A debate on telly has stimulated me to post this, quite intriguingly. As the title of the post suggests, it was about sex education/teaching of abstinence in schools.
We live in hard, beleaguered times. Our government is a pathetic mess of idiot politicians out of touch with the people they are supposedly in place to protect. On the one hand, they want safe sex to be taught in schools. On the other, they want 24 hour pubs open. A slightly confusing message would be the understatement of the year. The subject of STIs comes up in the debate, and eventually AIDS. Has anyone stopped to think, in the 'let's-have-science-cure-all-known-ailments' rush, that perhaps some illnesses can't be cured for a reason? Perhaps AIDS is nature's way of letting us know that the human race is erring?
I had a brilliant thought the other day, and the thought was that we could solve the NHS funding crisis by charging for the treatment and removal of STIs. It would encourage generally more monogamous relationships, and make a fuckload of cash to boot. Unfortunately it will probably never happen beacuse it's too radical ... these days you have fucking anti- and pro- everything. You can't please all the people all the time.
There was a brilliant argument from one (pro-abstinence) teen girl who thought it was right to value herself and her body, rather than just give it up to Joe Bloggs. The only problem is that a dire Western society such as ours, sleaze and smut in which we are all complicit, only keeps bringing down the people that want to escape. Sometimes you just have to be your own person, I guess.
The Foo Fighters had it right when they sang "what have we done with innocence, one in ten...." It seems that children no longer have the privilege of maintaining their own innocence about the world, and everything must be short-skirts-on-MTV, rappers telling girls to suck their dicks, teens getting free condoms in schools and fumbling around in the nearest park wasteland because they have nothing better to do. It's chilling how correct Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is. Apparently some LEAs have also instructed teachers to start telling primary school kids as young as 7 or 8 what a "clitoris" is. Not to take the moral high ground or preach or anything, but that is just outrageous. If ever there was something that you could justifiably be in an uproar about, that would be it. I do believe I am right in asserting that our generation (and by that, I mean everyone currently aged from about 19-20 upward to 45) is probably the last to experience such innocence. Innocence is just like virginity. Once you've lost it, you've lost it for good.
University experiences also could be discussed here. How often have I seen the familiar nightclub scenario, a drunk girl surrounded by eight or so men, like dogs surrounding a stunned fox, swooping in for the metaphorical kill? She does nothing to try shoo them away, but invariably invites them to come closer, grind closer, feel. In my eyes, that girl is of little consequence to me, as are the men. It seems as though the ideology of "I'm entitled to have a little fun when I'm not around my parents" must pervade the general consensus, that consequentially, unviersity must be little more than one long shag-fest. It does invite the question, if a girl so valued her body, held herself in such high esteem, why she would do something like this? And the only reasonable answer I can think of is that she must have very little self-esteem, or be particularly insecure in such a way that carrying out this one-night stand must somehow fulfill some kind of Freudian need from within.
Please don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say that boy meets girl, falls in love, gets married, the end. Of course life isn't that simple, and I'm not expecting it to be for me, or for anyone else. If you want to win the scrum point, you're gonna have to get your hands dirty.
ad astra per ardua.
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