Texas Teenage Virgins
Shielded from sex
In the town of Lubbock in Texas, where a lot of people take the Bible literally, the church is powerful enough to ensure that teenagers receive no education about sex, and definitely none about safe sex. Their teachers tell them nothing while the Christian radio stations and the preachers tell them that condoms don’t work, that sex brings disease and that abstinence is the only option.
Teenage Eva pledges, in front of her whole congregation, not to have sexual intercourse until she marries. ‘Everything beyond kissing is not pure,’ she says. She wears a ‘purity pledge’ ring to signify her vow of chastity. Her mother thinks it’s better that she has no choice.
The boys see it differently. On their way to a party, they are anticipating a game of skill at getting girls for ‘play – messing around in any way’. Underneath the bravado, though, they believe what the preacher tells them: that they should ‘abstain from sexual immorality because this is the will of God’. One young man feels that because he has ‘gone further than kissing’, he has betrayed his commitments to God. Abstaining from sex is extremely hard, he says, but it’s not impossible.
You wouldn’t want to put a toothbrush in your mouth that someone else had used, says the preacher. Sex in marriage is like a fire in a fireplace. Sex outside marriage is like a fire in the middle of the floor: it burns the house down and destroys everything. In terrifying tones he describes the alleged wages of sin: sex brings disease; condoms have holes in them.
This has no basis in fact, says the health worker. Denying young people accurate information about sex, relationships and reproduction puts them at risk and explains the Lone Star State’s soaring rates of teenage pregnancy. Some young women are having rectal sex as a form of birth control – and still consider themselves virgins.
‘Promoting promiscuity is promoting death,’ says the preacher. The Texas Health Department thinks otherwise, saying that the resistance to sex education maintains a veneer of purity but the young people are still having sex, – hence the high rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. The health worker says: ‘We need to do more than just talk about sexually transmitted diseases; we need to demonstrate how to use condoms. What they are getting is all misinformation and fear. If we can’t teach the parents and get into the churches and schools, there’s no hope.’
