Mairead 's got a very good point about the modern teenager: not necessarily dumb, but completely clueless about impulse control and cause-and-effect comprehension. In fact, I would argue that that is the basis for almost every single condemnation about kids the world over for millennia.
Impulse control is something we learn as we get older. Part of that is experience, but another is biological; a teenage brain is practically drowning in fluctuating chemicals and recent studies have shown they respond diametrically different ways to stress than adults do. Comparing myself now to 15 I'm amazed that I was ablet o drive to school safely the state my head was in...and I was sober!
Historically, there's always been enough psychology in the world to manipulate people, but not enough to understand them. Marketing people know more about human responses than the people themselves do. Our TV shows, movies, advertising, etc. are LOADED with content specifically designed to manipulate our emotions but we have ABSOLUTELY NO institutions instructing people how to interpret them. Most kids grow up without ANY training about how to make decisions or even how to handle responsibilities.
And this applies most strongly I think to parents. Parental skills are predicated on POWER, not INTELLIGENCE; Mom & Dad get their rule from AUTHORITY not WISDOM. A 2-parent household is pretty much a domestic variation of a dictatorship: Mom/Dad is always right even when their wrong, and if you call them on it, you will be penalized with restrictions on your liberties. Parents have to make a lot of decisions for kids because the kids don't have the knowledge to make them themselves, but I think after you spend 10 years or so arbitrating every little decision for someone, it starts to shape your relationship with them. Eventually, children start to grow up and learn things, but parents spend so much of the formative period with an incapable that they start to resent it when the relationship changes. And when kids start figuring out that the people they trust for information have been feeding them biased knowledge, they tend to distrust them...unfortunately it tends to be around 10-13 years old, when mom & dad's advice would HELP for a change.
The dictatorship parallel continues along the lines of information control. We often have to withhold information from children to avoid traumatizing them, but as they get older, we start doing it to keep them dependent on us for decisions. Regimes control opinion and belief by controlling information, and so too do parents do the same with their children by restricting what they learn. But eventually, it catches up to us and dishonesty and maniuplation catch up to us. We don't trust them to make the right decisions because we know they won;t make them...and we know that because we've KIND OF (not all the way) made them that way. If they DID KNOW how to make the right deicisons, then a parent wouldn't have to be the central authority in their lives by necessity would they? As a parent do you think you could just up and let that go after 15 years of routine? Inmates who spend that much time in prison have trouble adjusting to a new life too.
Added to which, teenagers have very little actual knowledge of the real world; everything they know comes from television, friends and family, advertising, and the limited environment around them. Sure we want our kids to have all teh advantages we never did, but in our frenzy to boost the advantages and remove objectionable/scandalous material, we're also eliminating any reference to a life before those advantages or any experience outside their own. Of course they have trouble dealing with real-life problems, they don't even know what the fuck they are much less how to resolve them! Taking responsibility is as much preventative as it is other, but we seem to equate "responsibility = consequences" in our society rather than "responsibility = thinking ahead". Sure being responsible is hard until you get used to it...but you need practice.
As far as Western attitudes toward sex, we play the ostrich complex: if we can't see it, it isn't there. If we don't tell kids about sex, they won't know its there and wont go after it. We took that attitude in WWI when we refused to distribute prophylactics to our troops in the hpes that we wouldn't be promoting the idea of casual sex with foreign women; the result was returning U.S. troops had the highest levels of syphillis of any other European nation. That also applies to our prevention. I tried to get a vasectomy years ago at the age of 22, but they wouldn;t give me one because I didn't have any kids yet at my age. I protested and offered to sign a waiver protecting the doctor from a malpractice suit, but he pulled the Hippocratic Oath on me. I'm going to try again this year, but even at 27, I might not get it.
On the condom issue, you might be able to get more guys to use them if you taught them this simple trick that I learned long ago and tell everybody I can if the issue comes up: put 2 drops of water-based lube inside the condom before you slip it on, and you get about 60% of the sensation back. I've tried it, and it works. But that would mean giving away information...OOOOH, knowledge bad!
But as for guys like drew70 who make the whole absitence argument, I'm in conflict with that. Abstinence DOES NOT EQUAL IMMUNITY! If we took that attitude with other pandemics like polio or small pox by saying "don't hang around sick people/do sick people things" we'd all be fucking dead now. STIs can mutate and one day they might mutate into more contagious forms that don't necessarily need sexual contact to spread and then where will abstinecne help? We're humans, we built the pyramids, we split the atom, we should be able to build a better immune system! We shouldn't be putting up with this crap because we should be better than this.
Sure, avoiding the infected saved the lives of the aristocracy during the Black Death, but it was a medical student on the ground who survived the disease to figure out how it actually killed people; and guess who's actions helped defeat the Plague worldwide in the end?
