Saturday, October 27, 2007

Contraceptives Make You Wanton

... or at least so Michael Coren seems to think:

If it's true, however, it's extremely disturbing. And if it's true the solution is to stop the girls having sex, not to make it easier for the others to join in. Otherwise it's like assuming that by ignoring the poor we'll prevent poverty.


Dear god this man is clinically insane. While I realize that it's one thing to encourage sexual activity between a twelve year old and adults. Then there's Coren's solution to treat normal sexual experimentation as "criminal":

The boys involved should be charged, the parents of the girls investigated and, perhaps, the abused children taken into care, because this is illegal and it certainly is abuse.


No, Michael - teenagers have been experimenting sexually since the dawn of time. Arbitrary laws and criminalization of that behaviour are stupid in the most extreme, resulting in cases like this one.

While I may have some reservations about making hormonal birth control available to twelve year olds, I think Mr. Coren's position is derived from a moral ideal that neither exists nor has it ever existed.

But in a way none of this is at all surprising. Little girls have been dressing like hookers, and boys like pimps, for years. The free market appears to care not a damn about morality if it can make a profit, and its usual opponents, the left, seems obsessed with promoting sexual anarchy and abolishing absolutes.


Oh yes, that old saw - it's all the fault of how people dress, and after all we've started to lose some of the social inhibitions that came over with the puritans when this region was settled.

The line that access to birth control makes people "wanton" or irresponsible is a crock. It was a crock a decade or more in the past, and remains a crock today. Teenagers have always experimented as their bodies change. Coren's horror is at the age that some are beginning to become sexually active. What he forgets is that there has been evidence about for years about "precocious puberty" where the process we are used to thinking of as starting at the age of 12 or so starts much earlier, sometimes as young as 8.

Coren also is ignoring - in a classically male fashion - the simple fact that it is the female who carries the burden of "consequences" from sexual activity. He's not going to get pregnant, she is - with all of the implications that carries. The neo-Christian "you should feel guilty about sex" line creates problems - and some of them are even worse than what Coren thinks is a current problem.

Used irresponsibly, it has reduced women to the level of the worst of men and transformed sexuality from a loving coupling of two people to a mere lustful exchange of bodily fluids.


Ah yes, contraceptives make you horny - got it. Sure. When Coren figures out that it has a lot more to do with the human mind, and a soup of hormonal chemistry than something as simple as a condom, he might start to understand why his "criminalize sex" line is doomed to fail.

I'm not saying that you provide unfettered access to sexual information, but rather that parents should lead by example. That doesn't mean not talking about the subject or ignoring it, but rather by being up front and honest with their children. Teach responsible behaviour, understanding of consequences and how to say "no". Access to contraceptives is a safety, and in an era where ignorance can be fatal, I'd much rather my offspring be able to protect themselves...and if that means making contraceptives available when they are teens, so be it. Better that than to learn that a child entering adulthood is doomed from a fatal infection, or is pregnant before they are ready to be a parent because some prude like Coren tried to make them criminals for being human.

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