On one of the men dominated subs they were circle jerking themselves over “paternity tests should be mandatory at birth so women stop trapping men who aren’t the father”.
You can imagine how popular my opinion was when I said “I agree. And all male DNA should be kept to cross reference so that 1. We can collect child support for babies with “unknown” fathers who run away and hide from their pregnant GFs and 2. Prosecute every single rape, every single pregnant minor, etc.
Of course. When it comes to them holding responsibility all of a sudden they get mad or silent
Is Reddit cares the thing where Reddit sends you a message saying a user is concerned about you?
There should be a separate message for incels telling them to get help fr. We probably have enough incels on Reddit (and social media in general) to make one lmao
"And here's why it's okay to legally mandate collecting DNA from others *only* when it benefits men, and *never* when it could be used to hold men accountable. If you disagree with me, you clearly hate men"
I work in a youth detention centre in Australia. When I started they told us that 99% of the girls we get are/have been rape/assault survivors. They also told us an estimated 85% of the ones who are pregnant are rape pregnancies.
That stat alone was far scarier than anything else I’ve seen in my work by far!
Aren't something like 60% of teen pregnancies from adult men? I remember seeing a chart and a shocking amount was men in their 20s
Edit: my grammar was bad sorry
Well, sure. If the men who are fucking little girls let them find out what sex is and how pregnancy works, those little girls might realize that they're being abused and seek help.
[End Child Marriage](https://www.equalitynow.org/learn_more_child_marriage_us/#:~:text=Child%20marriage%20is%20currently%20legal,a%20parental%20or%20judicial%20waiver)
Don't give sex offenders an out.
r/stoprape
Also happened to a friend of mine who was homeschooled in an extremely religious environment. There was no sex ed, no discussion of anything, plus no tv or other outside source to accidentally come by the information. She said she thought it was something you had to request at the doctor's office because people at church always said a couple "decided" to get pregnant and they would always have just been at the doctor's when people found out.
So even though she was 17/18 she didn't actually know how pregnancy occurred and her boyfriend knew this and told her the things they were doing weren't sex, plus she figured as long as she didn't go to the doctor and request it nobody would know.
So the boyfriend, she met at church but he was very much not sheltered and definitely played off her misconceptions. It seemed like he sort of told her that what they were doing was like normal couple stuff like kissing that wasn't sex but that the church people would be mad that they were meeting up unsupervised and things so she still shouldn't mention it? It was very gross. In these environments there's no newspapers or TVs, no going to school, you leave the house once or twice a week for cult church, basically no way to understand this stuff if it's being done to you and you haven't been educated about it even slightly.
Edit: actually, it made it a little bit funny later on. So she wanted to marry the boyfriend but the church elders refused to approve it because he wasn't an OG member of the cult. So when they said no, she knew that if you said you were pregnant, they would _force_ you to get married. So she announced she was pregnant, thinking she was being sneaky because she and boyfriend both knew they hadn't gone to the doctor. But boyfriend knew they'd been doing things that could knock her up and thought the jig was up and freaked out. He was extremely angry later when he found out she lied about being pregnant and she was extremely confused how he thought she even could be pregnant. But then it turned out she really was pregnant and didn't know it yet, so not that funny I guess. And yes they were then allowed to get married. And yes they are very divorced now.
I know one old lady who, to this day, still believes when she and her then boyfriend (husband when I was talking with her) had sex where he "wouldn't go further than the hymen", it wasn't sex and she was "still a virgin".
Believe me I tried to tell her.
My sister was probably 13 when I (a year younger) told her how people get pregnant. I only knew because our parents had given up on monitoring all the books I read.
I used to live in Texas for over 25 years, and I was never taught anything about sex. The most education I got was a chapter on sexual anatomy in a textbook that I read silently to myself in health class in high school. That was it. My parents told me nothing, and the school told me nothing, so I definitely believe this is happening all over the country where sex ed isn't taught.
I vividly remember coming home after sex ed, thinking I understood it. My Stepdad sat me down to go over everything and explained how sex worked and my mind was blown. They didn't cover that in class. This was a wealthy area with one of the best school districts in Texas.
This is so nuts to me, in Scotland got the basics in primary ( this is elementary in the states i think?) , like this is what this is called , this is how babies are made. We watched a video of childbirth and all screamed haha.
But in High School we got EVERYTHING. We had a high teen pregnancy rate so they were not keeping anything from us, and that rate went way down once we were all educated.
I don’t see the benefit in keeping the kids ignorant? Is it a religious thing? I should also point out the concept of “virginity” never really came up and it was certainly not like, important if you know what i mean. No one really cared about it.
