Can Internet inform teens about sex?

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I certainly don't want to see 10-year-olds or 15-year-olds spending hours a day surfing Internet porn sites. But it would have been awfully helpful to me and my contemporaries when we were growing up if we'd been able to go to the Internet for answers to the questions we had about sex.

Our parents were useless on the subject. They said things like "Your body is your temple" and "Do it and you die." But they were far too squeamish to answer our most basic questions, and we knew enough not to put them on the spot.

There was no sex education in school, and in the occasional discussion groups we had at church, nobody talked about anything we wanted to know about. Such as how, exactly, did people have sex? How did it feel? And what did the other sex's private parts look like?

What information we got came from the boys, who got it from the male sex magazines or from older guys, and it portrayed sex as something that was dirty, shameful and primarily something that boys "did" to girls.

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Meanwhile, under pressure from the Bush administration, many public schools are promoting only sex education programs that stress abstinence. There's nothing wrong with encouraging kids to delay sex until marriage. But it is wrong to keep telling them that this is the norm, when it hasn't been for generations.

It's also wrong to equate teenage sexual activity only with disease, unwanted pregnancy and death, and not also with pleasure and healthy intimacy - and with none of the aforementioned problems if one takes the proper precautions. When we give young people only half the story, we lose whatever credibility we had.

[link|http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/2660476|source]

Of course, I better take notes, since my daughter will be starting down the "boys aren't so yucky anymore" path soon enough.