We need to restore our sense of propriety that has been dulled by years of pelvic thrusts set to music.  Reshaping the soul of a nation, like reshaping the body, comes from attending to what matters…every little thing.

May 7, 200:   Thank You, Janet

July 30, 2004:   James Bond in Danger…for Real

NARAL: The Finer Points of Vulgarity

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

July 18, 2005

You’ve got to hand it to NARAL.  They really know how to get their point across.

NARAL Pro-Choice Washington wants to make it clear.  No ambiguous, vague, uncertain, unintelligible, nebulous, amphibological message from NARAL.  Absolutely none!

Do you want to know what the leading proponent of abortion thinks about healthy sexual behavior?  NARAL wants everyone to know!  Screw Abstinence. 

Just to make sure you don’t miss it, they scream at the top of their voices.  Throw your hands up and say it loud: “Screw Abstinence!!!”  They tell us at the bottom of their e-mail flyer to let everyone know:  Print Out Flyer & Help Promote Screw Abstinence.

This is not just political rhetoric and subtle behind-the-scenes lobbying.  They are throwing a party.  They are raising money.  And there is something for everyone at NARAL’s funfest:

  • A sex ed class for adults performed by Seattle theatre’s hottest sketch comedy group
  • Tips on Sexy Sex by Sex-positive purveyors of adult toys
  • A Screw Driver drink ticket
  • A Screw Abstinence T-Shirt

If there is anything good that comes from vulgarity in your face and over the top, this must be it.  We now know for sure and without a doubt, what NARAL values and elevates as their ultimate ideal for healthy sexual attitudes and behaviors.

For the past thirty years parents and health experts have agonized over the high rates of unwed teen pregnancy and the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).  Untold hours have been spent debating how to best educate young people on healthy choices related to sex.

Abstinence…purity…chastity…modesty…concepts of self-control and restraint have made a comeback.  But it has been a hard fought battle.  At every turn, there are opponents to abstinence.  Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and NARAL have worked hard to convince us abstinence education won’t work.

Now, thanks to NARAL, we know one of the major reasons abstinence education struggles.  It is mocked and ridiculed and rejected by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.

The finer points of NARAL’s Screw Abstinence party are these.

They trivialize the very essence of healthy choices based on self-restraint and the medical realities of sexual behavior.

They flaunt the outdated term “Safe Sex,” mutating it into “Safer Sex” without one shred of proof that sex toys are harmless games in the hands of promiscuous people.   Safer sex?  Safer than what?

They model for adults over the age of 21 the foundations of mindless, medically illiterate objections to abstinence education.  NARAL doesn’t need a reason to object.  It’s enough to “Come, laugh, learn, socialize and buck the system at NARAL Pro-Choice Washington’s Screw Abstinence Party.”

And perhaps the finest point of all in NARAL’s attack on the healthy attitudes toward sex by America’s young people is this.  When over twenty percent of children relying on the promises of “safer sex” get pregnant this year, NARAL will be there with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU to defend their right to sneak to the nearest abortion clinic without parental consent.

If abstinence education is challenged in its efforts to educate young people about healthy sexual attitudes and behaviors, we finally have the answer…in our faces…over the top…and without a doubt.  Thanks to NARAL.

February 5, 2005:   Sex Without Value

June 6, 2005:   Planned Parenthood’s War Against Choice

Medically Accurate Cowards

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

July 11, 2005

We’ve all seen it.  The television commercial where a magic pill is sold, the cure to some terrible medical problem.  The lady smiles.  The man takes her hand gingerly.  The sun sets, leaving a warm glow in the air just as the announcer lowers his voice.  As an afterthought, he remembers to tell us, “Valipuck may cause drowsiness, nausea, limping, coughing, gagging, financial ruin, blindness, skin rot or death.  Consult your physician.”

Magazines are luckier.  They have the whole back page of Valipuck’s ad to describe in the smallest font possible why the medicine they are selling to cure you could possibly leave you worse off than you were.

This is the age of medical liability, where undisclosed side effects of drugs can include financial ruin for drug companies.  One gets the feeling they are rushing to make the list of terrible possibilities longer than a person has time to read…just so you won’t.

There is only one serious exception to the “tell them everything” rule used by drug companies.  Without any compromising “fine print” disclosures, condoms are pushed on us from every possible angle, promising us unqualified “protection” from every consequence of sexual promiscuity.

On June 1, NBC and WB networks announced they would be running a series of four commercials “touting the importance of condom use in the prevention of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).”  Their message is the all-encompassing promise we have come to expect from condom pushers, “Other than abstinence there is only one way to protect yourself.  Use a condom every time.”

Jim Daniels, vice president of marketing for Trojan, assures us his “respectful and tasteful” ads will get out an “important health message.”  So, Jim, what about the fine print?  What about the medically accurate truth about condoms?

One month after Jim’s tasteful ads, the Kaiser Family Foundation filled out the missing information on condoms.  “According to a 2004 World Health Organization bulletin and a 2001 NIH report, individual studies have demonstrated that condom use reduces the risk of infection for:

  • Gonorrhea by 39% to 62% in women and 49% to 75% in men;
  • Chlamydia by 29% to 90% in women and 33% in men;
  • Genital herpes by 30% to 92% in women and less in men, though no numbers were given;
  • Trichomoniasis by 30% in women and significantly less in men, though no numbers were given;
  • Syphillis by 40% to 60% in both sexes;
  • Pelvic inflammatory disease by 55%; and
  • Genital ulcers by 18% to 23% in both sexes.”