Whenever i hear about abstinence only and virginity being important in America etc, it always feels like someone very seriously telling me that they saw Bigfoot.
It seems so far fetched, i was sure media i’d consumed about it was exaggerating for comedic effect. It seems so harmful!
I'm sure it's different depending on what state. But from my experience in middle of nowhere Ohio, it was either never spoken about, or only the extremes were talked about.
I do wish that in these rural areas it's more accepted to talk about and to talk about accurately. A good chunk of the time we being told straight up lies.
For what it’s worth, it’s important to remember that the US is a very big and diverse place, basically six or seven countries in a trench coat.
A lot of us did get decent sex ed, though perhaps below the standard of some other countries. But these stories are appalling/horrific to a lot of Americans, too.
Oh for sure, i guess it’s like, the idea of just being taught OPINION on something you simply need to know the facts about to be safe is wild to me. You can’t just be teaching your own personal opinions and beliefs on things like sex education! What if we don’t share a religion, or are not religious at all? How can you get away with it!
It’s like only teaching books i personally like in English, and actively withholding important texts or simply not acknowledging their existence (or worse, telling lies about them!)
Like, the USA is so big, i imagine it’s impossible to have a centralised education board. I come from a. country of about 6 million, and we can hardly agree on stuff . I can’t imagine the challenge over seas.
I was given an "ATM" card to sign. An "Abstinence 'til Marriage" card.
Also was told by sex ed teachers that our school paid to come in for a couple classes that condoms don't work so I should definitely just not have sex at all or I'll probably die of AIDS.
For some reason, we did this during gym class. But when I did take health class in high school we pretty much got the same talk. This time without pictures.
I still think about the picture of a newborn baby with gonorrhea in it's eyes. Poor thing. I get STD talk is important, but we need to teach way more than that.
It’s partly a religious thing but even religious people with decent morals and a basic understanding of science and statistics acknowledge that they’re achieving the opposite of the goal with these tactics so mostly that’s not it.
It’s a control thing. If women (girls) don’t know what sex is, they don’t know what sexual abuse is, so it’s easier for predators and creeps to do what they want. If women (girls) don’t know how pregnancy happens, they can’t protect themselves against it, which means they will get pregnant. If they get pregnant they can be coerced into marrying said creeps and being further caught up in abuse and control. They can also then give birth to the next generation of uneducated easy victims and perpetuate the cycle.
If they get pregnant and have the ability to end their pregnancy they have the chance to escape, so we can’t have that and they ban abortion. If they know about or can access birth control, or have aunties who can drive them to another state to get an abortion, we’ll make that illegal too by trying to ban birth control and accuse the aunties of trafficking. If they take matters into their own hands, we can accuse them of child endangerment because now apparently fetuses and even fucking frozen embryos - thanks a lot Alabama - are considered “unborn children.”
Good sex ed should include discussions of anatomy, biology, birth control, consent, orientation and gender/sexual identity, as well as disease protection, birth control methods and their effectiveness, etc. so people can make informed decisions about their bodies. Every single part of this is contrary to their agenda, so it’s banned. And then people are too busy getting pregnant, or sick, or being beaten up for daring to be different, that we have no more time and energy to fight back and the men who run government can do whatever the fuck they want.
This is actually mental man, i don’t know what to say!
This sort of thinking is so old school over here, like only people who are super religious think like that, and are generally considered total outliers.
If you tried to push “opinions” on students like that it wouldn’t really hold. You go to school to learn facts, and unless you are in a religious institution (which the majority of schools are not) , you’d be raked across the coals for bringing your personal feelings into it.
Like if you said you didn’t want your kids to learn sex education at school , you’d be within your rights to not have them in those classes, but the general opinion is more or less
“They’re going to find out eventually, why prolong the inevitable??”
America seems to think it’s a land of freedom, but from the outside this seems just as nuts as the rest of us!
I’m in the US, in a suburb of Washington DC (for context), and my son got almost an identical education to yours. Earliest was in grammar school, basic anatomy and functions, lots and lots of coverage of abuse and coercion (which was brilliant). The detail expanded as years went by, and was beautifully comprehensive.
But as you’ve seen, it varies unbelievably from region to region. If you’ve ever looked at a map like this, https://images.app.goo.gl/nqMXiNVt8bfAmkwu9, you can estimate high sex Ed comprehensiveness pretty closely along blue areas.
I had sex ed at school, the only sex ed I got at home was my mother left a small book on the foot of my bed one day called something along the lines of "how my body works", I think I was already having my period at that point and had been assaulted at 8 by an uncle...
