Wow, lots of bullshit bourgeois puritanism masquerading as 'progressive' views on sex!
Consider the ideology behind these statements more clearly:
Originally posted by eXacto+--> (eXacto). Ok , there is a lot of sex amongst teenagers , but that used to be the same back in the days .[/b]
Really. The denial of teenage sexuality as biologically adult sexuality, which is what it is, is only about parental desire to deny their teenager sons and daughters (mostly daughter's) personhood and full agency in order to justify the imposition of their will over their teenage children's.
It has nothing to do with the reality of teenage experience or conditions.
Contemporary age of consent laws are a relatively new invention and it was common for people to have socially acceptable sex much much younger than they do now (of course they still have sex at 13 or so but but its not socially acceptable). This is despite the fact that people today enter puberty much earlier than in any previous generation (due to diet).
So, why were 17th century fathers cool with their 13 year old daughters having sex while 21st century fathers are horrified by their their 13 year old daughters having sex? Because in the 17th century, the fathers were deciding who they had sex with, so for them to have sex in such a context allowed them to exert control of their daughter's sexuality. Because this practice is no longer acceptable (in the west), 13 year olds have sex with people they want to, and thats horrifying to their parents because it signals a lack of control over their sexuality, so the desire to control their daughters sexuality is misrepresented as a general denial of it (a denial that bobkindles appears to endorse). They regard their sons in a similar way but pursue control over them less aggressively.
The sexuality of young teenagers didn't change, rather the method of parental control over their sexuality changed, and thats whats responsible for the different attitudes. This is not an issue of biology or pyschology but an issue of power dynamics.
Originally posted by eXacto+--> (eXacto)
The drugs : maybe kids do a lot of drugs[/b]
No, they don't, this is a myth propagated by people with an interest in reinforcing patriarchal control over children and teenagers by depicting them as 'irresponsible' or out of control'. In reality, people 18-25 are much more likely to use drugs than people 12-17. The risks associated with overdoses from IV drugs are positively correlated with age, so its more dangerous for older adults as well.
Source: http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/public...actsht/druguse/ (http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/factsht/druguse/)
Source: http://www.drug-rehabs.org/ask.php?aid=41
Originally posted by eXacto
Alcohol is way worse than weed , even tabaco is so , XTC and stuff like that is an other thing , but weed is just pure nature and you are the ones who say
Actually alcohol is a lot worse than ecstasy as well.
The real risk from drugs (recreational and medical) is best measured in terms of its toxicity by the ratio of the effective dose (what you need to take to get high or feel better) and the lethal dose (how much you need to take to kill yourself). This is an appropriate measure because it determines the risk for acute fatalities (obvious, tobacco, unlike weed, also has long term risks).
The ratio of the effective to lethal dose for alcohol is 1 to 10, which is to say that if someone drinks ten times the amount needed for them to feel the psychological effects of alcohol, they risk death from alcohol poisoning.
By comparison, the ratio of effective to lethal dose from MDMA/ecstasy, is 1 to 16. So, MDMA is actually much safer, for all of the ridiculous myths about people dying on dance floors from MDMA overdoses, they're much more likely to die from alcohol overdose (they just don't call it "overdose" even though thats what it is).
Cocaine has a ratio of 1 to 15, so also less dangerous than alcohol, ketamine has a ratio of 1 to 38, nitrous oxide has a ratio of 1 to 150, LSD is 1 to 1000. Aspirin is 1 to 20.
Weed on the other hand, is so unusually nontoxic that it has no established lethal dose (unlike almost every other substance people ingest). Not only has there never been a case of marijuana induced death in a human, but lab researchers have failed to establish even a reliable theoretical lethal dose because they haven't managed to kill any lab animals larger than rats with it. For instance:
The non-fatal consumption of 3000 mg/kg A THC by the dog and monkey would be comparable to a 154-pound human eating approximately 46 pounds (21 kilograms) of 1%-marihuana or 10 pounds of 5% hashish at one time. In addition, 92 mg/kg THC intravenously produced no fatalities in monkeys. These doses would be comparable to a 154-pound human smoking at one time almost three pounds (1.28 kg) of 1%-marihuana or 250,000 times the usual smoked dose and over a million times the minimal effective dose assuming 50% destruction of the THC by smoking.
