Splicetoday

Sex
Mar 20, 2008, 10:59AM

Getting What They Deserve

Sex education is on the rise and teen STDs are still going up? Maybe the media should stop looking for easy explanations.

Std.jpg?ixlib=rails 2.1

The New York Times reported on March 12 that a National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey showed 25 percent of teenage girls in the United States have an STD. I suspect it was the first time that the phrase “irritating vaginal discharge” appeared on the front page of a major newspaper. Medical releases of this sort often warrant skepticism because of contemporary statistical overload, but the fact that this particular one appeared in such a high profile daily reflects how nervous our society is getting about the intimacies of kids’ sexual behavior. It’s unlikely that a quarter of teen females are actually walking around with an STD, it’s clear that suit-wearing professionals are concerned enough about youth sexuality that they’ll crunch numbers and produce a slanted survey to prove their point.

The consensus view would tell us that the reason for such a sexually gung-ho teen population stems from that very front page, which featured three different articles about Eliot Spitzer, whose own sexual habits cost him governorship of New York. Common sense would tell us that as long as VH1 is showing that guy from Poison trying to slay hookers with a big blonde wig on, or the check out line at Shaw’s blasts sex at us from all angles, this trend of increasing teen sexual activity will continue… because this supposed quarter of teenage girls has bought this Pop-Culture Hollywood Mad-House story of sex everywhere hook line and sinker.

But sexual activity is not really the issue here. The issue is disease. If this unorthodoxly graphic article in the Times is indicative of one thing, it’s that people are doing everything they can to inform the youth of this country about the abundance of diseases they might contract. Sex Ed is more prevalent now than ever—including commercials about genital herpes on Nickelodeon—and yet the number of STDs is still rising.

If it were a lack of education, or even the inundation of sexually explicit material found in the mass media, then it would be one tricky bastard to explain the remaining 75 percent of the teenage population that hasn’t gotten infected.

But it’s not tricky. Maybe these kids with herpes deserve some fucking herpes. Maybe that’s what’s coming to them. There’s an enormous bank of reliable sex-ed material available, and teenagers are over-informed by pop culture about sexual practices—and yet a quarter of all teenage girls are not attentive enough to any of the abundant sources on how to prevent STDs, many of which appear in the same media.

It’s hard to see why they would pay more attention, however. How can we hold people responsible for what information they embrace when the media’s presentation of a sex-crazed world is no more realistic or healthy than the bush-league scare tactics that educators release on a regular basis? Maybe this game of slanting reality in both pop culture and academia and government is breeding a younger generation of people who so stupefied that they don’t know what to believe at all.

Discussion
  • Hey buddy, for an article that throws around a lot of statistics you come off as suprisingly ignorant. First off, 25% of girls having an STD is beleivable because there are a whole range of things that qualify as a STD. The biggest one is HPV. This virus has over 43 identified serotypes, only 4 of which will cause symptoms in humans (genital warts and cervical dysplasia leading to potential cervical cancer). Oh, and hold your breaths...there is recent evidence that shows that HPV can transverse a latex condom. Not to mention that genital warts are located on parts of skin that condoms do not cover. The endemic levels of HPV will probably continue to rise due to early sexual debuts and increased partners. Oh but, the vast majority of these infections will not lead to disease, yet estimates seem to include them. As for other stuff, spreading syphillis, gonnorhea and company is not always due to incompetence. Of these 'vaginal discharges,' gonnorhea is really the only one that will be symptomatic 100% of the time. A big chunk of Syphillis and Chlamydia in women can be asymptomatic, not an excuse but certainly a confounder to be put against your 'desrve some fucking herpes' comment. If I remember some of my classes correctly, teen pregnancy rates are falling and HIV transmissions are falling. A lot of the issue at hand is that certain diseases have been switching demographics. HIV is becoming a young black women's disease, a group that no one thinks about when they think AIDS. I think the times article and the article above just show how sensationalism still sells in media. We need better education yes but not just in our schools. This is a complex dynamic issue, and a blanket 25% has STDs (ohhhh scary) does not do the issue justice.

    Responses to this comment
  • I believe the same article said that young black women have STDs at a rate of 50%. There has to be something larger going on for that to be the case. I'm all for education, but as a former teenager so much of it comes off as preachy and irrelevant. There needs to be broader of societal discussion on these issues--basically, sex needs to have less of a stigma associated with it. If people are better informed and more comfortable with sex and its options and alternatives I feel like people won't have to hide their sexual activity--something that can keep them from getting tested, disclosing the number of partners they've had or even buying condoms (a harrowing experience for a teenager!). Education is only part of the problem. We need more front page articles to make this an open issue. Maybe some of the folks on Spring Break could teach lessons on how bring sex into the open--they seem to have no reservations on the issue at all!

    Responses to this comment
  • Not exactly "won't someone please think of the children."

    Responses to this comment
  • This was so obviously written by a man... Nobody deserves herpes, and I'm not sure that you deserve to be writing this column. I'm a recent college graduate, and at least 2 out of every 5 girls that I knew in college had some sort of STD, weather it was HPV or something else. I knew several girls who were diagnosed with Cancer because of the HPV and 2 girls who had their cervics removed. This is an issue. You may think that our young men and women are over-educated when it comes to sex ed, but you are SO wrong. You just are. But you are right about the pop culture media having a bad influence on peoples minds. Men look at STD's and sexual health issues differently, they understand them differently. You don't hear about all of the personal horror stories from women like we do, it's too taboo... On a lighter note here is a fun PSA from Canada about sex ed, it's an oldie but a goodie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNOeiLFeUsc

    Responses to this comment

Register or Login to leave a comment