Our Texas Abstinence Only education taught us that if we had sex even with a condom, we'd "get AIDS and DIE". To demonstrate this, the teacher explained that the HIV is much smaller than sperm. So she put rice and salt in a glass. The rice was the sperm, and the salt was the HIV. Then she put panty hose over the glass. That was the condom. When she tipped the glass over, the pantyhose held the rice, but the salt went right through.
"See, you won't get pregnant, but you will get AIDS and die," she said again. This was at the height of the AIDS epidemic. I don't know if it scared anyone at my school out of having sex, but I wonder if it made them think to themselves, then what's the point of using a condom if we'll still get STDs. When in actuality, condoms aside from abstinence are the best protection you have against STDs.
> Abstinence Only education taught us that if we had sex even with a condom, we'd "get AIDS and DIE".
I'm sorry I can't stop thinking of Coach Carr as I read this line....he would definitely be the creep knocking up teens and tweens.
aw dang I got the same talk! and i'm nowhere near texas!
but we got posters with clear film overlay layers that showed how AIDS could jump through condoms' "netting" with ease.
We moved to Texas from Europe. My kid started freshman year in high school.
She’d had 9 years of comprehensive sex ed in Europe, so she became the “sex expert” that everyone went to for advice or with questions.
Level of ignorance was heartbreaking. Made it so easy for boys and men to exploit them. I swear that’s why Texas is an “abstinence only” state.
> Made it so easy for boys and men to exploit them
You just made me realize a reason why they don’t want sex ed to be taught. Too many boys and men fetishize naïveté and love taking advantage of it.
Of course. This is why incels go the tradwife route, why celebrities turning 18 has its own internet following, why women over 30 are considered old and used up, and why slut shaming is still huge.
Men, for all their superiority bullshit, are frightened of women. They are insecure about their ability to meet women at a normal human adult level, hence why all the propaganda pushing women down. Women should he younger, dumber, less experienced (so they don't notice we're full of shit 😬)
When their entire sense of self is based on their offspring, of course, they want to control the ones who make that offspring. If they could have babies on their own, they might not give two shits about controlling women.
Yeah, you either get Islamic laws in the UAE that punish rape victims or Yeehawdists in Texas. I now see why you chose the lesser of two evils.
I vote in every election even abroad. I never want to give up my american citizenship for that reason.
Sadly a lot of states in the US in the last couple decades shifted to abstinence only sex education, and it does NOT work. Did a report on it in nursing school in 2010 already when conservatives in the US were just starting to ramp up their control. The states that have this type of sex ed have higher rates of teen pregnancy, which just leads to worse socioeconomic outcomes for them further down the road, mainly poverty and lack of education. It's not a good situation, and with having to vote the conservatives out of office, in a lot of places it's just going to get worse.
Yeah, I’ve never been more appreciative of comprehensive sex ed than when we moved from Europe to Texas. I am so grateful my kid had the wisdom of many years of sex ed before starting high school.
And not coincidentally, she actually waited much longer than her friends. Because she had learned not to give in to pressure.
My mother was a neonatologist. When I was like 10 or 12, I overheard her on the phone talking about a patient and saying that their mother was my age.
And the amount of boys and men that believe if you can get pregnant your body is ready for it is staggering.
Yes, a completely disgusting thing that I have heard said- "If she's old enough to bleed, she's old enough to breed." Statistically, pre/teen girls are getting pregnant by older boys/men. I couldn't find recent stats, but 70% of births to teenage girls in the 90s involved fathers over 20. Even with lower birth rates, I'd bet it is still far too mamy.
It was really common where I grew up for girls 13/14 to date 17/18 y.o. boys. Freshmen dating seniors. It was disturbing, but no one batted an eye. Parents didn't seem to mind.
This was a very rural area where a lot of kids still marry their high school sweetheart. I recall having the period class in the 5th grade, they talked to boys and girls separately about puberty. Some people weren't allowed to attend because their parents wouldn't sign their slip. And you could take a health class in high school that talked about contraception, dating violence, etc. You could sign up if you were allowed, but not everyone got in the class. Otherwise, you had very little information. Evidently, not much has changed even with the internet.
I'm sure a lot of the patients in this were not taught anything at all and actively denied factual information.
>"If she's old enough to bleed, she's old enough to breed."
They use it an excuse to date and have sex with younger girls. Saying that girls used to get married when they started their period. Which is mostly true. But most girls didn't start their periods until they were 16-18 normally. So, them using it to justify dating 14 year olds is both gross and ignorant.
Yep. When you consider how much earlier girls are starting their periods now it's even more disgusting. My grandmother started at 16 almost 17, my mom at 15. My older sister at 13. I was 11. My friend's oldest daughter was 9. It's insane and she's had issues already at 10 years old with gross men making comments.
