2008 Woodie Awards
Talk back: Letter to the Editor (More sex column commentary)
In response to Letter concerning 'Sex and the Semester' from Feb. 18
Issue date: 2/25/05 Section: Forum
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To the editor:
I am replying to Ms. Hollifield's recent editorial concerning Sam Kittle's "Sex and the Semester" column.
My response is based upon my perspectives as an AIDS Fellow, someone with fairly conservative personal morals, but most of all, as a student experiencing the reality of Guilford College.
Ms. Hollifield asked, "Do college students at Guilford really need advice about sex?"
In a nation where fifteen million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases are diagnosed annually, and where over one in five of North Carolina's new HIV diagnoses are college students, my answer is a resounding yes.
Certainly, Ms. Hollifield would agree that these realities of unsafe sex are too devastating to ignore. But scare tactics alone will not constitute the comprehensive, realistic sex education that students desperately need.
Abstinence-only education ignores reality. Professors at Columbia and Yale Universities recently surveyed 12,000 teenagers aged 12-18 who pledged to abstain from sex. When a follow-up survey occurred six years later, eighty-eight percent of teenagers who had pledged not to engage in premarital sex had (compared to ninety-nine percent of those who did not pledge).
While the "pledgers" tended to engage in sex later in life, married earlier, and had fewer partners, only forty percent of males used condoms when they actually had sex, whereas fifty-nine percent of the "non-pledgers" used condoms.
Additionally, both the "pledgers" and the "non-pledgers" had a similar prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases.
The best approach to sex education is one that, while certainly acknowledging abstinence as the only guaranteed method of preventing sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, also recognizes the fact that the vast majority of Americans will engage in premarital sexual activity.
Options like serial monogamy, birth control pills, condom use, and "lower-risk" types of sex (for instance, the risk for HIV transmission through oral sex is significantly less than through anal sex), can significantly reduce the spread of certain sexually transmitted diseases and/or unplanned pregnancies.
I am replying to Ms. Hollifield's recent editorial concerning Sam Kittle's "Sex and the Semester" column.
My response is based upon my perspectives as an AIDS Fellow, someone with fairly conservative personal morals, but most of all, as a student experiencing the reality of Guilford College.
Ms. Hollifield asked, "Do college students at Guilford really need advice about sex?"
In a nation where fifteen million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases are diagnosed annually, and where over one in five of North Carolina's new HIV diagnoses are college students, my answer is a resounding yes.
Certainly, Ms. Hollifield would agree that these realities of unsafe sex are too devastating to ignore. But scare tactics alone will not constitute the comprehensive, realistic sex education that students desperately need.
Abstinence-only education ignores reality. Professors at Columbia and Yale Universities recently surveyed 12,000 teenagers aged 12-18 who pledged to abstain from sex. When a follow-up survey occurred six years later, eighty-eight percent of teenagers who had pledged not to engage in premarital sex had (compared to ninety-nine percent of those who did not pledge).
While the "pledgers" tended to engage in sex later in life, married earlier, and had fewer partners, only forty percent of males used condoms when they actually had sex, whereas fifty-nine percent of the "non-pledgers" used condoms.
Additionally, both the "pledgers" and the "non-pledgers" had a similar prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases.
The best approach to sex education is one that, while certainly acknowledging abstinence as the only guaranteed method of preventing sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, also recognizes the fact that the vast majority of Americans will engage in premarital sexual activity.
Options like serial monogamy, birth control pills, condom use, and "lower-risk" types of sex (for instance, the risk for HIV transmission through oral sex is significantly less than through anal sex), can significantly reduce the spread of certain sexually transmitted diseases and/or unplanned pregnancies.