Wow!  With odds like these, who needs enemies?  Any way you slice it, the flip side of these numbers is clear evidence of the serious risk for contracting life-changing diseases even when using a condom.  And this is even before disclosing that there is no evidence that condoms prevent infection by human papillomavirus, the cause of over 97% of cervical cancer cases.

Giving teens a choice between abstinence and condoms is like giving a five-year-old a choice between a pea shooter and a six-shooter loaded with four live bullets.

Jim, speaking for Trojan, tells his potential customers that they have two choices, abstinence or condoms.  He lays the two options out in either/or fashion as “protection”.

But there is only one way for Jim…or anyone…to promote condoms as “protection” in the same sentence with abstinence.  Just shut the door and push the medically accurate facts under the carpet, behind the wall, and into the round filing cabinet.

While drug companies heap their medically accurate facts on us, it will take an act of Congress to get the same disclosure on condoms…literally an act of Congress.  Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) is one of many who are insisting that condom packaging labels be revised to tell the full truth about condoms and their failure to provide the level of “protection” promised by advertisers.

Meanwhile, opponents to this labeling change are running full speed away from full disclosure, saying it “might undermine the public’s confidence in condoms.”  If we weren’t in the midst of an epidemic of STDs we might be laughing at a surprising irony: for the most part, opponents to medically accurate information on condoms are the same people who support laws requiring medically accurate information in sex education.

Any way you add it up, this is a formula for selling the people a lie.  It has worked for thirty years, but it won’t work forever.  Eventually, truth always comes to light.  Just ask the makers of the Pinto and cigarette industry CEOs.  Truth is only one class action lawsuit away from the surface.

Securing medically accurate information on condoms is not a battle for the coward.  In Congress, in classrooms, and in the courts…we are in debt to those who have the courage to lead the fight.  Thanks to them, no matter what it takes to make it happen, the truth about condoms is on its way.

February 14, 2005:  All the Condoms in the World

April 30, 2004:  Condoms: A Failure to Protect

See Archives for past editorials.

Love Affair with Failure

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

June 20, 2005

As big as it can be, a building size mural on our baseball stadium features four young kids suited up for a game.  It preaches success to every driver and the youngsters riding with them.  Get Active, Stay Tobacco Free.

MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving founded a campaign in the memory of a mother’s young teen killed by a drunk driver.  Schools post crumbled cars in the middle of high school campuses.  Youth clubs and police visits to schools carry one unshakable message to students.  Don’t drink and drive.

Drugs?  Teens are told in no uncertain terms.  Don’t do them.  Radio commercials not only preach to young people, they preach to adults.  Talk to your kids, ask your kids where they are going, accept nothing less than success.  What if a parent did drugs in their past?  The radio exhorts parents to separate past failures from teaching success.  To help teens get over their problems, you have to get over yours. 

Tobacco, drunk driving, drugs…we have no problem preaching success.  And then, of course, there is sex.

Medical realities have created the necessity to lead children to healthy sexual choices…abstaining from sex until marriage.  We are in the midst of an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, STDs.  One in five people over the age of twelve…the age of twelve…has genital herpes, a lifelong incurable disease.

Statistical proof has been offered demonstrating we can lead children to successful lives where they abstain from sex.  And students are showing that even when they have had sex, given truth and encouragement, they can redefine their lives with sexual abstinence.

During the course of ten years with abstinence funding and growing educational programs, we have seen teen pregnancy rates decline.  This should be good news and inspire us to be more determined in our efforts and more clear in our message…leading teens to success.  It should make television producers more responsible for showing the consequences of teen sex and for leading the effort to show sexual promiscuity as irresponsible behavior rather than the great American pastime.

Instead, PBS is spending American taxpayer dollars to preach failure.  It has ignored the hundreds of teens in the Louisiana’s Governor’s Program for Abstinence. Instead, looking for a preacher for failure, it has chosen one teen in Texas who actively opposes the abstinence curriculum in her school.

Shelby is a Christian teenager in Lubbock, Texas.  At age 13, she pledged abstinence until marriage.  But at the ripe old age of 13, Shelby doesn’t believe in abstinence programs.  She is the perfect person to preach failure to America.

Abstinence…it’s the healthy choice.  It is a message that is working, against all odds, against the rampant sexual filth promoted by television and movies, encouraging teens to make the healthy choice.

Just imagine what teens could do if PBS producers, parents, educators, movie actors, friends, family, and legislators actually believed they could succeed.  Just imagine what teens would believe about sex if they could hear adults in leadership roles mentor and encourage them to succeed.  Just imagine for one minute that there existed a PBS producer who believed that teens deserved the truth about premarital sex and used all their resources to encourage them to abstain from sex.

Preaching failure…letting a 13-year-old student speak for them…producers are taking the easy way out.  Success, they are teaching, is not for everyone.  It may work for Shelby, but it won’t work for her schoolmates.

Focusing on failure…letting a 13-year-old student direct their cameras…producers are pointing out how easy it is to fail.  And if failure is inevitable, then why bother exhorting students to succeed.

If students have trouble succeeding in maintaining sexual abstinence, we have no further to look than to the mentors who lead the way.  Why would teens have any chance for success if we found our message on failure?

August 20, 2007:    Happy Teens

September 10, 2004:    Duh