Don’t think about white mice. Don’t give white mice another thought. Really, if white mice come to mind, just stop thinking about those cute little white mice. It really isn’t hard to stop thinking about white mice. When you start thinking about white mice, just start telling yourself that there are far more important things to think about than adorable little white mice. And don’t let that computer mouse make you think about white mice.
I’m lucky, I have a track pad on my laptop, so I don’t think about white mice. Although when I see the dish of cotton balls in the bathroom it reminds me of white mice sometimes. When I think of white mice, I usually remember the elevator in grad school that always seemed to have a pharmacy grad student with cages of white mice being brought from the animal care center. Then I repeat over and over, “stop thinking about white mice“.
But I digress, don’t let elevators or cotton balls make you think about white mice. Don’t even let little white baby shoes remind you of white mice. Remember, when these things remind you of white mice, just keep telling yourself that you’re not going to think any more about white mice. Not even when you hear a door squeak or a child’s squeaky toy, or even when you see a scooter. Forget the white mice. White mice are just not important.
That’s the way it goes with comprehensive sex education, and with ‘value-neutral’ abstinence programs. The more we discuss sex, the more we think about it. The more we discuss ways of avoiding the consequences of sex the more empowered we feel about sallying forth into carnal bliss.
Discussed in such a permissive manner, trained in the culture of readily available ‘protection’, there isn’t an inclination to defer gratification.
Small wonder then that this week we’ve heard of the latest study telling us that the more we discuss white mice, er, sex, with kids the more they go out and have sex.
William Kilpatrick cited several such studies well over a decade ago in his book Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong.
Abstinence education works somewhat better than comprehensive sex education, by as much as 30% in some studies. If abstinence, however, is nothing more than saying no to primal urges, it’s inherently problematic. Such a ‘just say no’ approach is to the development of mature sexuality what a bread and water diet is to developing healthy nutritional habits over a lifetime.
Authentic sexuality is about subordinating one’s self to God’s wise plan for ALL of His creation. When such subordination achieves the status of habit, one is more rightly disposed to the self-mastery requisite for marital fidelity. Our bodies are not our own to do with as we will. Entering marriage after a lifestyle that caters to just that understanding, that our bodies are our own to do with as we will, predisposes us to disaster in marriage.
Fidelity is a virtue. And virtue as we know is a MORALLY GOOD OPERATIVE HABIT. Vice is a morally bad operative habit.
We need to be instilling these very concepts in our young. Morality, Goodness, Habits: Those qualities that define one’s character.
Just saying no, without the tempering influence of a larger moral vision can degenerate into trying in vain not to think about white mice.
Teaching them to cave to inpulse, to eschew morality, to indulge the self in a moment’s notice is simply the wrong preparation for when one’s spouse simply isn’t up to gratifying needs on demand.
This is so much more than ‘staying safe’. It isn’t sitting and saying that I won’t think about white mice. It’s about attaching one’s yearning to a love greater than oneself. It’s about dying to self in order to live for God and one’s future spouse, before we have even met him or her. It is the grain of wheat falling to the ground and dying as a grain so as to yield far more grain in due season.
Coming Home 
I’ll be thinking about white mice all day now- and probably will dream about them tonight- white mice, with their beady red eyes riding on little scooters. 😀
Great post and good illustration of how comprehensive sex education fails.
You’ll be okay Bethany. Just don’t think about WHITE MICE! 😉
I would like to see more ways for this perspective to be part of the mix. I was at Christmas dinner with a family I’ve been friends with for a long time, and a man about my age or a little older was telling his 20 year old great niece that at her age “you sure nuff need a man.” I said, don’t pay any attention to that Mimi, men aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Now in due course she will most likely find a man she wants to marry, or perhaps move in with, I don’t know, but she doesn’t need to get a man just to get a man. For that matter, sex isn’t all its cracked up to be either, and I suspect it cannot be fully enjoyed without an enduring commitment to the partner that lasts all day long and all year long. That is part of God’s plan too.
