Sex Education Aimed at Teen-Agers Turns to an Old Standby--Chastity

The characters look like Betty and Veronica from the cartoon strip “Archie,” one in a ponytail and the other wearing a cheerleader sweater. But this strip is called “Secondary Virginity” and the blonde is telling the other, “You know that ‘gift that you only give once?’ I already gave mine, so who cares anymore?” Her friend replies, “You can stop if you want to. If Bill could stop taking drugs and my dad could stop drinking, why can’t you stop having sex?”

The cartoon appears in a 61-page federally funded chastity workbook called “Sex Respect.” Aimed at junior high school students, it features slogans such as “Score on the Field, Not on Your Date” and “Don’t Be a Louse, Wait for Your Spouse.” It is listed by the state Board of Education in its proposed sex education guidelines, recently revised to stress chastity for teens as the birth control method of choice.

The word chastity may have an old-fashioned clank to it. But mirroring the latest approaches to drug and alcohol abuse, abstinence is now being revived nationwide to combat premarital sex and what is increasingly seen as its drawbacks--unwanted teen pregnancy, abortion, overpopulation, and sexually transmitted disease.

“Sexual abstinence is the only foolproof way of not getting pregnant,” said Jo Ann Gasper, deputy assistant secretary of population affairs, who oversees the federal Office of Adolescent Pregnancy. “The message to convey is you do not engage in sex until marriage,” she said.

The office, formed in 1981, will spend at least $5 million this year on programs such as Sex Respect to encourage teen-agers to delay or stop having sex. Another federal project will bring sex education and communication lectures to working parents on their lunch hour, she said.

Also joining in the “just say no to sex” message are some physicians and social workers, singers such as Jermaine (“We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off”) Stewart, and even Playboy magazine’s current Playmate of the Month.

But unprecedented, say historians, is official government support for what was once a religious issue. California’s Office of Family Planning, for example, sponsored a videotape urging abstinence for teens. Produced by the Right to Life League of Southern California, an anti-abortion organization, the $35,000 tape completed last month opens with a teen-age couple in bed watching a TV soap opera depiction of sex, said league spokeswoman Susan Carpenter-McMillan. The boy and girl consider that they could become parents and, realizing they have no contraceptives, decide not to have sex. Testimonials and rock music follow.

Pending state approval, the video will also be listed as an optional educational tool in the state Board of Education guidelines, Carpenter-McMillan said.

Earlier this year, at a cost of $300,000, the U.S. Agency for International Development distributed a pro-chastity rock song and video called “Cuando Estamos Juntos” (“When We Are Together”) in Latin America. In it, Latin pop singers Tatiana and Johnny sing, “You will see that I’m right when I say no even though my heart is burning.” A follow-up study to assess effectiveness is under way and a sequel called “Detente” (“Wait”) is planned, an agency spokeswoman said.

Some claim chastity programs are needed because contraceptive education, mostly through Planned Parenthood Federation programs, hasn’t checked the growth of unwanted pregnancy which, according to one estimate, affects 40% of today’s 20-year-old women. Nearly half of American teen-agers aged 15 to 19 are sexually active, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit reproductive health research organization in New York.

Result of Ignorance

“Planned Parenthood pushes the fact that your parents have not taught you correctly,” said Cherie Smith, founder of Aunt Cherie’s Home in Bakersfield, a home for unwed mothers. “In every single case (of unwanted teen pregnancy) it started out with a family crisis, then a month or two later the girl got pregnant. It’s family cooperation and discussion that will (stop unwanted pregnancies), not teaching them to rebel against the only authority they know.”

According to its executive director David Andrews, Planned Parenthood also promotes abstinence and more sex education involving parents, as well as school-linked clinics, ads for contraceptives on TV, more focus on male responsibility, and continued rights to abortion.

“Our opposition has traditionally felt that ignorance is better,” he said. “We know the opposite is true. More unwanted pregnancies result from ignorance than responsible sex education backed up by birth control and contraceptive services.”

No studies have yet compared the effectiveness of chastity programs or counseling as opposed to contraceptive use. But Douglas Kirby, director of research at the Center for Population Options in Washington, said classroom sex education programs appear to have little effect on behavior. “It seems rather likely the same would be true of abstinence programs,” he added.