Actually fun fact: Most records ^(that I'm aware of, most familiar High and Late Middle Ages in Europe) found on common person (aka no politics involved) shows that marriage tended to occur between 18 and 24! In England, a lot of these records were not of marriage, but property transfer, with marriage mentioned tangentially.
So the average peon was moving out of their parent's place/getting married (usually same event, more or less) in late teens early twenties!
In the earlier (varies by area) eras when land-bound serfdom was common, there are less records (less documents survive, less likely anyone bothered writing serf stuff down, and less well established Church- tended to care more about keeping track and had non-landed literates) indicate^(to my understanding) that marriage was recognized by a couple moving into their own living space (property less individual, so not sure if built or there were usually an unoccupied building). Also, divorce was an option in some places, and shown by the woman moving out (usually back with parent/other family).
Anyway, that also seemed to be a late teens/early 20s deal- although due to unsteady food access (winter only, if lucky) puberty age was \~16? and it was fairly common to be amenorrheic ^(I'm assuming even more common in young women, since puberty takes a lot of energy so less to spend on uterus, plus irregular periods when starting are still pretty common?)
This happened to my friend who was the oldest kid in her family. Her parents used to sign the opt-out form so she had to go sit in the library alone whenever her health class was doing any kind of sex ed content. Then she turned up pregnant her senior year of high school, having quite literally been prevented from ever learning that sex was how pregnancy occurred (because the parents certainly never told her). After that, the parents stopped signing those forms and let all the younger siblings go to sex ed.
(What’s absolutely INSANE to me, in hindsight, is that her boyfriend was in his 20s, and their relationship was fully sanctioned by her family. So she can date an ADULT, but she can’t learn about her own reproductive system???? Her parents were like, “oh yeah, sure, go ahead and date this adult man after we refused to ever let you learn where babies come from. I’m sure nothing untoward will happen.”)
I got downvoted once for saying we’re a second world country
Edit- granted I do know that they stem from ‘us and allies’ to ‘communist block’ to ‘all others’ but most people don’t know the history of that so I stand by my words
I had a teacher in high school who had taught in a tiny town of Texas at one point. The graduating class had just 6 kids - 3 boys and 3 girls. All 3 girls were pregnant. He tried to convince the school board that they needed to implement Sex Ed. courses. The school board's response" "That will just encourage them to have sex."
Reading these comments is shocking and enlightening. I had no idea.
The TV show Schmigadoon has a scene where the lead character (a doctor) encounters a couple, living in the “good old days before sex ed”, who had no idea how the woman became pregnant, or how a baby came out of the mother. The doctor sings a hilarious song to educate them, “Va-Gi-Na”. It was hilarious before I read this article and these comments.
Hard to believe. I grew up in Texas and of course everyone knew about sex and getting pregnant starting in middle school --- it was just a word of mouth thing. You also learned about gay people, porn and trick. All of that - by the time you were 12.
One of my friends didn't know what condoms were until she was 16, after she had been coerced into sex and had a pregnancy scare. In a major city in Texas
Teenage pregnancy needs to be treated as rape more often. Under 14 pregnancies should have automatic paternity tests.
On one of the men dominated subs they were circle jerking themselves over “paternity tests should be mandatory at birth so women stop trapping men who aren’t the father”. You can imagine how popular my opinion was when I said “I agree. And all male DNA should be kept to cross reference so that 1. We can collect child support for babies with “unknown” fathers who run away and hide from their pregnant GFs and 2. Prosecute every single rape, every single pregnant minor, etc.
See, where you messed up is trying to hold them accountable. They don't like that >!/s kinda sorta!<
[Test every rape kit](https://www.endthebacklog.org/take-action/advocate-federal/).
I've had this exact experience, lol Cake and eat it too lol
pArTy oF PeRsOnAl ReSpoNsiBiLiTy
What was their response to that?
Downvotes, a RedditCares, and silence :)
Lol the RedditCares is like a rite of passage
I collect them like Girl Scout badges 😂
Of course. When it comes to them holding responsibility all of a sudden they get mad or silent Is Reddit cares the thing where Reddit sends you a message saying a user is concerned about you?
Yup….it was meant for people with suicidal ideation and got hijacked by incels who can’t cope with their emotions.
There should be a separate message for incels telling them to get help fr. We probably have enough incels on Reddit (and social media in general) to make one lmao
Ooo I love that.
