....Yet I continue to bring you quality blogging material, folks! What dedication!


I got another letter. This one was unexpected. This was was written by a woman who babysits a coworker's children. She is also, I later found out, a member of the aforemention Congregation. The letter was actually very well written, up until the point (the second to last sentence, actually), where she calls my article "verbal pornography".

Her primary argument is that "not everyone is seeking or needs this type of explicit directions for oral sex safeguards", which I assume are the dental dam instructions I wrote about. She goes on to urge me to write about "remedies used in other times by our culture - that is, physical activity that can be done alone or ina group - baseball, hiking, etc, or the favourite remedy used by many - the cold shower."

My counter argument is as follows: 1) Actually, everyone does need this information. They may not be "seeking" it, but they need it.

It's funny, in the letters I've received so far, there seems to be an assumption that I'm writing for youth. I'm not. I'm writing to anyone who is sexually active, young or old, gay or straight, married, divorced, widowed. This information is important to everyone. I'm not trying to corrupt our youth. I'm just trying to give everyone information that they may need at some point.

Anyway, on to point two. If she thinks for a second that those 'remedies used in other times' did any good, if they were used at all, she's dangerously naive. I just did research, to find that teenage pregnancy rates have been steadily declining for the last 20 years. Want to know something else?

Birth, Abortion and Pregnancy Rates, Females 15-19, by Country, Mid-1990s

Country	Births per 1,000	Abortions per 1,000	Pregnancies per 1,000
Sweden (1996)	7.8	17.2	25.0
France (1995)	10.0	10.2	20.2
Canada (1995)	24.5	21.2	45.7
Great Britain (1995)	28.3	18.4	46.7
United States (1996)	54.4	29.2	83.6

Sweden has the lowest teen pregnancy rate. United States has the highest. Guess which country uses a harm reduction model (i.e: They recognize a behaviour exists, but seek to reduce the negative effects the behaviour may cause), and guess who uses abstinence models?