An Open Letter to Shelly Donahue

An Open Letter to Shelly Donahue:

I would like to address you on the grounds of your views towards sex education for teens in the United States. You have been preaching an abstinence-only sex education in private and public schools across the nation and even abroad for the past 20 years and in your current “national abstinence and relationship curriculum” called WAIT (Why Am I Tempted?) Training, you encourage high school students to remain abstinent and wait until marriage to have sex. The qualms I have with you lie within the WAIT program, and I would like to bring to attention not only your teaching messages of abstinence-only sex ed, which has been proven to be adversely successful, but also the particular methods you use to try and further propagate this message.

First of all, let me just begin by saying it loud enough for the people in the back: ABSTINENCE-ONLY SEX ED IS NOT EFFECTIVE SEX EDUCATION.

Thank you.

The United States currently ranks #1 worldwide for both teenage pregnancy and STI rates. A teenager in the U.S. is more likely than in any other industrialized country to have a child (Kearney). Our government has attempted to combat these high numbers by mandating abstinence-only sex education in middle and high schools. Now, don’t get me wrong; abstinence is the only sure-fire way to avoid becoming pregnant or contracting an STI, but the issue with teaching this method and this method only to teenagers, is that, shockingly, they’re not all going to listen to it.

Instead, what ought to be done is to give teens a comprehensive sex education that includes medically correct information about birth control, disease prevention, and the like. As author Jessica Valenti so nicely puts it, “It’s reality-based sex ed that understands that no matter how many scare tactics you throw at people, they’re still going to do what they want” (Valenti 21).

You say on your website that you are dedicated to “turn[ing] things around like the teen pregnancy rate, the STD rate […]” (Shelly). But, Shelly, studies have shown that abstinence-only education is positively correlated with teen pregnancy and STI rates. According to a 2011 study by the Public Library of Science, states that stressed abstinence-only education in their laws have a teen pregnancy rate of about 7.32% while states that merely covered abstinence in with their comprehensive sex education have rates of about 5.63% (Stanger-Hall).

One of the things that absolutely gobsmacked me upon researching about sex education throughout the country, was learning that there are only a handful of states in which sex education is required, and that some are required to be abstinence-only, but there are also some in which the sex ed doesn’t have to medically accurate.

Get that?

What they teach kids is not required to be factually true!

As John Oliver puts it in his segment on sex ed in America, that’s like saying, “Hey, we’ll be teaching your kids American history this year! But guess what? It’s not going to be historically accurate!” (Oliver).

Why would something like this ever be mandated?

It absolutely boggles my mind.

Figure 1: Map of U.S. depicting this inane policy of non-medically accurate sex education.

In the 2005 documentary The Education of Shelby Knox, 15-year-old Shelby Knox advocates against the abstinence-only sex education curriculum taught at her public high school in Lubbock, Texas, which at the time, had one of the highest rates of both teen pregnancy and STI rates in the country (Lipschutz). The documentary also depicts a “purity ball”, which is a prom-like event that young girls attend with their fathers or both parents in which they pledge to them their chastity until marriage.

Yeah.

Seems totally normal and not at all creepy.

Now this is where this anti-sex culture opens up an even nastier can of worms, starting with these “purity balls”. Largely held in southern states, by nature, these “balls”, along with other chastity pledges such as virginity cards, rings, and ceremonies, are selling this idea that virginity (particularly a young women’s) is a commodity and an asset that must be protected so that the goods are not ‘tainted’. Women are compared to objects that will be ‘spoiled’ upon having sex. Objects like “dirty lollipops”, “chewed up pieces of gum”, “used toothbrush”, “dirty pair of sneakers”, or the one you use in your program Shelly, “pieces of tape” that, when attached to the arms of multiple guys, will lose its “bonding power”.

What a horrible, horrible thing to say.

You are promoting a culture in which having sex is something that will devalue the worth of women. Not even all unmarried people- explicitly women. I should not have to explain to you why that is horrible. No one should be made to feel ashamed of a personal choice they make about their sex life. This shaming is so unbelievably damaging to the psyches of young girls who hear your message and your disgusting metaphor.

I speak of these repercussions of abstinence-only, “used tape” metaphor sex education from my own experience at a sex ed seminar I attended in middle school. I remember it was called “Positively Waiting” and it was part of our 8th grade Confirmation curriculum at the private Lutheran school and church I attended. In said seminar, an above-middle-aged married couple told us their ‘horror stories’ of when they were young and decided to have sex with their respective girl/boyfriends. The husband had contracted herpes and the wife had gotten chlamydia multiple times and had had an abortion as a teenger.

Now, at the heart of it, this part of the seminar was fine. They had been young kids who didn’t know about or use contraceptives or condoms or anything to stave off STIs, so it seems natural that they would want to pass a message stressing the importance of educating oneself before having sex. Except, that wasn’t quite the lesson they were trying to teach us with their testimonies.

