What Does "Abstinence" Mean To You?

Pop quiz. No looking at your notes. In which organization's educational materials did the following sentence appear? 

"Almost everyone can agree that abstinence is the only way to 100 percent protect against unintended pregnancy and STDs." 

1. The Abstinence Clearinghouse
2. The National Abstinence Education Association
3. The Heritage Foundation
4. None of the above

If you answered "none of the above," go to the head of the class. The sentence appeared in advocacy materials that we here at the ACLU developed for the purpose of ending government funding of ineffective, ideologically driven abstinence-only-until-marriage programming.  

The above exercise should give you pause; it stopped us in our tracks. What is the likelihood we're going to win this battle to get real information about sexual health into teenagers' hands if we continue to mimic our opponents' language?  

I'd like to say that we got to this epiphany on our own, but we didn't. It took the team of cognitive linguists at Real Reason to help us see that those of us who advocate for better sex education may unwittingly be undermining our mission by the very language we use. 

To help us become better sex ed advocates, Real Reason took a close look at how Americans understand sex and sexuality; the images of sex and sexuality that proponents of abstinence-only programming use to push their agenda; and the language used by advocates for comprehensive approaches that provide accurate information and skills to help teens live healthy lives now and in the future. 

Real Reason considered several key concepts operating in the debate over sexuality education, including sexuality, education, government, and development. For brevity's sake, let's look at the most dominant in this context: sexuality. After combing through mountains of material on sexuality education- from fact sheets and speeches made by advocates on both sides of the debate to legal briefs, blogs, television transcripts, and special linguistic databases - Real Reason identified two prominent cultural models of sexuality influencing the debate:  

1) sexuality as an undesirable, contaminating substance, and

2) sexuality as EXTERNAL FORCE, specifically, an OPPONENT.   

In the first, sexuality is something you suddenly and unfortunately "come into contact" with, not something that has always been a natural part of who you are. It's seen through the lenses of pure and impure, good and bad: think "dirty" jokes, "filthy" language, "polluted" young minds, and even the virgin/whore dichotomy. 

As for the second pairing, think of all of those stereotypes of lust-driven adolescents, the victims of their raging hormones. In this frame, sexuality is a threat to our self-control that needs to be reined in; there's always the risk of being "overcome" by desire or "giving in" to temptation. 

These models not only operate in our opponents' materials, but in ours as well. Sometimes we evoke them in a defensive manner. Other times we adopt them uncritically - for example, when we use the term "abstinence" to show that we too think teens should wait to have sex. Because of its connection to the EXTERNAL FORCE model of sexuality, we do ourselves and the young people we care about no favors by using the term abstinence. 

While we believe that it's important to talk about how, why and when to decide not to have sex, using the term "abstinence" concedes too much. It invokes a belief system that casts sex as fundamentally negative (along with the other harmful things from which one commonly abstains, like drugs, excessive alcohol, and overeating). It implies that refraining from sex is about danger, not giving in, and teeth-gritting, painful self-denial.  

Instead of saying, "Abstinence is a healthy choice for young people," a more productive way of getting our message across might be to use the phrase "waiting to have sex is..." Instead of saying, "Abstaining from sex is the only 100 percent effective method," we could say, "Deciding not to have sex is..." By rephrasing these sentences, we not only refuse to frame the debate in our opponents' terms, we also begin to recognize teenagers as thoughtful and capable decision makers, laying the groundwork for them to make healthy choices.  

Turning our messaging around may be challenging. Still, the tide is with us: parents support comprehensive sex education and research shows that it's effective. So stay tuned.  In the coming months, we will continue working with Real Reason to more fully develop our vision of sexuality education and to bring forward an alternate cultural model that we hope will help secure the world we want -- not one where sex is a dirty substance or an aggressive outside force, but one in which we accept sex and sexuality as part of life, something that makes us human, and allows us to experience deep connections with other people. Our ultimate goal is to link this vision with policies that support and enhance human sexuality and human relationships.