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 Apparently, the English have a drastically divergent philosophy than the U.S. when it comes to teaching kids about sex. While the Bush administration is busy eliminating references to condoms on public health sites and pretending that kids will stop having sex if you tell them to (and limit their access to responsible information, leaving them no other resources than porn sites and WB teen dramas), the British government is trying new and exciting ways to keep their kids from engaging in intercourse.  The key to the right wing push for espousing abstinence is simple… denial. Surely, a teenager won't succumb to their (ironically) God-given urges if their faith in The Lord is strong. But rather than stumble down that idiotic road, the Brits are coming to grips with the fact that their little teenage hormone bundles are going to experiment in one form or another with sex.So rather than denying that perfectly natural phenomenon, why not try to harness it into something without so many perceived consequences? That's what their government is doing, by encouraging kids to release their sexual tension through methods that don't involve full-blown intercourse—namely, oral sex. A government-backed course reaching more than 100,000 kids is encouraging pupils under 16 to experiment with oral sex, in an effort to slash rates of teenage pregnancy. The course, which was engineered by Exeter University with the blessing of the Departments of Health and Education, trains teachers to discuss various pre-sex "stopping points" with under-age teenagers. Its intent is to reduce promiscuity by encouraging pupils to discover "levels of intimacy," including oral sex, as alternatives to full sexual intercourse. One in every thirty secondary schools is employing the course. It seeks to tackle Britain's teenage pregnancy rate, which is the highest in Western Europe.  Of course, conservatives are saying that the course, called A Pause, will have the reverse effect by exciting the sexual interest of children. One thing that conservatives ignore or forget when employing these arguments is that, unless their instructors look like Elizabeth Hurley or Jude Law, most likely the effect of these lectures is anything but arousing.For instance, if I had been taught this course by, say, my middle-school instructor Mr. Drobny, there's no way my mind would have been able to wander away from his creepy Mr. Rogers-style sweater long enough to think about some sexy schoolgirl strumpet slobbering on my schlork. And unless a parent has little Johnny or Janey locked in a basement for home schooling, there's already plenty of images and messages available to excite our impressionable youth. Oral sex: the immaculate contact? Last year we told you of a San Francisco study which showed the risk of HIV infection to be very low, maybe even nonexistent, according to one physician. Well, news of this study has trickled down the pike gradually, and now the Village Voice is weighing in on the issue by giving a forum to those who, at best, are at odds with the controversial findings. Rex Wockner, a journalist whose syndicated news stories and commentaries have appeared in the gay press for 18 years, told the Voice, "I know four people who I believe when they tell me that they seroconverted from sucking."  "It's great news that guys in San Francisco are out there sucking dick and they are all still negative," Wockner said. "The unfortunate thing about this study is that nobody asked them how many times they did that. Doing it only once and staying negative doesn't prove a thing." Kimberly Page-Shafer, the San Francisco study's lead author, did not return phone calls from the Voice.The Voice also reports that there is disagreement within the San Francisco health department concerning the issue. "I certainly agree that the risk from oral sex is very low," says director Mitchell H. Katz. "The part of the message I don't think is beneficial is the part that says 'and may be zero.' I myself would not have oral sex with someone who was positive or of an unknown status." Katz says he tells people they have a 1-in-2500 chance of getting HIV from unprotected oral sex with ejaculation. It does seem unfathomable that the danger of contracting HIV from blowing someone who's infected would be close enough to zero, no matter how low, to proclaim that in academic circles, let alone through public information. And something tells me the physician in question probably won't be attempting that high-wire act anytime soon.
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