For conservatives, the major selling point of abstinence-only education was all the things it doesn't teach. It doesn't teach you how to use condoms. It doesn't teach you about the birth control pill. No shots, no diaphragms, not even the pull-and-pray method. Some programs teach you, in highly exaggerated terms, that these things have failure rates, but that's it. The dominant concept behind abstinence-only education is that both the "sex" and "education" parts are problematic and best left out of the curriculum.

Starting an education program by making a long list of the things you don't want to teach sounds like a good idea on paper, but it turns out that when you're presenting your ideas to parents and school boards, they keep getting stuck on the silly idea that education should be about educating students, which is usually performed by sharing information instead of withholding it. Which created something of a conundrum for abstinence-only proponents, who then were tasked with the job of coming up with something that resembled education enough to sneak by school boards. That, or at least they needed to get some text inside books besides, "Sex is dirty, so don't do it. If possible, don't even think about it." It turns out that some parents and sticklers on school boards feel that an entire course should be more than two sentences at the beginning of class and then a semester of having high school kids kill time by scribbling in coloring books.

Tasked with the duty of coming up with something that resembles actual education, the developers of abstinence-only curricula, who were mostly of the right wing Christian persuasion, happened upon a brilliant plan: Just repack social conservative Christian propaganda in language that sounded vaguely scholastic and voila! No need for facts or real education. Soon a variety of what I like to call Potemkin textbooks and sex education curricula were developed.

Abstinence-only books and programs don't teach facts or safe sex strategies, but after all the work that curricula developers put into stuffing the textbooks with bona fide words and pictures, it's a little unfair at this point to accuse them of teaching nothing whatsoever. Plenty of lessons are imparted in the abstinence-only classroom at this point, some intended and plenty that are not intended in the slightest. Here's a sample of some of the lessons being passed with your federal abstinence-only dollar:

Technical virginity. Since most, probably all, abstinence-only materials are written by social conservatives who idealize traditional heterosexual marriage as the only legitimate form of sexual expression, there tends to be a focus on defining "sex" in these books as penis-in-vagina intercourse. Between that narrow definition of sex and the tendency of some abstinence-only programs to extract pledges from students to wait until marriage to have sex, a situation has been created where horny teenagers are practically challenged to find some legalistic technicalities where they can both get off and keep their pledges not to have sex. Enter "technical virginity," otherwise known as doing "anything but."

"Anything but" can actually be a safer way for teenagers to experiment if they stick to heavy petting and kissing, but when "anything but" includes, as it often does these days, anal and oral sex, the supposed STI-preventing benefits of abstinence-only evaporate. The statistics bear this out. Researchers from Yale and Columbia reported in March 2005 that abstinence-only pledgers had the same STD rates as non-pledgers, because they were still having sex while maintaining "technical virginity," and they were less likely to use protection, probably because they heard that it doesn't work anyway from their sex educators.

A third of American women are broken, moral degenerates, and suicidal from guilt. Abstinence-only textbooks come down hard on women who have abortions, even though there's no real reason to think that having an abortion degrades your will to wait for marriage to have sex, because the vast majority of women who have abortions have had sex at some point, probably recently. So either they're married or their will to avoid sex until marriage was degraded prior to the abortion. The Waxman report on abstinence-only education found that many texts teach that having an abortion leads to sterility, mental health problems down the road, and even suicide. Considering that more than one third of American women will have an abortion, these books are suggesting that one third of American women are broken shells of human beings.

In case that concerns you, the evidence for the widespread mental health problems caused by abortion is somewhere between scant and non-existent, so if you're worried about the source of women's problems, look to other causes. I hear that there's some threat to the right to abortion, for instance, which might be a cause for concern.

Women, or at least vaginas, are objects that get "used up" fairly quickly. Abstinence-only educators absolutely love having classroom demonstrations to drive home the point that women who've had sex are used up and more suitable for being thrown in a dumpster than gussied up in a wedding gown. Various objects are used to drive home this point. Some educators prefer to compare women to toothbrushes, telling the students you don't want to use someone else's toothbrush after they've opened the package and used it. Some pass out gum or lollipops and then dare the students to swap them after they've started chewing on them, likening non-virginal women to chewed up candy. My all-time favorite, though, might be Jennifer Waters's method, since she sticks tape to student arms and pulls it off, showing that if a woman has had sex with another guy before you, she's less emotionally "sticky."

From a certain perspective, however, her demonstration could be a pro-promiscuity one that teaches girls how to overcome co-dependent tendencies through sleeping around. I don't think that's how she means it, however.

Men are sexually aroused by condescending ego-coddling. The Waxman report also described one abstinence-only text called "Choosing the Best" had a story in it about a princess who helps a prince slay a dragon by giving him all the information he needed to know in order to do it. Her reward for being resourceful and saving their lives is that the prince dumps her for another woman. The moral of the story? The men value their feelings of superiority over women more than they do their own lives.

And those are just a few of the many retrograde, sexist, unhealthy lessons being imparted in abstinence-only education.