Category Archives: Sex Education

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

April 24, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

Once upon a time, if you wanted to know if he loved you, it was a simple matter of asking a daisy flower.  Pluck a petal, he loves me.  Pluck another, he loves me not. Plucking petal after petal, down to the center of the daisy, love, not, love, not, love…He loves me!  Or, depending on the daisy, He loves me not!

Once upon a time, it used to matter if he loved me or love me not.  Love was the point.  We were looking for love, and we weren’t shy about it.  Lucy loved Desi.  Mr. Cleaver loved Mrs. Cleaver.  And the Beatles celebrated She Loves You…Yeah, Yeah, Yeah…Yeah!

From the simple to the complex, the measure of love was always the measure of value rising from human activity.  On the personal level, love was sanctified in marriage.  On the social level, love was the source of power for great movements.

One can’t imagine Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, leadership of the civil rights movement without acknowledging its foundation of love.  Writing from a jail in Birmingham, he worked to explain his passion for opposing segregation.  Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, King wrote. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

King led demonstrations against segregation.  But he did so in love.  He never aimed to replace one system of injustice with another.  Standing on love, he exemplified his dream.

It is no mistake that King founded his social movement on non-violence.  Wife Coretta Scott King explained that the central element of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolence emanated from “his belief in a divine loving presence that binds all life.  This belief was the force behind all of my husband’s quests to eliminate social evil….”

Love, for King, was the fountain from which flowed justice, dignity, and dreams.  And as co-pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, King’s writings always turned to the One who epitomized ultimate love.

Christ, in one of his last moments as teacher to his disciples, expressed everything we can say about love, humility and sacrifice with one towel and a bowl of water.  “Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love….he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.” [John 13:1,4-5  NIV]

In the habit of explaining great truths in parables, Jesus created a living parable of sacrificial love, love that grows from humility, a love demonstration of the Golden Rule.  And just to make sure the disciples would clearly receive his teaching, he told them, “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.”  [John 13:14-16 NIV]

He loves me…a humble sacrifice done in love because you love me as you love yourself.  He loves me not…anything less.

A consideration of the fullest expression of human love shines a bright light on the culture of sex in America today.  It helps explain why foes of abstinence education fight with such furor and hostility against those who would raise sexual abstinence until marriage as a noble and expected standard of sexual behavior for young people.

This fight against abstinence education is, at its most fundamental level, an expression of an attempt to keep sex from being subordinated as a function of sacrificial love.  The fight against abstinence education is a struggle to maintain sex as an isolated function of two physical bodies, each seeking personal physical pleasure at the expense of what might be done to the other body.

Abstinence education restores the importance of love, humility and sacrifice as part of the sexual act.  It inspires students to value their sexuality as one dimension of their capacity to be loved and to give love.  This is a much bigger focus for sex than what has been promoted since birth control elevated Hugh Hefner as the cultural icon of human sex.  And it can’t be tolerated by those who pay homage to Hefner.

The sexual revolution was less about birth control than it was about divorcing us from the responsibility for the welfare of other human beings.  We were given permission to use others to gratify our physical sexual urges and ignore the consequences of loveless sex as collateral damage.  Babies in utero were redefined as tissue.  STDs were redefined as treatable illnesses.  And heartbreak was defined as a religious value.

He loves me.  My total welfare, economic, physical, social, emotional, relational, and spiritual is of greater importance to him than any physical shiver of sexual pleasure.

Anything less than that?  He loves me not.

____________________

New International Version (NIV), Copyright (c) 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society.  Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

October 24, 2005 –  TEENS AND SEX: How Many? So What?

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Teaching the Value of Love

February 20, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

“We don’t teach values.”  Sex educators fond of promoting condoms and birth control to teenagers are also fond of making this claim.  “We are values-neutral!”

It’s never been really clear to me just why they take such pride in these claims.  It seems to be a sideways admission that one has lived on the face of the earth for nearly forty years and has been unable to come to any conclusions about what really matters.

This prideful admission that no values are important enough to single out for passing on to our children was birthed in the 60s.  Bored with tradition, and encouraged by our relationship with science and the brave new world of space flights and men on the moon, America launched into an artistic love affair with hopelessness.

I distinctly remember crashing into this dark fantasy in 1969 as a freshman at Arizona State University.  A group of us freshmen on the sixth floor of Manzanita dorm packed into a car one Friday night and headed for the drive-in to see Midnight Cowboy.

From beginning to end, watching the movie, I couldn’t understand why this film had won the heart of America.  While viewers found it elevating to see the naive male prostitute Joe Buck and his sickly friend Ratso struggle to survive on the streets of New York City, they had to overlook the fact that Joe Buck and Ratso were lying, thieving thugs.

Their story could have been more cheaply and honestly told by standing a camera in the middle of the worst, dark New York crime infested streets and filming the muggings, beatings and killings that hurt people and landed perpetrators in jail.

In one case, real-life criminals were given cells and prisoner numbers.  Their attitudes and behaviors were considered hostile to civilized society, and they were expected to reform.

