US teen sex statistics show ‘disheartening’ trend

Carolyn Moynihan

Birth rates among teenagers are on the rise again in the United States after large declines between 1991 and 2005, according to a report from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Other sexual health indictors also have flattened or worsened in what the CDC calls a “disheartening” reversal. Predictably, there are calls for “better sex education” -- meaning more stuff about condoms and pills, evidently.

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/us_teen_sex_statistics_show_disheartening_trend/

Farah Fawcett cancer likely HPV STD

ABC news finds doctor who says, "So what? Don't stigmatize it..."http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=7939402&page=1They don't get it, the reason to make it known and clear is simple. It is easy to prevent.And meanwhile we have a number of sex ed groups who teach that if it isn't vaginal, it isn't sex. A lot of kids believe it, and so the anal cancers and oral and throat cancers caused by HPV continue to rise. They are out there teaching that there's no stigma involved too. Less stigma, more death. There's an advertising jingle.Eric Richardson, M.D.

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Throwing oil on the blaze of teenage sex

Carolyn Moynihan

From the country that brought you the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe -- television ads for condoms and abortion. Will the British government never get it? The more “harm reduction” they go in for, the worse the problem gets. Friday last saw the end of a three-month consultation by the government’s broadcasting standards watchdog, the BCAP, on a proposal to allow abortion clinics to advertise on TV before 9pm. Condom ads, currently confined to one channel, would also be shown in the earlier time slot. Pro-life pregnancy counselling services could also advertise -- if they could afford it -- but would have to make it clear that they do not refer for abortion, “so that delays do not result in medical complications,” as one news report puts it. It would be too bad, wouldn't it, if women had time to think about what they were doing.
http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/throwing_oil_on_the_blaze_of_teenage_sex/

Sex Without Intimacy: No Dating, No Relationships

by Brenda Wilson
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105008712&ft=1&f=1001

Morning Edition, June 8, 2009 ¡P The hookup — that meeting and mating ritual that started among high school and college students — is becoming a trend among young people who have entered the workaday world. For the many who are delaying the responsibilities of marriage and child-rearing, hooking up has virtually replaced dating. It is a major shift in the culture over the past few decades, says Kathleen Bogle, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University.Young people during one of the most sexually active periods of their lives aren't necessarily looking for a mate. What used to be a mate-seeking ritual has shifted to hookups: sexual encounters with no strings attached.

The science of sex

Marcia Segelstein - Guest Columnist -
Thanks to medical science, we now know that smoking cigarettes is unhealthy. It can lead to diseases like emphysema and lung cancer, and increase the risks of heart disease and stroke. So we have acted swiftly on that information. In one generation, our attitude about smoking has undergone a remarkable transformation. Where smoking was once commonplace, and homes everywhere had ashtrays, even if only for visiting smokers, today it's almost shocking to see someone light up. Banned from airplanes, offices and many restaurants, smoking – and smokers – are viewed with a kind of disdain at worst, pity at best.

TV shows and movies rarely show people smoking, except when they're villains. The dangers of smoking are taught to young people with almost religious zeal. Most modern parents who found evidence that their teenagers were smoking would haul them down to the nearest cancer ward for a close up look at the consequences of smoking, or at least to their doctor, who would undoubtedly back up parental warnings that smoking is dangerous to their health.

Now substitute the words "casual sex" for "smoking." Thanks to medical science, we now know that casual sex is unhealthy. Not just because of the myriad of sexually transmitted diseases it can cause, to say nothing of the unwanted pregnancies it can create, but because of what it does to the human brain. Two doctors, Joe McIlhaney and Freda McKissic Bush, explain what we now know about sex and the human brain in their book, Hooked: New Science on How Casual Sex Is Affecting Our Children.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Perspectives/Default.aspx?id=567964

WETZSTEIN: U.S. narcissism out of control

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/17/wetzstein-us-narcissism-out-control/

Back in Love and Economics, I made the point that finding a balanced perspective on your own value in relation to other people is one of the hardest things to do.

And in Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World, I connected narcissism to our sex lives. The sexual revolution transformed sex from being the deepest community-building activity into a consumer good. That just has to fundamentally shift the social balance between outward-looking, community-building, other-regarding behavior radically toward inward-looking, self-preoccupied, self-regarding behavior.

Post and comments by Jennifer

Sermons on Sex Cause A Stir in Alabama

Apparently a new series of sermons is getting quite a lot of attention in Good Hope, Alabama.
It's one thing for a church in a big city like Dallas or Atlanta to tackle the ticklish topic of sex. It blends in with the urban scene. It's another thing when a small-town congregation puts up billboards with the phrase "Great sex: God's way" on rural highways to promote a sermon series. You can't even legally buy beer in Cullman County, and a preacher is talking about S-E-X on Sunday morning?

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Blog/Default.aspx?id=450694

Sexual insanity

Bill Muehlenberg

Week by week the stories become more sensational. Blogs were still buzzing over California’s “octomom”, Nadya Suleman, when the story of Alfie Patten, a baby-faced British 13-year-old and putative father, grabbed the international headlines. In Australia, where I live, an appeal court has awarded a lesbian duo hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for getting two babies from IVF treatment rather than one.

Strangely enough, such dramatic consequences of the erosion of marriage and the explosion of out-of-control sexuality were foreseen -- in some instances long ago. In 1968 Will and Ariel Durant’s important book, The Lessons of History appeared. In it they said, The sex drive in the young is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/sexual_insanity/

Mindful Eating and Mindless Sex?

George Will's column today entitled "Prudes at Dinner, Gluttons in Bed" discusses a new Policy Review essay by Mary Eberstadt, who is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Eberstadt's essay is called "Is Food the New Sex?" and asks the question "What happens when, for the first time in history, adult human beings are free to have all the sex and food they want?" notes that:

One might think, she says, either that food and sex would both be pursued with an ardor heedless of consequences, or that both would be subjected to analogous codes constraining consumption. The opposite has happened -- mindful eating and mindless sex. If food is the new sex, Eberstadt asks, "where does that leave sex?" She says it leaves much of sex dumbed-down -- junk sex akin to junk food.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Blog/Default.aspx?id=429648

Reinventing campus sexual culture

by Ryan T. Anderson

Living a virtuous life can be a lonely struggle at college, but a new network of students and professors is changing that.

February 2005 saw the launch of a new student group at Princeton, the Elizabeth Anscombe Society, named for the famed Cambridge philosophy professor, star student and successor of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and intellectual defender of traditional sexual ethics. The Anscombe Society set for itself a lofty mission: We aim to foster an atmosphere where sex is dignified, respectful, and beautiful; where human relationships are affirming and supportive; where motherhood is not put at odds with feminism; and where no one is objectified, instrumentalized, or demeaned. We aim to increase the level of respect among members of the university community who disagree on these issues as we explore our common understandings as well as our differences. Lastly, we hope to provide those students who strive to understand, live, and love their commitment to chastity and ‘traditional’ sexual and familial ethics with the support they need to make their time at Princeton the best it can be.

Read the entire article.