Abstinence isn’t the best advice

There I am, sitting on my couch, minding my own business. The television is on a little… There I am, sitting on my couch, minding my own business. The television is on a little loud, but I’m too bored to care. That is, until the world’s most cynically marketed product blares its advertisement in my face.

You know the ones I’m talking about – no, not Rascal Scooters. It’s one of the few products where competing brands are all advertising in the same way. A young, slightly weird looking – let’s say, less than conventionally handsome – dude is shopping for his weekly needs in a grocery store. He pops the top off some three-lettered cylinder, sprays his torso and is then mauled by swarms of women or another where a stampede of ladies converges on basically the same guy.

And a recent ad features a comely young lady who saunters toward the camera and offers a sexual favor should you smell of her brand of aerosoled aroma. There’s no more subtlety to the sex they’re selling, and it’s not fair, damn it.

I mean, for four bucks, who wouldn’t buy a tiny canister of, well, anything if people are telling you models will now look your way. I, personally, don’t need anything but my own natural musk to get the lasses’ attentions. But part of my job as revered Pitt News columnist is to look out for the common man; and these commercials have to stop before they suck more paychecks out of Oakland – and allowances out of the South Hills.

Why hasn’t the Bush Administration’s morality brigade forced these seductive sirens from the airwaves? I mean, they’re abstinence-only guys, right? Because I swear that these commercials stand in the way of a sex-free America; I swear.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that these ad campaigns are the root cause holding back the $1.5 billion in federally funded abstinence-only education for curing the sweaty desires of our young people!

Mathematica Policy Research, the group Bush had monitoring the progress and results of his no-sex-ed program, released their conclusions on Friday. You probably didn’t hear about it because it was hidden in an old shoe box, under a filthy commode, inside a locked wash room whose door reads “beware of the leopard.”

Traditionally, documents released on Fridays receive little coverage in the press, so the release of unimportant information is reserved for this day. And yet somehow this little report snuck its way into the Friday dump, which is surprising considering how open they usually are about bad news.

You see, the hundreds of millions of tax dollars spent each year to get kids to pinky swear they won’t do it is not working – like, at all.

Compared to a control group who received no-sex education apart from the biology bits, both groups have nearly identical percentages of sinners. Those who stayed abstinent, those who had unprotected sex and those who had multiple partners are equally represented – except that those in the abstinence-only classes had slightly more students with four or more sexual partners.

Although there are growing numbers joining my school of thought, there remain many who claim that body-spray commercials aren’t the problem – or at least, that there’s more to it. Abstinence-only education doesn’t work, never has and never will, they say.

“These programs fail miserably in actually helping young people behave more responsibly when it comes to their sexuality,” said William Smith, vice president for public policy of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S.

Unfortunately for the kids of Ohio, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Montana, New Jersey and Wisconsin, sexocrats like Smith have convinced these states to abandon millions in federal funding for these programs. These states, who parted ways with the feds, issue pithy statements that appeal with “evidence” and “reality” as if either matters to Jimmy Dobson or any of Pat Robertson’s Regent University sleeper cells in the executive office.

I say, sure, in this world upon which AIDS and HIV roam, it is the obligation of those in charge to make sure the young people in this country are informed on how to take care of their bodies. But if we pretend that kids don’t have sex, that should be just as good – at least, let’s not constantly remind them of the sex they’re not having by taking AXE or TAG or ASS off and out of the air.

Arun smells just fine, thank you. E-mail him at thefamilyatomics@gmail.com