shit really went down in the UK this week.

lots of good stuff this weekend.

first, an article that showed up first in the tennessean and then got picked up by no less than the chicago sun-times with this idiotic headline: "surprise! no-sex pledges work: study" you know, no matter that, in general, this has been disproven over and over, no matter that the pledges were somewhat effective only with teens who already wanted to remain abstinent for other reasons. true love waits! obviously! this headline is totally accurate and everyone should know that virginity pledges work for everyone. every single person ever. and people wonder why we have such a high rate of teen pregs. you either get nothing or you get drivel that is completely free of nuance or useful information. traditional news blows.

this week across the pond, 30,000 scottish girls will receive the HPV vaccine without any accompanying education letting girls know that this doesn't protect them from pregnancy or other STIs. this is all thanks to the catholic church - yes, scots health and education leaders actually had to sit down and get the church to sign on to their plan. gag me with a spoon. buried in the middle of the article was this gem:

Many sexual health experts believe it is essential to give out safe sex advice alongside the jab to make it clear they will remain at risk from other STIs including HIV, chlamydia and gonorrhea. More than half of the 5,000 female chlamydia patients in Scotland last year were under the age of 20.

really? you think so? call me crazy, but i think it's a good idea to let girls know before they're sexually active what this vaccine does and [perhaps more importantly] doesn't do. i mean, until about 5th grade, i thought babies came out of your butt. i don't think there have been any longitudinal studies done yet, but i can't imagine that there's any evidence that 12-year-old girls are going out and having sex just to test out their vaccine. i'm up-to-date with my tetanus, but you don't see me going out stepping on rusty nails.

in other UK catholic news, catholic action UK reports on an apparently controversial specal education program being piloted in northern ireland:

Children with learning difficulties should be shown explicit images of intercourse as part of sex education, according to a radical new campaign by the Family Planning Association. The FPA's 'It's My Right' campaign has produced a CD-Rom to be used by special needs teachers and school nurses. It features explicit images of sex and masturbation. 'It's more explicit than mainstream sex-education,' said Audrey Simpson of the FPA. 'But you need to be quite explicit, otherwise you create confusion,' she claimed.

this leaves me thinking two things. first, how is it anything short of discriminatory and neglegent to oppose this? it's not like you can deal in winks and euphemisms with people who are developmentally disabled [one could argue that you can't really do that with middle-schoolers either, but that is neither here nor there right now.]. you'd rather turn a blind eye and let these people get sick or pregnant and no tknow what's going on? sounds like loving thy neighbor to me. and second, as someone somewhere pointed out this week, did we forget somewhere along the line that sex ed is about sex? i mean, sure, it can be about delaying sexual initiation, it can be about preventing pregnancy or STIs, it can be about saying no to bad sex, but it's still about sex. i think this is a good example of how much we lose sight of that in these moralizing times.

drew sent me this study to break down - the gist of it is that some british people did a study of - gasp! - 100 women and found that hormonal contraceptive use leads women to choose different men than they would if they were ovulating regularly. i actually saw [and consequently dismissed] this story about a month or so ago, but here's my two cents again: it's crap. taking its subtitular claim ["the contraceptive pill could lead to women choosing the wrong partner"] seriously requires that you believe that women choose their partners by the smell of their immune systems alone. they try to scare you by saying that "partners with different genes are also less likely to experience fertility problems or miscarriages," as if taking the pill is going to make you want to fuck your brother or something. overall, it's just another not-so-subtle jab at contraceptive use, not to mention alarmingly heterocentrist - no mention of women who like women [at least not in the article; i wasn't able to find the whole study]. anyway, that's that.