In that seminar, I remember nothing of them discussing birth control and the like or saying how important it is to have an open line of communication with your partner so both of you are fully aware of one another’s situations. Instead, they used this anecdote to essentially scare us by saying that this is what happens when you sin (remember it was a religious event, so it’s only fitting we drag Jesus into our sex lives as well) and have sex outside marriage.

I also, very vividly, remember the woman using the exact metaphor you use of comparing people having sex to a piece of tape and a hairy arm. The one (small) saving grace of my particular seminar is that I don’t remember them explicitly saying that a woman is like a piece of tape, it was more general to anyone engaging in sex. And instead of saying that we will lose our “bonding power”, as you so eloquently put it, she told us that we will lose our “stickum”, which is virtually the same thing. At the end of the seminar, they told us that they had special ‘pledge’ pins for us and that to get them, all we had to do was come up to them, look them in the eye, and say, “I am worth waiting for”.

They phrased it as if it was optional, but in the looming gazes of all our teachers and everyone in the grade (boys and girls alike), if you didn’t do it, you might as well have been yelling out, “I’M A SLUT!” to the entire room. So, of course, I have one of these pins and I looked that woman in the eye as she stared back at me (rather harshly) and told her, “I am worth waiting for”, and she handed me this little black heart pin with the aforementioned declaration inscribed in tiny gold lettering. It also came with a little card that included all the things we were promising to do, like not “losing our stickum” and crap like that. I still have it somewhere. I used to keep it pinned up on my board with pictures of all my loved ones, until of course, the day I realized how gross and deeply repressive it was.

Now, this particular seminar was not actually part of any school-or-state-mandated sex education, but rather, part of a Confirmation program for young, pubescent kids to induct them as fully-fledged members of the Christian Church.

Now, I know that you yourself are also a Christian and part of your abstinence-only urging also includes a religious aspect. According to your website, your mission statement and goals are to “biblically proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord through all that we do in educating, encouraging, empowering, and equipping parents and adults to raise the bar of sexual self-control in the teenagers they influence” (Shelly). This particular mission statement is for another one of your seminars, this time for parents, called TALL Truth (christened as such because you are really tall.. ?).

So clearly, religion plays a very important role in your life and in your teachings. And that is just fine- you are passionate about this and about God, so it’s natural, and heartening, to see people care so much about something that they would dedicate their lives to it. Your curriculum also isn’t completely anti-sex; one of the points you make in your TALL Truth seminar is that sex is great, but the best sex is when you’re married.

Now, we are going to have to agree to disagree about abstinence-only sex ed. But Shelly.. Dear Shelly. You can’t keep going around and spreading these metaphors that, whether you directly intend it or not, imply that women (and their hymens) are somehow this commodity that can be spoiled. Because that is so not true and it is taking so many steps backward when it comes to women’s rights and empowerment. If you’re going to preach abstinence, teach girls how to say ‘no’ and boys how to hear it. Don’t tell them that if they do this, they will simply become nothing more than a “used-up piece of tape”.

Angry but Respectfully,

Belle Wyman

Works Cited

“About Shelly… – Shelly Donahue -.” Shelly Donahue, TALL Truth Inc., http://www.shellydonahue.net/about/.

“Infographic-Sex-Education.” GirlTalkHQ, GirlTalkHQ, 31 May 2017, girltalkhq.com/new-female-founded-app-real-talk-set-bring-comprehensive-sex-education-teens/teen-map-e1362162632706/.

Kearney, Melissa S, and Phillip B Levine. “Why Is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States so High and Why Does It Matter?” The Journal of Economic Perspectives : A Journal of the American Economic Association, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2012, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22792555.

LastWeekTonight, director. Sex Education: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). YouTube, YouTube, 9 Aug. 2015, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0jQz6jqQS0&t=1043s.

Lipschutz, Marion and Rose Rosenblatt, directors. The Education of Shelby Knox: Sex, Lies & Education. Incite Pictures, 2005.

McCammon, Sarah. “Abstinence-Only Education Is Ineffective And Unethical, Report Argues.” NPR, NPR, 23 Aug. 2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/23/545289168/abstinence-education-is-ineffective-and-unethical-report-argues.

Stanger-Hall, Kathrin F, and David W Hall. “Abstinence-Only Education and Teen Pregnancy Rates: Why We Need Comprehensive Sex Education in the U.S.” National Center for Biotechnology Information, Public Library of Science, 14 Oct. 2011, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194801/.

Valenti, Jessica. “Feminists Do It Better (and Other Sex Tips).” Full Frontal Feminism: a Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, by Jessica Valenti, Seal Press, 2007, pp. 19-40.