Some moral conservatives hope that their chastity lectures will replace birth control information altogether.

Volunteer counselors do not mention contraceptives at 2,200 “crisis pregnancy” or “abortion alternative” centers nationwide, said Sister Paula Vandegaer, a social worker with Los Angeles-based International Life Services, which serves as a clearinghouse for the centers. Women who come to the centers for free pregnancy tests and test negative are given chastity counseling, she said.

Such counseling occurs “spontaneously,” said Debi Stopnik, 30, director of the Huntington Beach Life Center, an affiliate of the Orange County Right to Life League, which counsels 400 women a year. “I say ‘Look at you. You’re a beautiful 15-year-old girl. What you’ve got is so special, you don’t have to give it to anybody who walks up. Simply say no.’ ”

While girls in their first year of sexual activity are “receptive,” those with multiple partners “just laugh at you,” Sister Vandegaer said. “Their life style is around sex. We don’t suggest they go on contraceptives.”

‘Worse Than No Counseling’

“In some ways chastity counseling is worse than no counseling at all,” attorney Gloria Allred said. “Since it is not going to be effective for most young women, it deprives them of viable knowledge that would safeguard them,” said Allred, who last year obtained an injunction against 25 Southern California Right to Life League counseling centers for conducting pregnancy tests without a medical license. The tests are now conducted off-site.

Inducing shame over sexual behavior is highly correlated with increased teen-age pregnancy rates, said Linda Gordon, history professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of “Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A History of Birth Control in the United States.”

Gordon said chastity was also championed in the United States from about 1910 to 1925, an era marking the beginning of unchaperoned dating, but eventually died out.

“In my mind, what happened then will happen this time. Fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t think one can stop certain kinds of sexual activity by moralizing about it,” she said. “It hasn’t happened in the past and it’s unlikely to happen now.”

Premarital sexual activity in the United States has been gradually on the rise since the turn of the century, Gordon said. “By 1920, studies suggest about half of all middle-class women had had premarital sexual experience.”

In fact, teen-age pregnancy rates were higher in the 1950s than they are now, she said; the difference today being that fewer women marry as a result.

The current chastity movement, part of a growing general conservatism, is unprecedented but understandable as a backlash to the prolonged period of sexual permissiveness and practice sparked during the ‘60s, she said.

A New Awareness

Sevgi Aral, a sociologist with the sexually transmitted disease division of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, said that the fear of catching acquired immune deficiency syndrome, herpes and other sexually transmitted diseases, the natural conservatism of middle-aged baby boomers, and disenchantment with the women’s movement have all contributed to a new awareness that “perfect happiness does not comes with perfect sexual liberation.”

At least half of all teens are not sexually active, and those who are have sex sporadically, she said. Seventeen percent of teens are “practicing abstainers,” Aral added.

Last year, a dozen students joined the Anti-Sex League, a chastity support group formed at Cal State Long Beach. Some considered the group a joke, but one 18-year-old student remarked to the press: “(Celibacy) gives me freedom. If I put sex totally out of the question, I’m not worried about anything when I’m with a female.”

Pregnancy and disease aside, some physicians argue that sexual intimacy should be deferred until at least 17 or 18, the average age at which a sense of identity has been achieved, said Dr. Adele Hoffman, clinical professor of pediatrics at UC Irvine and author of the textbook “Adolescent Medicine.”

“Often very early intercourse, say under 14 or 15, is not completely consentual and that obviously has ill effects,” said Frank Furstenberg, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist who has written extensively on teen-age sexuality. But he said, when intercourse is by mutual consent, there is no evidence it produces ill effects for boys, and for girls, “the quality of evidence is really poor.”

“Somewhere between the ages of 13 and 20, most kids begin to have sex. Too early,” he said, “could be 13 or 18 depending on whether the kid assumes responsibility for preventing pregnancy.”

Wide Range of Programs

Currently, sex education programs in public schools are determined by state guidelines and are offered as electives by local school districts. Across the country, programs range from elementary reproductive charts to “telling them everything and providing contraceptives,” said Beth Fredrick, of the Alan Guttmacher Institute. According to the institute, 36% of all U.S. public high schools offer a sex education course, compared with 38% of Catholic high schools and 24% of other private schools.

