This story in the Washington Post a few days ago caught my eye. Basically the gist is that one in four U.S. teenaged girls have some form of STD, mostly human papillomavirus. The slant of the article, however, is frustrating to me. The central question in the article seemed to be “Why do teenagers have sex?” Not, “Why don’t teenagers use protection?” or “Why are teenagers having sex with five different partners?” but “Why are teenagers having sex at all?”

The fact that we’re asking this question shows, to me anyway, that there’s a double standard going on here. We expect high school students to be almost miniature versions of adults about matters of scholastic responsibility. Students must be extremely organized, meet all of their deadlines, prepare for high-stakes tests and make college decisions that will affect the rest of their lives. We’ve got zero tolerance for plagiarism and little tolerance for screw-ups of any kind. So if these teenagers can be responsible in all of these senses, why, on the subject of sex, does the prevailing attitude seem to be “Hell no, and the more we tell them about it, the more they’ll do it”?

This attitude is encapsulated in the trend towards abstinence-only sex education and strong emphasis on abstinence even in programs where other options are mentioned. I’m not far removed from that age bracket, and I can promise that between the double standard above and general teenage mentality, the effort is futile. The problem ought not be a matter of getting teenagers to quit having sex, but to quit having dumb, dangerous sex. So, how to do you convince “invincible” 16-year olds that if they have dangerous sex, they stand a reasonable chance of getting sick, pregnant or both? The first step is realizing that teenagers have sex for the same reasons everyone else has sex, and that we can’t stop it happening. What do we do next?