Bristol Palin is partnering with the Candie's Foundation, a subset of the Candie's company, to promote "abstinence" as a way to "raise awareness" and "combat teen pregnancy." Never mind that one form of awareness, of course, is the awareness that pregnancy and STD rates often drop when teenagers are educated about birth control. Or that abstinence-only education doesn't seem to make teen pregnancy rates go down. Forget all that, but consider, for a second, the cultural incoherence of launching a huge new campaign to promote abstinence when this is the home page for your clothing and accessories company. Britney looks great, but she also looks, well, highly sexualized. There's a hall of mirrors effect here worth noting: No other young female star of the past ten years at once tried to sell herself as a virginal young thing while embracing the media sexualization of her as fully as ol' Britney. (Remember when she appeared barely clad and highly waxed in Rolling Stone?) In this sense, Britney is actually the perfect figurehead for Candie's, which is trying to have its cake and eat it too. On the one hand, the Candie's Foundation represents the company's deliberate embrace of cultural family values. On the other hand, of course, the company peddles in the same old implicit commercial messaging to girls: namely, that a girl's worth lies in her overt sex appeal, which, by the way, can really be enhanced with a fabulous new Candie's Floral Lace Thong for Juniors or this Candie's Studded Cold Shoulder Top. Then again, maybe I'm cynical, and Candie's isn't peddling teen sexuality at all. It just realized that sometimes a 15-year-old girl practicing abstinence likes to dance around in the privacy of her own bedroom in her lace-thong undies. Just like Sandra Dee.

Tags: Bristol Palin, Britney Spears, Candie's

While Bristol Palin was enjoying another prime time moment making her ambassadorial debut as the Candie's Foundation's abstinence spokesperson—Meghan, you're right, what dizzy come-hither-hypocrisy is at work there!—you probably missed the Obama administration's low-key unveiling, in the budget, of its teenage pregnancy prevention approach. Mature discretion in tackling this hot-button issue: Now there's a style that seems to send the right sober signals. In a minimal, and carefully muted, paragraph in the budget blueprint, the administration emphasizes its support of "evidence-based" programs while clearly aiming not to get both sides all riled up right away. Thus you won't find such phrases as "comprehensive sex education" and "abstinence-only." Instead, you'll find references to "medically-accurate" information and to the "importance of abstinence."

But don't bet on the success of efforts to avoid the rhetoric of arousal. Already some reproductive health advocates are complaining that the formulations fudge too much. And it's not clear that abstinence proponents, whose funding is being cut, are going to buy the administration line, reported in the Wall Street Journal, that they could qualify for funds set aside in a pot for developing and testing "innovative strategies." They surely can't hope for a penny if Bristol is their idea of innovation.

Tags: abstinence education, Bristol Palin, Candie's, comprehensive sex education, Obama, teenage pregnancy

This is perhaps the least surprising finding of social science to date: "Rates of births to teenage mothers are strongly predicted by conservative religious beliefs, even after controlling for differences in income and rates of abortion." In 2008 the larger public got a taste of what watchers of the social conservative movement have known for a long time, which is that they've quietly started to celebrate teenage motherhood, albeit while falling short of openly encouraging it. When Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston were trotted out as American heroes for the Big Knock-Up during the Republican National Convention, that was a wink and a nod to this growing enthusiasm in the Christian right.

Another example of the trend comes from the deliberately misnamed Feminists For Life, which sponsors a college lecture series that exhibits young women explaining why having a baby in college was the best thing that ever happened to them. Wild promises are implied: The boyfriend will make a romantic proposal straight out of a storybook, parents will be ecstatic, studies will be manageable, life will be darn near perfect. Perhaps Bristol Palin's lack of a storybook ending, which cannot be covered up with any number of People magazine covers, will help expose this lie that's been building within this subculture.

Don't think that the Christian right wanted it this way. It's in response to the impossible situation they've put their young people in. Mark Regnerus—himself an evangelical Christian, but one who takes his academic fealty to the truth seriously—wrote a book demonstrating that all the admonishments to evangelical youth to wait for marriage not only didn't cause them to wait longer to have sex, but that evangelical teenagers have sex at even younger ages than pretty much all other groups of teenagers. (He theorizes that their fear that stopgap behavior like oral sex and mutual masturbation is perverse drives them to intercourse sooner.) Add to that the levels of misinformation about contraception fed to them in an attempt to trick them out of having sex, and what you have is a situation where, to quote the researcher on this most recent study, "religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself." Nature beats God most of the time.

There's only one solution, and evangelicals such as Regnerus or Michael Gerson have started to promote it strongly: early marriage. Of course, what that means is up in the air. Regnerus suggests 19-20, Gerson plays it safe by suggesting one's early 20s. This cynic points out that both are still many years past the average age of sexual debut, which is close to 17 (though younger for evangelicals).

The on-the-ground compromise that evangelical Christians seem to be coming around to is quietly encouraging—or at least, not discouraging—sexually active teenagers to get pregnant quickly, so they "have" to marry, because they know that just asking kids to marry young won't fly when their kids, like most kids, have college and career goals that marriage could interfere with. Getting pregnant and married young will never be as well-regarded as abstaining for a decade plus after puberty before marrying, but teenage motherhood is quietly becoming a way of life for evangelicals, and a compromise position between the sexual needs of actual human beings, and the strongly anti-sex attitudes pushed by the Christian right.