In the other case, celluloid criminals wore fancy duds paid for by wardrobe, showed up in Hollywood limos for a red-carpet walk down the aisle between the rich and famous, and walked away with an Oscar.

Our love affair with the crass and dark and hopeless and brutal and profane is also a love affair with failure.  We are failing to stake a claim on what our responsibility is for raising the next generation of Americans…our children.

The latest episode of focusing on failure is taking place at Orono High School in Maine.  Out of the hundreds of thousands of books available for educating freshman, the English department settled on “Girl, Interrupted.”  The school is defending their choice as “real.”  These memoirs of author Suzanna Kaysen’s hospitalization in a mental institution at age 18 contain graphic descriptions of sexual acts and suicide.

Is this the best picture of the “real” we can offer our children in a literature class?

Then, after freshman English, do we send our children to sex education for a lesson on how to put on a “real” condom because we tell them “real” children in the “real world” are going to have sex anyway.

And, finally, when parents come to school to demand answers and a change in the message of what “real” is and should be, do we tell them they are pushing their values on a school system where values should never exist?

Values?  Is there anything we do or say or think in our entire life that doesn’t involve making a value choice?  Values-neutral?  Who are they kidding?

If love makes the world go round, when are we going to elect this value as worth consideration in our movies, our songs, our English classes…and, most importantly…our sex education classes?

If you live in Orono, Maine, or in any other city where you care about the values we are teaching our young people, there is a great book to recommend to your high school English teachers.  The Art of Loving Well is a new and novel idea for many educators.  It is a book that knows the values that matter and takes the time to make them matter to young people.

This 340-page anthology of ethnically diverse selections, includes short stories, poems, essays, drama folk tales and myths that elevate the values that matter most for the happiness and future of our young people.

Values-neutral?  Impossible!  The Art of Loving Well lays claim to its responsibility for passing on worthwhile values to our children, helping adolescents learn responsible sexual and social values through good literature which reveals the complexity of life and love relationships.

English teachers…teachers of all kinds…are always teaching values.  “Reality” is a poor excuse for defending the kinds of books and movies we offer our children.  We offer it because it is real?

Love is real.  And if we want our children to be successful in love, then it’s about time we started teaching the values that matter most…the art of loving well.

October 10, 2005 – Wonder Love

February 21, 2005 – Sex Without Value

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TEEN SEX: How Many? So What?

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

October 24, 2005

The Picture of the Problem depends on who is taking the picture.  For us as parents, the picture that matters most to us is the family portrait hanging over the fireplace.  We focus our concerns on the circle of family photographs–in the faces of each of our children and grandchildren, precious lives we hug each morning, tickle each day, and tuck into bed each night.

For experts studying the Problem, our family pictures and our precious children disappear, buried under an avalanche of statistics.  This is just as much a part of the problem as the problem itself, creating a divergence in views between experts and parents.  We love our children, but who can love a statistic?

Years ago, reading about Andrew Carnegie in my seventh grade history book—for the first time, I realized one person could have millions of dollars in his own personal bank account.  Just imagine it!  What would it feel like to have a million dollars?  The numbers were huge–too big for my young mind.

So it is with teen pregnancy.  The numbers can be simply staggering.  Math teachers labor to impress children with the enormity of a number as large as a million.  One popular lesson has school children working to collect one million of something:  aluminum pop tabs from soda cans or printed letters on a newspaper page.  How far would one million dollar bills reach?  How high would a stack of one million pennies climb?

Thinking of one million pregnant teens, the mind goes blank.  A million?  Maybe the best way to understand the big numbers is to make them smaller.  In truth, the realities of teen pregnancy can best be understood by looking around us, to the lives of our family and friends.

I remember back to a friend in my eighth grade class in 1965, a quiet girl who dated a handsome dark-haired boy.  They weren’t the only “couple” of my eighth grade class.  For instance, Debbie was famous for kissing her boyfriend between classes, and Kathy was the envy of the girls because she went on a class hayride with heartthrob Bob, a source of school rumors and gossip for nearly two weeks.

But the quiet girl and the handsome, dark-haired boy were different.  They were serious.  And then one day, the quiet girl was gone.  Just like that.  Silently, the ripples of gossip carried the news across the classroom, “She’s pregnant.” And no one said anything more.

The choices in 1965 were limited.  In eighth grade, the quiet girl was too young for a shotgun marriage.  Abortion wasn’t legal, nor did it have social approval.  Although we didn’t discuss it, we all knew common practice dictated that she had been secreted off to a home for unwed mothers or to a family out of town where she gave birth to the baby and gave it up for adoption.

The next time I heard of a classmate being pregnant, I was a senior in American History–four years later.  A pretty, athletic girl walked through the desks and up to the front of the room with a withdrawal slip.  Mr. Halbert signed the paper, and she turned to face us on her walk out of the room.  Students moving out of our school always grabbed attention—there were so few of them who left, and, naturally, someone in the room had to ask, “Where’s she going?”  Again, ever so quietly, the news passed around the room, “She’s pregnant.”