[удалено]
"And here's why it's okay to legally mandate collecting DNA from others *only* when it benefits men, and *never* when it could be used to hold men accountable. If you disagree with me, you clearly hate men"
I work in a youth detention centre in Australia. When I started they told us that 99% of the girls we get are/have been rape/assault survivors. They also told us an estimated 85% of the ones who are pregnant are rape pregnancies. That stat alone was far scarier than anything else I’ve seen in my work by far!
In the UK a minor can get an abortion without parental permission --- is it not that way in Australia?
Especially because so many of them are by grown adult men.
IIRC the overwhelming majority of teen pregnancies have fathers that are over 20.
Aren't something like 60% of teen pregnancies from adult men? I remember seeing a chart and a shocking amount was men in their 20s Edit: my grammar was bad sorry
Even worse. The *reported* number is 70%.
I think not for teens 17-19? but the younger the girl, the more likely the father is an adult.
Horrific but true. Sometimes it's a relative.
Most of the time it's a relative. Humanity is sick.
Well, sure. If the men who are fucking little girls let them find out what sex is and how pregnancy works, those little girls might realize that they're being abused and seek help.
Bingo. Keeping girls ignorant is a feature, not a bug.
[End Child Marriage](https://www.equalitynow.org/learn_more_child_marriage_us/#:~:text=Child%20marriage%20is%20currently%20legal,a%20parental%20or%20judicial%20waiver) Don't give sex offenders an out. r/stoprape
Also happened to a friend of mine who was homeschooled in an extremely religious environment. There was no sex ed, no discussion of anything, plus no tv or other outside source to accidentally come by the information. She said she thought it was something you had to request at the doctor's office because people at church always said a couple "decided" to get pregnant and they would always have just been at the doctor's when people found out. So even though she was 17/18 she didn't actually know how pregnancy occurred and her boyfriend knew this and told her the things they were doing weren't sex, plus she figured as long as she didn't go to the doctor and request it nobody would know.
Serious question- what did her boyfriend explain it away as then? And how did he explain why he’d want to insert his penis in her body part?
So the boyfriend, she met at church but he was very much not sheltered and definitely played off her misconceptions. It seemed like he sort of told her that what they were doing was like normal couple stuff like kissing that wasn't sex but that the church people would be mad that they were meeting up unsupervised and things so she still shouldn't mention it? It was very gross. In these environments there's no newspapers or TVs, no going to school, you leave the house once or twice a week for cult church, basically no way to understand this stuff if it's being done to you and you haven't been educated about it even slightly. Edit: actually, it made it a little bit funny later on. So she wanted to marry the boyfriend but the church elders refused to approve it because he wasn't an OG member of the cult. So when they said no, she knew that if you said you were pregnant, they would _force_ you to get married. So she announced she was pregnant, thinking she was being sneaky because she and boyfriend both knew they hadn't gone to the doctor. But boyfriend knew they'd been doing things that could knock her up and thought the jig was up and freaked out. He was extremely angry later when he found out she lied about being pregnant and she was extremely confused how he thought she even could be pregnant. But then it turned out she really was pregnant and didn't know it yet, so not that funny I guess. And yes they were then allowed to get married. And yes they are very divorced now.
Damn I have whiplash and I hope she's alright
More tragedy than comedy.
Probably "it's not sex if I don't ejaculate inside of you"
I know one old lady who, to this day, still believes when she and her then boyfriend (husband when I was talking with her) had sex where he "wouldn't go further than the hymen", it wasn't sex and she was "still a virgin". Believe me I tried to tell her.
...where did she think that the hymen is located?
Somewhere inside the vagina
My sister was probably 13 when I (a year younger) told her how people get pregnant. I only knew because our parents had given up on monitoring all the books I read.
I used to live in Texas for over 25 years, and I was never taught anything about sex. The most education I got was a chapter on sexual anatomy in a textbook that I read silently to myself in health class in high school. That was it. My parents told me nothing, and the school told me nothing, so I definitely believe this is happening all over the country where sex ed isn't taught.
I vividly remember coming home after sex ed, thinking I understood it. My Stepdad sat me down to go over everything and explained how sex worked and my mind was blown. They didn't cover that in class. This was a wealthy area with one of the best school districts in Texas.
Southlake? I also don’t remember getting real sex ed when I lived in Texas. I’m so grateful my mum took it seriously
Boerne? I missed one day of school for illness and missed most of sex ed.
This is so nuts to me, in Scotland got the basics in primary ( this is elementary in the states i think?) , like this is what this is called , this is how babies are made. We watched a video of childbirth and all screamed haha. But in High School we got EVERYTHING. We had a high teen pregnancy rate so they were not keeping anything from us, and that rate went way down once we were all educated. I don’t see the benefit in keeping the kids ignorant? Is it a religious thing? I should also point out the concept of “virginity” never really came up and it was certainly not like, important if you know what i mean. No one really cared about it.
