I read it here and my heart broke. Over one in four teenage girls! When music, movies, and TV are assuring our kids that it’s okay to have sex any time they feel like it, few people are talking about venereal disease and the associated heartbreak.
My book club met last night to talk about a new romance that’s come out–I suppose it’s a romance. The main question is whether or not the guy will ever get the girl, and that’s a romance in my book. Anyway, there was another character who slept with any woman who walked by, and while we were talking about him, I pointed out that the heroine–who happened to be temporarily married to said sleaze–was a little too gullible for my taste. “Think of the venereal diseases that guy must have been carrying,” I pointed out.
But no one talks about such things, so no one thinks about them . . . much. But it’s time we began to talk about such things with our kids. Read the above article and see if you don’t agree.
On another note, today I was trying to print out some handouts for my fiction class at Mt. Hermon. My laser printer kept quitting before the job was done, and every time it sent me a plain sheet of paper with its complaint printed across the top:
ERROR: syntaxerror
OFFENDING COMMAND: true.
Well. When my words begin to offend my printer, I think it’s time to call it a day. 🙂
~~Angie
STDs-Sad
Printer-funny
I am a huge fan of yours; I have bought all of your books!! Thank you for addressing this topic with dignity and grace. It needs to be dealt with and you handled it beautifully.
I would like your opinion on a topic that goes with this. I recently found a blog page by a woman who co-pastors a church with her husband. At first, I was enjoying it but then it seemed that more days than not sex was the issue; I don’t mean just teaching about it but actually giving intimate details such as her morning “romp with the pastor….how she can barely keep her hands off of him etc…” She further said we should give our husbands what he needed /as much as he needed and that anything gooes in the marriage bed. I left a comment and explained that while teaching womens’/mens’ group and counseling troubled couples on this issue is much needed ; I believed that the intimate details of the marriage bed should be guarded and not put on the world wide web. I was raked over the coals and chastised and in essence told that I must not love my husand enough to meet his needs and was called a so-called christian. Her husband left a respose about being in a time warp and this was 2008.
I am not a prude or old; I do believe that all this needs to be addressed in the right setting but I don’t believe that one should post such intimate details.
As I said before I really like the way you addressed this issue and would LOVE your opinion on what I said to the other blogger.
I don’t have a blogger identity, so I will leave my name.
Teresa
Shouldn’t that be “have an STD” not “Has”?
The worst part of the STD statistic? I just saw on GMA that they are attributing it to abstinence education. So how does teaching kids NOT to have sex cause them to get STDs. Argh!
I don’t think correcting grammar usage is the focus here.
I saw this on the news yesterday and it was heartbreaking. But until we stop glamorizing the Britneys and other celebrities and cleaning up the movies and television programs, it will only get worse. Add to that the typical youthful sense of invulnerability.
And the really scary thing is that statistics about sexual activity is not a great deal different among our Christian teens. Vicki Courtney’s Virtue Alert deals with this on a regular basis (virtuealert.blogspot.com) – she also speaks and has several books and a website for teen girls (virtuousreality.com).
Makes me want to lock my 12-year-old in her room until she’s 25 and then marry her off in an arranged marriage! 😉