A short time later, in May, I graduated from high school with plans to attend Arizona State University.  The birth control bill had just arrived on college campuses around the country, and I was on hand to witness the beginning of a quiet revolution.

Now, after 30 years of “controlling birth” with a pill, the best measure of social change is evident in the lives of the people I know:  in my own family, in the schools where I taught, with the students at my children’s high school, at church, and in the families of friends and neighbors.  Teen pregnancy is no longer a rare occurrence, something we hear of every four years or so.  We all know of young women and men who are parents—unwed teen parents.

And when pregnancy touches the life of a young person we love, there are simply no statistics to measure the impact on their lives.  Statistics are flat numbers, two dimensional counters that fill up governmental reports.  But they fail to illustrate the more personal significance of teen pregnancy for our children and for our nation.

When you hug your child tonight, when you pull the bedcovers under her chin, ask yourself if teen pregnancy is your only fear about teen sex.  If she gets pregnant, she will become the concern of statisticians.  They ask, “How many?”

But you’re the parent.  And you know the meaning of sex beyond the statistics.  Is that the best the experts have to offer us, a few pills or a patch to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg?  Parents have the heart to ask, “So what?”  And we know that the answer to this question is in the family photos on the mantel above the fireplace…in the lives that we cherish, no matter how few.

________________________

One million printed letters on a newspaper page would cover a bedroom wall eight feet high and six feet long; one million dollar bills end to end would reach 96.9 miles; and a stack of one million pennies would climb nearly one mile up into space, enough for four stacks of pennies as high as the Empire State Building.

 

April 11, 2005 – Why I Teach Abstinence

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Oral Sex: The Big Surprise

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

September 19, 2005

Oral sex is a leading story this week.  The Centers for Disease Control announced last Thursday that oral sex is a common practice among U.S. teens.

Once again, this report has spawned a public response filling column inches in newspapers and hours of air time on talk radio.  Evaluating the rate of oral sex among teens, Kristin Moore, president of Child Trends, declares to The Washington Post that, “…these numbers indicate this is a big concern.”

Indeed, radio talk show hosts are concerned.  They have picked up the story and are talking with listeners around the country.  Their listeners are concerned.  We are all concerned.  But are we surprised?

Not anymore.  One decade earlier, oral sex was a term largely confined to medical journals and sex-friendly publications.  It was a term limited to descriptions of private adult relationships.  Never did people link this behavior to adolescents.  Today Professor of Pediatrics Claire Brindis tells The Washington Post, “…we’re talking about a social norm.  It’s part of kids’ lives.”

If there is any surprise left about teens and oral sex, it is the surprise that so many adults and authorities on teen sex now consider oral sex a normative behavior for teens.  It is surprising to hear a radio listener tell Michael Medved that he would rather have his child  engage in oral sex than sexual intercourse.  “Is your child a son?” Medved asks.

“Yes,” the caller admits.  Medved pursues.  Would the caller sanction oral sex if his child were a daughter?  “No, I guess not.”

Dr. Brindis thinks we should give teens a stronger message about the risks of oral sex.  The surprise here is what she considers the stronger message.  “Maybe we need to do a better job of showing them they need to use condoms,” Brindis advocates in The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, the poster man and woman for oral sex are making news half way around the world.  As reported on Independent Online, “a rubber company in China has begun marketing condoms under the brand names Clinton and Lewinsky.”

Spokesperson Liu Wenhua of the Guangzhou Rubber Group, in a pre-sale promotion, was handing out 100,000 free Clinton and Lewinsky products.  Eventually, when sold in southern China, a box of 12 will cost $3.72 and $2.35 respectively.  Liu, obviously a clever marketing strategist, points out, “The Clinton condom will be the top of our line.”

The big surprise of the CDC story on oral sex and teens is that there is no surprise.  As we tally up the news stories and commentary, the real surprise is that we appear to have lost our resolve to consider oral sex a blight on the sexual innocence of our children and a threat to their health and welfare.

A father endorses oral sex for his son because it can’t cause pregnancy.

A health expert and professor declares our best strategy to counter the fad of oral sex is to do a better job of teaching teens how to use condoms for oral sex.

And our nation’s highest officer, known around the world as a proud proponent of oral sex as a method of avoiding “sexual relations” and adultery, now has his own name on a line of condoms in China.

Where, in all of this, is the clear and authoritative call to teens, “STOP!”?  Clearly, we have lost our ability to be surprised.  But have we also lost our ability to cry out to our teens with absolute concern for their emotional and physical health?

Have we sunk so low that we assuage our pain at seeing young people engage in risky behaviors by helping these teens justify the risks as manageable and preferable to making a baby?

Preferring the path of least resistance, we have abandoned our children because it is just too much trouble to hold the line of defense for their protection.  The big surprise about teens and oral sex is that there is no big surprise.

 

September 10, 2004 – Duh

October 29, 2004 – Food for the Brain

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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

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