Tags: Bristol Palin, christian right, evangelical christianity, teenage pregnancy

The kids are more boring than you might think. Or that's the conclusion one is forced to reach after reading a Pew Research Center study about sexting and a University of Minnesota study about casual sex among college students. The latter got some play in the blogs and in the mainstream media for the headline-grabbing finding that screwing around doesn't mean you're screwed up, but researchers also found that there isn't as much screwing around as breathless stories about the "hook-up culture" would have you believe. Between these two studies, it was found that only 4 precent of teenagers have sent a sexually provocative photo through text message and 80 percent of college students' most recent sexual encounter occurred  in the context of a committed relationship.

Don't expect these studies demonstrating that kids are boring to have much influence on the mainstream media coverage of youthful sexuality to budge one bit from the breathless hysteria we've all come to know and feel queasy over. As well we should. There is a line between titillating ourselves by disingenuously judging young people for having sex and expressing genuine concern for young people's well-being, but the day time talk shows that cover the "hook-up culture" not only cross that line, but they can't even see it anymore in their rearview mirror. A vicious, ratings-grabbing cycle has been established: Titillate the audience with images of adolescent sexuality and then lash out at the young people for having so much fun (in your imagination). Here's a classic example, complete with jokes about threatening young men with physical violence because of their youthful sexuality. Ha ha! You may think you're hot stuff, what with your legal right to have sex with teenagers, young man, but daddy's got a gun/phallic symbol!

The titillation/condemnation cycle is more than a ratings grab, however. It's also an excuse to exert control over young people's lives and bodies, under the ruse of concern. Lurid tales of casual sex do a much better job of selling virginity pledges and abstinence-only education and even keeping condoms off high school campuses than the much more likely, boring stories of young people falling in love and having sex within committed relationships much like your own. With that kind of incentive to keep pushing these stories about how kids don't date anymore and all sex is meaningless, how does a small thing like scientific evidence stand a chance?

Tags: hook-up culture, sexting

Amanda, I was also struck by the disparity between the sexting data to come out of the Pew poll dated December 2009 and the earlier studies done by the National Campaign To Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. The earlier survey had one teen in five reporting having sent or posted naked photos of themselves. The new Pew data shows just 4 percent of teenagers ages 12-17 reporting having sent "sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images" to someone via text message. That is a pretty enormous disparity and may represent the difference between an epidemic and the cable ratings grab you describe. Tracy Clark-Flory thinks the change in the numbers may have happened because kids wised-up after the sexting media frenzy last winter. She thinks they may just have stopped using their cellphones to show off their naked bodies. I also wonder if the string of draconian criminal prosecutions last winter affected how likely they were to self-report sexting afterwards, since the Pew poll took place from June to September of this year.

Maybe even more interesting is the decline in the numbers across the two surveys with respect to teens receiving sexual images. The National Campaign to Prevent Pregnancy survey showed 25 percent of teen girls and 33 percent of teen boys seeing naked images originally sent to someone else. A more recent MTV-Associated Press poll of young adults ages 14 to 24 indicated that 17 percent of the kids who'd received sexually explicit photos reported passing them along to someone else. The Pew survey shows 15 percent of teens ages 12 to 17 have received a sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude photo or video of someone else. Those numbers are still awfully high, but they do appear to be dropping. I wonder if that means teens have learned at least one useful thing from the sexting frenzy: that passing these images along to third parties is a form of bullying with lifelong—sometimes even life-threatening—consequences.

Tags: teens; sexting

Abstinence-only programs (especially the ones that claim condoms don't work) are probably a large factor in the overall rise in teen pregnancy, but I think you're right to look at the exceptions to the overall trends, Jessica. Regional differences in teen pregnancy rates can be chalked up to a number of variables, and the official school curriculum is only one of them. The differences you note between Arizona and North Dakota can probably be explained in large part by religion's influence on the culture in those states.

One aspect of sex education that doesn't get much attention is the role that religion plays. Or, rather, it does, but the mainstream media mostly focuses on the Christians whom they assume all walk in lockstep on reproductive rights. But while this hostility to sexual health and information is very real in evangelical churches and the Catholic church, there are also a bunch of mainline Protestant churches that have a health-oriented approach to sexuality. I know that the best sex education I received as a teenager was through a friend's Protestant youth group, which had a two-day program that assumed we would be sexually active before marriage and that contraception and STD prevention were important issues to us. And when I think of no-nonsense Protestants with a Midwestern, commonsense approach to life, I think of Lutherans, who are the dominant religious group of North Dakota. According to Mark Regnerus' research into the sex lives and religion of American teenagers, mainline Protestants like Lutherans are only just behind atheists and Jews in terms of delaying intercourse, probably by substituting oral sex and "outercourse" to avoid STDs and pregnancy. Between putting it off longer and being more hip to contraception, these groups predictably would have lower pregnancy rates.

Arizona's biggest religion is Catholicism—a religion that gets an A+ in the art of shaming people over sexuality and discouraging contraceptive use. Clearly, the issue of where kids are getting their messages about sexuality and contraception is very complicated indeed, but what is not complicated is that the content of those messages seems to have a dramatic influence on behavior. Kids who believe they shouldn't be ashamed of having a sexuality and who are educated about contraception use tend to be more responsible about sex. Kids who believe sex is shameful and contraception is dangerous are more likely to tell themselves they won't have sex, and then capitulate in a moment of passion, telling themselves that at least they aren't the kind of sluts who carry condoms. Frankly, the messages that kids get from church, friends, and family probably have a lot more power than what they get from school.

That doesn't mean abstinence-only education isn't dangerous, of course. In a lot of places, abstinence-only serves to reinforce the larger cultural messages kids receive about how they should be ashamed of their sexuality and furitive and irresponsible in their experimentation. It's just that it's one factor among many.

Tags: abstinence-only, teen pregnancy