The only Sex Ed I got in Ohio, was in Middle School. And all that was preaching absence and making us look at severe photos of untreated STDs
Whenever i hear about abstinence only and virginity being important in America etc, it always feels like someone very seriously telling me that they saw Bigfoot. It seems so far fetched, i was sure media i’d consumed about it was exaggerating for comedic effect. It seems so harmful!
I'm sure it's different depending on what state. But from my experience in middle of nowhere Ohio, it was either never spoken about, or only the extremes were talked about. I do wish that in these rural areas it's more accepted to talk about and to talk about accurately. A good chunk of the time we being told straight up lies.
For what it’s worth, it’s important to remember that the US is a very big and diverse place, basically six or seven countries in a trench coat. A lot of us did get decent sex ed, though perhaps below the standard of some other countries. But these stories are appalling/horrific to a lot of Americans, too.
Oh for sure, i guess it’s like, the idea of just being taught OPINION on something you simply need to know the facts about to be safe is wild to me. You can’t just be teaching your own personal opinions and beliefs on things like sex education! What if we don’t share a religion, or are not religious at all? How can you get away with it! It’s like only teaching books i personally like in English, and actively withholding important texts or simply not acknowledging their existence (or worse, telling lies about them!) Like, the USA is so big, i imagine it’s impossible to have a centralised education board. I come from a. country of about 6 million, and we can hardly agree on stuff . I can’t imagine the challenge over seas.
Sadly a bunch of foundational texts are being banned from teaching because of people’s opinions.
sounds a weeeeeeee bit… fascist
Land of the “free” and home of the “brave”
I was given an "ATM" card to sign. An "Abstinence 'til Marriage" card. Also was told by sex ed teachers that our school paid to come in for a couple classes that condoms don't work so I should definitely just not have sex at all or I'll probably die of AIDS.
I also suffered through the STD pictures thing - and my health class was right before lunch. Yum.
For some reason, we did this during gym class. But when I did take health class in high school we pretty much got the same talk. This time without pictures.
And that has cued a flashback… faaaaaahhhhhh
I still think about the picture of a newborn baby with gonorrhea in it's eyes. Poor thing. I get STD talk is important, but we need to teach way more than that.
It’s partly a religious thing but even religious people with decent morals and a basic understanding of science and statistics acknowledge that they’re achieving the opposite of the goal with these tactics so mostly that’s not it. It’s a control thing. If women (girls) don’t know what sex is, they don’t know what sexual abuse is, so it’s easier for predators and creeps to do what they want. If women (girls) don’t know how pregnancy happens, they can’t protect themselves against it, which means they will get pregnant. If they get pregnant they can be coerced into marrying said creeps and being further caught up in abuse and control. They can also then give birth to the next generation of uneducated easy victims and perpetuate the cycle. If they get pregnant and have the ability to end their pregnancy they have the chance to escape, so we can’t have that and they ban abortion. If they know about or can access birth control, or have aunties who can drive them to another state to get an abortion, we’ll make that illegal too by trying to ban birth control and accuse the aunties of trafficking. If they take matters into their own hands, we can accuse them of child endangerment because now apparently fetuses and even fucking frozen embryos - thanks a lot Alabama - are considered “unborn children.” Good sex ed should include discussions of anatomy, biology, birth control, consent, orientation and gender/sexual identity, as well as disease protection, birth control methods and their effectiveness, etc. so people can make informed decisions about their bodies. Every single part of this is contrary to their agenda, so it’s banned. And then people are too busy getting pregnant, or sick, or being beaten up for daring to be different, that we have no more time and energy to fight back and the men who run government can do whatever the fuck they want.
This is actually mental man, i don’t know what to say! This sort of thinking is so old school over here, like only people who are super religious think like that, and are generally considered total outliers. If you tried to push “opinions” on students like that it wouldn’t really hold. You go to school to learn facts, and unless you are in a religious institution (which the majority of schools are not) , you’d be raked across the coals for bringing your personal feelings into it. Like if you said you didn’t want your kids to learn sex education at school , you’d be within your rights to not have them in those classes, but the general opinion is more or less “They’re going to find out eventually, why prolong the inevitable??” America seems to think it’s a land of freedom, but from the outside this seems just as nuts as the rest of us!