A pioneering chastity program, the Postponing Sexual Involvement Series, now being implemented in eighth-grade classes in Atlanta and Jonesboro, Ga., and Durham, N.C., is based on a given value: “You ought not to have sex at a young age,” said the program’s creator, Dr. Marion Howard, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga.

The program is being disseminated to 60,000 Georgia youth through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which will also test the results. The series also has been adapted by the Northern Michigan Planned Parenthood affiliate and selected by the Michigan Department of Social Services as a model for a statewide “say no” program.

The Sex Respect curriculum was written by Coleen Kelly Mast, a Kankakee, Ill., high school teacher, using a $300,000 grant from the federal government. Last spring, the program was tested in high schools in Fort Scott, Kan.; St. Louis; Chicago; Appleton, Wis.; and Bradley, Ill.

With workbooks for junior and senior high school students, their teachers and parents, the program promotes abstinence--even for the sexually active--with readings on dating, assertiveness and self-confidence. It includes exercises, tests, cartoons and charts and suggests that the topics of birth control, homosexuality and masturbation be covered at home. (Under proposed state guidelines, however, sex education teachers are urged to include such topics with a non-judgmental attitude.)

More than 2,000 copies of the program have been ordered nationwide, said author Mast. “The phone rings early in the morning to late at night,” she said. In between teaching workshops and training Sex Respect teachers, she is forming a National Institute for Chastity Education, a clearinghouse to disseminate programs that “promote chastity for everybody.”

‘The Same Temptations’

Carol Sewell of Chino, chapel coordinator for the Southern California Christian School in Anaheim, said the curriculum will be used at the school this fall. “There’s no difference between Christian adolescents and non-Christian adolescents. They have the same hormones and the same temptations. All they need is guidelines and someone to show them the benefits of how to avoid these situations.”

Teens interviewed at random reacted differently to the possibility of chastity lessons.

“Most people wouldn’t understand it,” said one boy, a seventh-grader from Anaheim. “They’d say, ‘What’s sex?’ ”

“Some would look at it and laugh, but some would listen,” his 14-year-old neighbor said. Both said they had received a lot of “say no” advice to drugs and alcohol, and would appreciate a similar program about sex.

“That’s what I was always told--just say no,” said a 17-year-old Santa Ana girl, who has been sexually active for four years. She said she didn’t know whether chastity programs would deter teens from having sex. “Most kids want to see what it’s like, to experience it. It seems like everybody’s so into being like everybody else.”

High school students surveyed about a script of the joint Office of Family Planning/Right to Life abstinence video also had mixed reactions.

“I feel there are unbelievable things in this film and they would make teens lose interest,” wrote one. “It seems they (the actors) are almost all against premarital sex. That’s a little unrealistic,” wrote another.

But another wrote, “It will release some of the pressure. I know now I’m not the only one who’ll wait.”

“No one strategy is going to work,” said Johanne Dixon, head of a federally funded sexual postponement project of the National Urban League, a social services organization for blacks and other minorities. Targeted to parents of young adolescents, the Urban League project focuses on improving communication and self esteem. It is now being tested in four cities: Colorado Springs, Detroit, Dallas and Tampa.

Parents are taught how to control their children’s lives by teaching them to say no to several things including sexual activity, Dixon said.

Because most teens are unsupervised from 3 to 6 p.m., parents also are taught to offer alternatives to idleness such as church groups, music or dance lessons and volunteer work and they are encouraged to institute rules such as curfews, she said.

Parents need to be involved in all aspects of a child’s life, she added. “For instance, how well they are doing in school and life has a relationship on whether or not they are sexually active. Kids who feel whole in other areas of life start out later sexually than those not that comfortable with themselves who feel unloved, unwanted and neglected.”

“We’re still at the point where it’s not at all clear whether any of those (chastity) programs will have any effect whatsoever,” said sociologist Furstenberg. Meanwhile, he warned that adolescents may end up being caught in the cross fire of the chastity wars.

“They’re often just as confused as they can be by the way adults handle the issue.”