Safe sex doesn't work, either

Critics of the sexual abstinence message and its "just say no" mantra say that this strategy for preventing unwanted pregnancies or the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and viruses doesn't work because people are going to have sex anyway.

They have no self-control. Granted.

Few people in the modern age appear willing to exercise much in the way of self-control. I concede that this cultural attitude of do whatever you want and whatever pleases you has shattered the protective barriers established by ancestors who believed in the liberating power of self-control.

But changing from a prohibitive to a permissive society isn't the answer.

Yet that's exactly what our culture has done. Forty some-odd years ago, counterculturists pushed and promoted an agenda of doing what feels good. A sexual revolution was claimed on behalf of the American woman. And soon popular culture embraced this movement for its racy controversy and juicy illicitness.

Popular culture has been behind the "safe sex" campaign for more than thirty years. But the sad reality for safe-sex proponents is that this strategy hasn't worked too well, either.

It replaced what counterculturists deemed an antiquated abstinence message. Because people cannot be trusted to exercise self-control, as the reasoning has gone, the solution to sexual epidemics has been to make sex "safe" through measures of protection.

The hard truth is that safe sex hasn't had a very good track record of preventing pregnancies or the spread of STDs and viruses. The big lie that no permissive "safe sex" proponent will admit to is that "safe sex" as it has been coined isn't really safe at all. It is "safer" than no protection at all. But it isn't as safe as abstinence, and an element of significiant risk still exists to the individuals involved.

Condoms, spermicides and birth control pills have been promoted and pushed as the tools that make the safe sex strategy work. And yet, in spite of an aggressive publicity campaign throughout the nineteen eighties and nineties, teenaged pregnancy continued to increase in many areas of the country. So, too, did the incidents of STDs and viruses.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) condoms are, at best, 87 percent effective at preventing pregnancies and only slightly better at preventing the spread of diseases or viruses. Essentially, then, about one in nine condoms can be expected to fail according to the data.

Female birth control measures aren't any more certain, either. Birth control pills vary in their effectiveness depending upon the brand. And they do not protect against the transmission of diseases or viruses. Even the female condom isn't fool-proof.

That's really the point. There is no fool-proof method to preventing pregnancies or STDs and viruses.

Except abstinence. It has a 100 percent success rate when used.

That is the key right there: When used.

Permissivists do not want to acknowledge that abstinence is the healthiest and safest strategy. They dismiss it as ineffective because "nobody" will follow it.

Well, now, I wouldn't be so cynical or pessimistic as to agree with that.

When and if popular culture's messages ever change from permissiveness to dignity and self-respect, only then will generations of young people begin to listen to the wisdom of waiting and exercising self-control.

But because mainstream social institutions refuse to practice self-control, we cannot expect most of our young people to do so, either.

Prevention begins and ends with popular culture. So does permissiveness. Until or unless the values and messages from this institution change, we can expect more of the same destructive sexual behavior to continue and possibly worsen.

We can expect teen pregnancies to continue being endemic as long as television programs like MTV's "Teen Mom" airs, and glorifies and sensationalizes the lives of troubled young teenaged mothers.

We can expect our young men and women to associate self-confidence, self-respect and dignity with the sexual liberties as long as we give celebrities like Kim Kardashian or "Teen Mom" star Farrah Abraham ink and a forum to promote their highly dysfunctional, delinquent behavior.

Abraham, 22, hired an adult production company and an adult co-star to film her in a pornographic video. She has defended this action saying that she did it for herself so she could admire her new, improved body status post breast augmentation. She also said she wants to be able to view the images of herself when she is older so as to remind her of when she was at her sexiest, most youthful, and beautiful.

Even worse, she evidently did this shoot sans condoms and only on birth control. She did report paying for STD exams for herself and her co-star. Talk about your poster child for safe sex: "Oops! I forgot the condoms. Oh, well. Who needs them anyway? I'm on birth control and everyone takes this for granted as being 100 percent safe...right? What the heck..."

It turns out that Abraham also has a substance abuse problem as well as obvious psychological issues; depression most notable. Besides making the porn film as a cheap ego boost for her self-esteem, she has also undergone multiple cosmetic surgeries. How sad it is that a young woman like Abraham would degrade and defile herself with pornography in an effort to boost her self-esteem. How unfortunate that she feels she needs to alter her body in order to feel better about herself.

What Abraham doesn't seem to realize is that porn doesn't make a woman look sexy. Rather, it objectifies her and turns her from a human being into a slab of meat. Incidentally, so does cosmetic surgery. Blemishes and imperfections get in the way of our egocentric pursuit of sex appeal. We apparently want to be on display, because we think this is the way to gain admiration.

Abraham is so convinced that she needs these cheap ego boosts to feel good about herself. What a destructive message to send to other impressionable young women; some of whom are also single moms and/or may have personal issues similar to Abraham's. This makes her an enabler, and certainly not a positive role model.

But Abraham is microcosmic of the obstacles our society faces in its effort to get control of the unwanted pregnancy and STD/virus epidemics that plague the public. If our culture is going to continue pushing condom and pill use as a means of getting the sexual epidemics under control, then we are well advised to not refer to the message as "safe sex," because that is disingenuous and misleading.

A more appropriate term for this permissive sex movement is "augmented sex." It is sex with physical tools that sometimes don't work and get us into trouble anyway.