Putting sex in proper perspective, but not making it the focus of every waking moment, is also right — but no sex education at all isn’t a viable answer. First, we know that kids are bombarded with advertising and culture intensely laced with sex, e.g. Brook Shields on TV every commercial break asking “You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” (I’m showing my age, that’s an OLD commercial). Second, kids do have urges, earlier and earlier, and they think about them all the time.
Teaching God’s plan is not something the public schools can do well, even if it were legal for them to do it at all. Ergo, churches, of whatever denomination, should be devoting a good deal of effort to sex education classes — not all day, every day, not even every Sunday, but maybe once a week when kids reach the age when they ARE thinking about white mice, or sex, anyway. What sort of sex education should a church teach? It should focus on how and why sex is part of God’s plan, and that subordination of sexual urges for God’s plan is essential to a fulfilling life, including a fulfilling sex life.
Should public schools leave it all to churches? No. Not every teen belongs to a church, and not every teen listens to what their church teaches. Should public schools compete with churches? No, at best, they should explicitly acknowledge,’ your church may be teaching you how sexuality is part of God’s plan, and that is a good way to achieve some self-discipline. For those of you not receiving that instruction, there are good material reasons to exercise some self-discipline. Penicillin hasn’t made them all go away.’ A few months ago, I read about a high school graduate in South Carolina who had a very explicit and intensive sex education class, who is the first in her family not to be either pregnant or a father by age 16. Someday she hopes to marry.
Perhaps we also need to restructure our culture and our economy so that marriage is encouraged and feasible at a relatively early age. In short, are we asking too much to expect kids hitting the age of puberty earlier to wait longer before the discipline of marriage is available? It would take a more communitarian lifestyle to pull this off. There needs to be a tight safety net allowing parents to love each other, care for their children, continue their education, enter the workforce, not make marriage something to put off for many years during which casual sex becomes an overwhelming temptation. But not too fast — it is not good to make a lifetime commitment on a teen impulse either…
It was in WaPo also but here’s a link: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/20010/feb/10020107.html Abstinence Only Education Linked to Deceased Promiscuity in High Risk Teens
The girls getting pregnant are also being exposed to STDs. Would you sentence a teen-ager to future infertility by encouaging her to practiice “safe-sex”? Not my daughter you didn’t and cetainly not any granddaughter. We make her wear a seat belt and we hand them condoms?
On the other hand, business increases for Planned Parenthood. Think about how much money manufacturers of condoms, the Pill, and here’s where the real money, the morning after pill and the HIV cocktail.
How about this: we get the Church and schools to inform parents it is their obligation to teach the facts of life. We in the po-life movement are doing our best to educate parents: the best medical and social science says sex outside of marriage is harmful. If they wouldn’t let their 6 year old play with matches, they should promote absistence.
As a former po-choicer and ex-atheist, Jen Fulwiler has a lovely blog, Conversion Diary. Her post on seeing angry pro-choicers at a March for Life is a must read: http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jan/10012801.html
The “right” to an abortion is based on a putative right to pirivacy. Now the civil libertarians are pushing SB 6452, a bill that insists that pregnancy centers post that they don’t perform abortions or provide the morning after pill. http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/feb/10020108.html
Dr. Gerard,
What’s a parent to do when our young teens want to go to the movies for some innocent fun but Mom can’t find a decent movie that doesn’t have at least one or two gratuitous white mice?? PG-13 isn’t for 13 year olds anymore. Help!
By the way, these mice are adorable.
Janet,
I know what you mean about movies with one or two white mice. Good News! Forget the white mice, Alvin and the Cipmunks the Squeakuel is playing in movie theaters everywhere. We just took the kids.
But…teens are past Alvin & Co.
It’s a tough question. If the sexy stuff isn’t too over the top, I would be open to taking my kids and sitting elsewhere if they need that “space”. It could be a very teachable moment, giving you something tangible with which to contrast your virtues. It also presents itself as an opportunity to show how Hollywood uses sex rather needlessly. (Honestly, 99% of the sex in films is entirely gratuitous) Without a doubt, most of that sex in films does not lead to unity, fulfillment and family. It usually traps people in a thousand different ways.