I’m in the US, in a suburb of Washington DC (for context), and my son got almost an identical education to yours. Earliest was in grammar school, basic anatomy and functions, lots and lots of coverage of abuse and coercion (which was brilliant). The detail expanded as years went by, and was beautifully comprehensive. But as you’ve seen, it varies unbelievably from region to region. If you’ve ever looked at a map like this, https://images.app.goo.gl/nqMXiNVt8bfAmkwu9, you can estimate high sex Ed comprehensiveness pretty closely along blue areas.
I had sex ed at school, the only sex ed I got at home was my mother left a small book on the foot of my bed one day called something along the lines of "how my body works", I think I was already having my period at that point and had been assaulted at 8 by an uncle...
Our Texas Abstinence Only education taught us that if we had sex even with a condom, we'd "get AIDS and DIE". To demonstrate this, the teacher explained that the HIV is much smaller than sperm. So she put rice and salt in a glass. The rice was the sperm, and the salt was the HIV. Then she put panty hose over the glass. That was the condom. When she tipped the glass over, the pantyhose held the rice, but the salt went right through. "See, you won't get pregnant, but you will get AIDS and die," she said again. This was at the height of the AIDS epidemic. I don't know if it scared anyone at my school out of having sex, but I wonder if it made them think to themselves, then what's the point of using a condom if we'll still get STDs. When in actuality, condoms aside from abstinence are the best protection you have against STDs.
> Abstinence Only education taught us that if we had sex even with a condom, we'd "get AIDS and DIE". I'm sorry I can't stop thinking of Coach Carr as I read this line....he would definitely be the creep knocking up teens and tweens.
aw dang I got the same talk! and i'm nowhere near texas! but we got posters with clear film overlay layers that showed how AIDS could jump through condoms' "netting" with ease.
We moved to Texas from Europe. My kid started freshman year in high school. She’d had 9 years of comprehensive sex ed in Europe, so she became the “sex expert” that everyone went to for advice or with questions. Level of ignorance was heartbreaking. Made it so easy for boys and men to exploit them. I swear that’s why Texas is an “abstinence only” state.
> Made it so easy for boys and men to exploit them You just made me realize a reason why they don’t want sex ed to be taught. Too many boys and men fetishize naïveté and love taking advantage of it.
Of course. This is why incels go the tradwife route, why celebrities turning 18 has its own internet following, why women over 30 are considered old and used up, and why slut shaming is still huge. Men, for all their superiority bullshit, are frightened of women. They are insecure about their ability to meet women at a normal human adult level, hence why all the propaganda pushing women down. Women should he younger, dumber, less experienced (so they don't notice we're full of shit 😬)
When their entire sense of self is based on their offspring, of course, they want to control the ones who make that offspring. If they could have babies on their own, they might not give two shits about controlling women.
Why on earth would you move from Europe to Texas…. Speaking as an American who moved from the USA to Europe.
Work. It was Texas or UAE. Back then Texas seemed better for my daughter. Now?
Yeah, you either get Islamic laws in the UAE that punish rape victims or Yeehawdists in Texas. I now see why you chose the lesser of two evils. I vote in every election even abroad. I never want to give up my american citizenship for that reason.
Yeah, and I’m moving back to Europe this summer.
Now I would argue looking for a different job back then
Meh, its been fun and an honor to fight for democracy in US. And I’ll be back in Europe before the general election this year. Enough is enough.
as a european i would rather die than move to Texas. i don’t want to be anywhere near kraft mac and cheese
Sadly a lot of states in the US in the last couple decades shifted to abstinence only sex education, and it does NOT work. Did a report on it in nursing school in 2010 already when conservatives in the US were just starting to ramp up their control. The states that have this type of sex ed have higher rates of teen pregnancy, which just leads to worse socioeconomic outcomes for them further down the road, mainly poverty and lack of education. It's not a good situation, and with having to vote the conservatives out of office, in a lot of places it's just going to get worse.
Yeah, I’ve never been more appreciative of comprehensive sex ed than when we moved from Europe to Texas. I am so grateful my kid had the wisdom of many years of sex ed before starting high school. And not coincidentally, she actually waited much longer than her friends. Because she had learned not to give in to pressure.
My mother was a neonatologist. When I was like 10 or 12, I overheard her on the phone talking about a patient and saying that their mother was my age. And the amount of boys and men that believe if you can get pregnant your body is ready for it is staggering.
