Safer Practices vs. "Wait until marriage"

If you live in the US, you've likely been inundated with 4parents.gov's commercials about abstinence until marriage. Kids who can't possibly be older than 14 say "mom and dad, please talk to me about sex, tell me what you want for me, and tell me to wait until I'm married."

On the one hand I understand that STDs/STIs are out there, so is pregnancy, and that many teenagers just aren't ready for sex. I believe parents SHOULD talk to their kid about these things in a balanced manner, because if the religious right has its way sex outside of marriage will just be illegal before too long. The site does talk about birth control, surprisingly. On the other hand, I find the "until marriage" slant distasteful and ill-advised and their "marriage is just better" attitude distasteful.

4parents advises that parents not allow televisions or computers in a teenager's bedroom, and that parents carefully monitor their children. Who they hang out with, what they do on the Internet, etc etc. Is this in the name of keeping your kid from being too...sexualized? Something like that, I suppose. Somehow I managed not to turn to drugs, sex and alcohol despite having a computer in my room. Maybe I'm a fluke!

How about not buying your kid a bunch of FPS games that will likely desensitize him or her to violence? How about protesting things like the gratuitously violent "Saw" series or "Hostel" duology? Why don't we have children on television saying, "Mom, dad, talk to me about violence. Help me learn the difference between reality and fiction and help me to be a good person" or some such? Why is violence more OK than sex?

Bienvenue (Welcome)

I'm Ariane. Welcome to my blog!

I'm:
- a student
- an academic
- a feminist
- a nerd/geek
- a writer
- heterosexual
- sex-positive
- submissive (in bed)
- opinionated

At some point in the last, say, week or two, a friend came to me and described an all-too-common situation to me: a young woman comments in response to a poem, "I'm so glad that this poem doesn't have any references to sex or homosexuality in it. It shows that poetry can be beautiful without being crude and indecent."

Oh young lady. You don't know me but yours is an opinion I'd like to pin on a wall and throw darts at, and at the same time it has inspired me, for somewhere in the last few days I decided that I have a few things to say about sex and sexuality, and maybe they're things that people will find interesting.

Or maybe I'll get flamed to Internet Hell for being openly feminist, sex-positive and happy to rail away at the injustices of this world.

So let's be sex-positive for a little while, shall we? Even the staid academics are doing it!