June 19, 2005

The danger of seatbelts

Posted in Uncategorized at 10:00 pm by Alissa

I was reading my “Friend Exchange” (朋友通信) journal the other day.  This is a part-scholarly, part-community building Chinese publication on lesbian and gay issues a friend of mine passed along.  Although it’s an underground publication, you would never know by its professional-looking publishing at Tsingdao University and the support it receives from the Ford Foundation.   What makes it underground is that it is not sold publicly or available through “official channels.”

Anyways, in the “Friend Exchange” was a transcript of the CCTV news forum show entitled “Homosexuality: Avoiding it is no better than facing it” (同性恋：回避不如正视) which aired on Dec 2, 2004.  While reading it, I ran into an inspiring quote:

“Like now, when we are trying to prevent AIDS, we can finally publicize the issue of using condoms.  For a number of years, we would publicize the issue all the time but it would just be silenced because it received strong opposition.  But now we can finally publicly discuss it.  I really appreciated the words a scholar once said to me, ‘It’s just like advocating or requiring the use of vehicular seatbelts.  We require people to use seatbelts, not because we want them to get in a car accident but because we want them to have a precaution measure.’” — Hu Pei-cheng

It got me thinking: yeah, what about seatbelts?  Isn’t promoting seatbelts just giving people a license to kill?  If you know that you are safer while wearing a seatbelt, why not take more risks?  Why not drive faster and be a little more reckless?  You have a seatbelt after all!  Well, ok, maybe grown adults are more rational than this.  But what about the young adults who just got their license?  When we tell them to use seatbelts, we are virtually saying “it’s ok to drive recklessly.”  If we really wanted to have our kids be safe, we wouldn’t let have access to seatbelts at all.  This would teach them to drive cautiously all the time!  Besides, seatbelts aren’t a 100% effective anyhow.  We’re lying to our kids by telling them that seatbelts are safe.  Actually there are stats that show 34% of teen fatalities in car accidents were of teens who were wearing their seatbelt (for adults it’s 38.5%)!  The truth is that seatbelts are dangerous!  It’s the promotion of seatbelts that has lead to all the teen car accidents in recent years.  We should start calling our legislators and telling them to introduce legislation to stop promoting seatbelts on TV, roadsigns, and in schools.

Ahem.   With that said, let’s look back at the issue of condoms and sex education.  What country has the lowest rate of teen pregnancies in the western world, an average age of 17.7 for first-time sexual intercourse, and 85% condom use among sexually active teens?  The Netherlands.  What country has the highest rate of teen pregnancies in the western world, an average age of 15.8 for first-time sexual intercourse, and 38% condom use among sexually active teens?  U.S.A.  What is the difference between these two countries?  One of most notable differences is sex education.

In the Netherlands, sex education is talked about frankly by parents and teachers alike.  Condoms and birth control pills are easily available for young and old.  Teachers address sexuality whenever it is relevant, whether the class be biology, health, psychology, or whatever.  The underlying themes in the Netherlands on sex education is reliable information and open discussion.  In the U.S., the federal government sponsors an abstinence-only program which cannot mention condoms at all, unless talking about their failure rates.  Half of schools use this program.  Is it any wonder that the number is so high, seeing how the U.S. government gives more money to the schools that teach abstinence only?  Given the widespread budget problems in public schools, what school wouldn’t do just about anything (including misinforming students) for a few extra bucks?  Both the Netherlands and the U.S. have an “anything goes” attitude towards sex and the media, but in the U.S. TV and movies is the only widely available information young people have to sex.

Let’s give an real-life story of a woman:  she loses her virginity shortly after her 15th birthday, virtually never uses condom and uses the pill about 50% of the time, goes through her high school’s abstinence-only sex education program even though she is already sexually active, never talk to her parents about sex and they never talk to her, at 18 she becomes pregnant (like 34% of teen women) and has an abortion.  According to the stats, she is truly an all-American girl.

The fact is that teens are going to have sex.  This is unavoidable given human nature and sexuality.  But STD’s, pregnancy, abortion, etc. are avoidable.  We just need to give young people the tools they need to make responsible decisions.  In this age of modern science, no teen needs to learn how to be responsible about sex through trial and error.

Now, why is a post on sex education on this blog?  Because I believe one of the core problems with the struggle for GLBT civil rights is a general lack of knowledge about sexuality.  How many people know that it is completely uncontroversial that homosexuality is not a choice in scientific circles?  How many people know that homosexuality occurs in nature (often!)?  How many people know that many babies are born every year whose biological sex does not match their genitalia?  Have they heard the terrible stories of doctors who arbitrarily assigned intersexed babies a gender, never told them, and let them grow up knowing deep down that their body doesn’t make their gender?  Many of them find themselves attracted to the same sex and wish everyday they were the other sex.  Only when they are far into adulthood do they find out that it was a doctor long ago who decided their genitalia was not “normal,” chose the easiest path to “fix them,” and told the parents to raise them according to that gender regardless of their chromosomes or of the previous experience of people with the same condition.

We live in a society that represses accurate sexual health information and then fills the airwaves with completely false conceptions of sexuality.  I laugh when my Chinese friends ask, “Aren’t Americans really open about sex?”  I think there are careful distinctions that have to be made: while the media is open about sex and while people’s behavior is “open,” honest and frank discussions on sex are few and far between.  On the risk of sounding like an extremist, I would say we are living in a time of post-sexual liberation and pre-sex education where people are acting extremely irresponsible.  Of course, what else could I expect if I tossed car keys to a teenager who had never driven before and said “Seatbelts don’t work,” but for them to engage in irresponsible behavior?

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