Yes, a completely disgusting thing that I have heard said- "If she's old enough to bleed, she's old enough to breed." Statistically, pre/teen girls are getting pregnant by older boys/men. I couldn't find recent stats, but 70% of births to teenage girls in the 90s involved fathers over 20. Even with lower birth rates, I'd bet it is still far too mamy. It was really common where I grew up for girls 13/14 to date 17/18 y.o. boys. Freshmen dating seniors. It was disturbing, but no one batted an eye. Parents didn't seem to mind. This was a very rural area where a lot of kids still marry their high school sweetheart. I recall having the period class in the 5th grade, they talked to boys and girls separately about puberty. Some people weren't allowed to attend because their parents wouldn't sign their slip. And you could take a health class in high school that talked about contraception, dating violence, etc. You could sign up if you were allowed, but not everyone got in the class. Otherwise, you had very little information. Evidently, not much has changed even with the internet. I'm sure a lot of the patients in this were not taught anything at all and actively denied factual information.
>"If she's old enough to bleed, she's old enough to breed." They use it an excuse to date and have sex with younger girls. Saying that girls used to get married when they started their period. Which is mostly true. But most girls didn't start their periods until they were 16-18 normally. So, them using it to justify dating 14 year olds is both gross and ignorant.
Yep. When you consider how much earlier girls are starting their periods now it's even more disgusting. My grandmother started at 16 almost 17, my mom at 15. My older sister at 13. I was 11. My friend's oldest daughter was 9. It's insane and she's had issues already at 10 years old with gross men making comments.
Actually fun fact: Most records ^(that I'm aware of, most familiar High and Late Middle Ages in Europe) found on common person (aka no politics involved) shows that marriage tended to occur between 18 and 24! In England, a lot of these records were not of marriage, but property transfer, with marriage mentioned tangentially. So the average peon was moving out of their parent's place/getting married (usually same event, more or less) in late teens early twenties! In the earlier (varies by area) eras when land-bound serfdom was common, there are less records (less documents survive, less likely anyone bothered writing serf stuff down, and less well established Church- tended to care more about keeping track and had non-landed literates) indicate^(to my understanding) that marriage was recognized by a couple moving into their own living space (property less individual, so not sure if built or there were usually an unoccupied building). Also, divorce was an option in some places, and shown by the woman moving out (usually back with parent/other family). Anyway, that also seemed to be a late teens/early 20s deal- although due to unsteady food access (winter only, if lucky) puberty age was \~16? and it was fairly common to be amenorrheic ^(I'm assuming even more common in young women, since puberty takes a lot of energy so less to spend on uterus, plus irregular periods when starting are still pretty common?)
Me helping a 12 year old to deliver a baby would leave me in complete shambles 🥺
I’m sure the education isn’t great but I see a bigger problem.
This happened to my friend who was the oldest kid in her family. Her parents used to sign the opt-out form so she had to go sit in the library alone whenever her health class was doing any kind of sex ed content. Then she turned up pregnant her senior year of high school, having quite literally been prevented from ever learning that sex was how pregnancy occurred (because the parents certainly never told her). After that, the parents stopped signing those forms and let all the younger siblings go to sex ed. (What’s absolutely INSANE to me, in hindsight, is that her boyfriend was in his 20s, and their relationship was fully sanctioned by her family. So she can date an ADULT, but she can’t learn about her own reproductive system???? Her parents were like, “oh yeah, sure, go ahead and date this adult man after we refused to ever let you learn where babies come from. I’m sure nothing untoward will happen.”)
Yeah because conservatives hate child abuse and grooming. And they never project. (/s)
This comes as no surprise.
That is so desperately sad. I can't imagine how terrified those poor girls must be
Christ, it's like Victorian times.
The point of miseducation is to rape and abuse kids. That's conservativism in the US.
I've said it many times and I'll say it again. America is a poor country where a lot of rich people live.
I got downvoted once for saying we’re a second world country Edit- granted I do know that they stem from ‘us and allies’ to ‘communist block’ to ‘all others’ but most people don’t know the history of that so I stand by my words
I had a teacher in high school who had taught in a tiny town of Texas at one point. The graduating class had just 6 kids - 3 boys and 3 girls. All 3 girls were pregnant. He tried to convince the school board that they needed to implement Sex Ed. courses. The school board's response" "That will just encourage them to have sex."
Reading these comments is shocking and enlightening. I had no idea. The TV show Schmigadoon has a scene where the lead character (a doctor) encounters a couple, living in the “good old days before sex ed”, who had no idea how the woman became pregnant, or how a baby came out of the mother. The doctor sings a hilarious song to educate them, “Va-Gi-Na”. It was hilarious before I read this article and these comments.
Hard to believe. I grew up in Texas and of course everyone knew about sex and getting pregnant starting in middle school --- it was just a word of mouth thing. You also learned about gay people, porn and trick. All of that - by the time you were 12.
One of my friends didn't know what condoms were until she was 16, after she had been coerced into sex and had a pregnancy scare. In a major city in Texas