So, when I get there with my gang in three yerars, I’ll be thinking seriously along these lines.
Janet, have you ever checked out Feature Films? There are some great family movies there that don’t include any white mice.
BHG has a good point on STDs, and also on who is motivated to market what. That’s what American business is really all about, getting us to buy stuff we didn’t really need, or wouldn’t have needed if we hadn’t been sold on something else we didn’t need first.
Two virgins who marry and remain faithful for life are never, never, never going to contract a single STD. They just aren’t. That’s worth talking about. All the “safe sex” methods improve the percentages, if done right, and consistently, but they are often skipped in the heat of the moment, and aren’t perfect. Of course, it remains true that generations who had almost no way to make sex “safe” indulged anyway. We’re not going to get perfection, and we have to be prepared to hang onto half a loaf when we can’t get a whole one.
I don’t think parents are ever going to be enough all by themselves. It takes hearing the message from a dozen different directions all over the community to make an impact.
Two virgins who marry and remain faithful for life are never, never, never going to contract a single STD. They just aren’t. That’s worth talking about.
I agree wholeheartedly!
By the grace of God, that’s how my husband and I started our lives together. We began as best friends, it became more than that but we remained virgins for 2 years before we got married. We are still best friends today.
God bless you both Bethany. The last wedding I attended was two friends who had known each other for over five years, and hadn’t even kissed until their wedding. The groom said something about that at the reception, and the bride tiptoed over to him and kissed him again — but it was a great example. There are plenty of premarital babies in both of their families, and some of the teens / early 20s friends and relations sent them notes saying “Thank you for doing it right and waiting until you were married” on the occasion of their first pregnancy. It really was his baby too — not only in the biological sense, but, short of carrying it in his own abdomen, which men are not designed for, he was taking really good care of his wife the whole time. They had a healthy baby boy, who would NOT face the camera for an ultrasound, so they didn’t know until birth.
i stumbled across this, so i thought id leave my two cents.
you miss the point with your white mice analogy. kids think about sex regardlessly. are we so far removed from our own childhood that we forget the content of grade-school banter? children and teens arent stupid; they already know what sex is (for the most part).
the point is that when we attempt to teach only abstinence to children/preteens/teens, we are in effect telling them not to think about the white mice–not to think about sex. you will say that sex before marriage is unnatural and evil, though you surely wont mention the thousands of years of “evil” reproduction, without which the figures in the old testament could ever exist.
in saying that sex is a pleasure (that you will say is granted by God) which must be avoided and quashed from the unmarried vocabulary, one cites the allure of the topic then explicitly forbids it. if this doesnt result in your ‘white mice’ effect, i dont know what will.
sexual education deals with this in a contrastingly straightforward manner. it allows safe discussion between kids and knowledgeable individuals who are inclined to treat each other with respect. it tears the veil of mystery from the subject and relinquishes the students from the authoritative/ignorant relationship model. sure it may ‘result’ in teens feeling confident enough to safely engage in intercourse, but isnt that their choice?
Didnt your God grant man free will so that he man choose to be a heathen if he so desires? in fact, this will in effect separate the true believers from the phonies. if a teen is truly righteous (in your eyes) then he will do the “right” thing. this should embolden christians with yet another possible source of superiority. if you wish everyone around you to live solely by God’s rule, then America, a nation free from the stricture of one religion, is not the place for you.
Alexander –
I think the biggest issue with sex education is the position it promotes and the one you appear to subscribe to: Which is the promotion of individualism. Thinking in terms of fullfilling one’s self in a sexual manner.
While sexual immorality has always been an issue and people will always engage in it – it was never promoted and made culturally acceptable to this degree. You talk about grade-school banter?! I don’t know where you went to grade school but I can assure you that I wasn’t bombarded with it during my years. Neither were my parents nor were they witnessing the sight of pregnant teen girls gracing the school hallways in numbers each school year as if it were the norm.
Even if you take the faith element out of the equation, can you honestly look around and tell me that sex education is improving the quality of life within our culture? It’s clearly not. What I find so amazing within the argument that supports sex-education, is the opposite effect it is very clearly having on our over-sexed society. Various methods of artificial birth control are discussed and advocated; however, there are still high rates of teenage pregnancy. It’s common to walk inside of a high school today and enounter quite a few teenaged girls walking around very pregnant. Also, the high rates of sexually transmitted disease is another issue:
But you will attempt to argue with me that the abstinence approach will result in the ‘white mice’ effect moreso than the ‘sex-education’ approach does?!
If anything, I think value-based abstinence clearly outlines the positives of waiting until two people are inside of a healthy, committed marriage/relationship. It highlights what you will benefit with: A committed, loving, stable partner; children who will have the love and security of both mother and father, an emotionally and physically healthy sex life that is about love not ‘lust.’ They in essence do not have to worry about … disease, an unwanted pregnancy + the financial/legal stress that ensues, the higher risk of facing emotional turmoil when a non-committed partner doesn’t work out. While sex education may highlight some of these similar areas and attempt to discourage on some level, in the same breath it also turns around and gives youth a free license to risk physical and emotional harm to themselves and others. It’s desensitizing them, programming them to embrace human sexuality in a selfish manner by trying it – without thinking of the moral ramifications that ensue because it’s subsribing to the idea that there is no such thing as ‘self control.’ It’s clearly misrepresenting what is best for ‘self’ instead of advocating what is also good and benefical for fellow mankind.
Listen, any well-functioning society is going to operate off of universal principles that are ‘right’ and if it functions well will also be the product of what is morally sound. You don’t want to call that ‘God’ fine – but I won’t mince words. Just remember that this country wasn’t found on a specific religion; however, it was founded on the moral principles of God. You can look straight to our Declaration of Independence as merely one example that provides evidence where a God is clearly acknowledged: Endowed with certain inalienable rights by our CREATOR. As for the rest, my advice would be to read the Old Testament from the bible for yourself to get an understanding on what was going on with Mankind, how they were cut off from God, and how God responded back. That’s if you so choose – after all, this is America and nobody is forcing you to do anything. I; however, would recommend it.
God doesn’t brandish sex as some ultimate ‘evil.’ Afterall, God is the creator of it and there is a reason his way works while everything else just creates some form of ensuing chaos. It is man-kind that abuses and misuses ‘sex’ and then endures the consequences for it. THIS – might be the instances in the OT that you may or may not have been referring to.
And to answer your questions about ‘teens’ and ‘choice’ – how do we reconcile such a statement when parents are legally and morally accountable for underage teens?! No, it’s not really their ‘choice’ because ‘choice’ infers a sense of personal responsibility and accountablity for actions. Like adults have to take on. However, when Teens make bad choices regarding their sexuality, others around them suffer the consequences and pay the price for their actions. Grandparents raising grandkids? Parents footing the financial burden on insurance for treatment? Babies born to mothers and fathers who are emotionally and financially incapable of taking care of themselves, let alone another human being? Yes, not much of a choice there at all.
To conclude, yes – the ‘white mice’ effect is accurate. I can tell you that even for myself as a single, adult, female – I need to be careful with the content I come into contact with on TV or elsewhere. ‘Sex’ is definitely thought about the more it is brought up in front of you – even if it gets brought up in some indirect fashion to ‘teach’ on something. When you take the NT advice from Jesus and ‘pluck out the eye that causes you to offend’ (which is metaphorical for removing out of your life that which is not good for you) – you have an easier time dealing with and overcoming temptation. Lastly, it’s not the teaching of the biological mechanics of human sexuality that is the problem. It’s the moral position that ‘sex education’ is subtly upholding when making birth control available to teens without parental consent and knowledge or teaching that acting on the urges of ‘self’ is perfectly normal and acceptable. THAT is taking it a step too far because even some animals are biologically programmed by God in nature to take better care of their partners (wolves who mate with one partner for life).