Theoretically, if the amount required to kill a rat is extrapolated to the expected amount required to kill a person, you could die from marijuana if you consumed 1500 pounds of it within 15 minutes.
The only popular drug thats more dangerous than alcohol is heroine,with a 1 to 5 ratio. So, one way of thinking about this, is the difference in danger between heroine in alcohol, is about the same as the difference in danger between alcohol and cocaine, and somewhat narrower than between alcohol and mdma.
Source (for information on alcohol, MDMA, cocaine, LSD, Heroine, etc): http://www.americanscientist.org/template/...print=yes#50979 (http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/50773?print=yes#50979)
Source: (for information on maijuana and aspirin): http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/mj_overdose.htm
Its also worth pointing out that while tobacco causes lung cancer, THC (in marijuana) actually protects lung cancer, and none of the other substances in marijuana cause it or any other cancer, so, if you're gonna smoke tobacco, at least smoke weed as well to cancel out some of the adverse health affects! :
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2501729_pf.html (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729_pf.html)
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11630
http://www.forbes.com/health/feeds/hscout/...cout603764.html (http://www.forbes.com/health/feeds/hscout/2007/04/17/hscout603764.html)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bobkindles, you're so disappointing in this topic. You clearly have bourgeois patriarchal views of teenagers, and a very male-chauvinist view of teenage girls, even while thinking that you dont.
Originally posted by Bobkindles
I think teenager age-ism is especially important in politics, as teenagers who put forward arguments against the existing economic and political system are described as idealistic and are not taken seriously, because they do not have sufficient experience of what is often referred to as the 'real world'.
Actually, they're not taken seriously because they don't have any power, they don't have money and status. People feel they can ignore people who aren't powerful, the less power, the more they can be ignored. Anything they say to justify it is just an excuse.
Originally posted by Bobkindles
many social problems that are associated with teenagers and their apparent 'immaturity' are partly due to Capitalist society which creates social isolation and frustration for the individual, leading harmful behaviour such as the use of hard drugs.
You are taking it as a fact that teenagers are immature, i disagree. They're surely as mature as people over 20; while its easy to find exceptionally immature teenagers, its equally easy to find exceptionally immature adults. The only difference is that, as a demographic of power, the worst examples are not used to stereotype adults as they're used to stereotype teenagers, just as every negative stereotype about black people can be found among white people, the only difference being that the stereotype isn't applied to white people on a cultural level.
In any case, as i previously demonstrated, teenagers under the age of legal responsibility are *less* not *more* likely to use illegal drugs...and illegal drugs, apart from heroine but including cocaine and other 'hard drugs', are safer than alcohol and tobacco anyways.
There may be more sexual activity, but this is characterised by ignorance of the risks associated with sex,
Thats bullshit, really.
If theres more sexual activity, it snot because of "ignorance of the risks associated with sex", but rather despite people believing that sex is vastly more risky than it actually is.
There are three issues in terms of risk from sex which are often confused. The first is in transmission of deadly STIs, the second in transmission of annoying but not dangerous STIs, and the third is in terms of pregnancy (which i'll deal with separately).
People are *terrified* of getting HIV. The reality however, is that if you're not having frequent, repeated, unprotected sex (not just once, not oral) with IV drug users or a black gay men living in certain regions, your chances of getting HIV are almost nil. (source: http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstracts/102231288.html)
There are two reasons why you wont get HIV, the first is that actual infection rates are extremely low outside of at risk populations, the second is because HIV is hard to transmit by sex with an infected person except with frequent, repeated exposure.
There are political reasons why people don't want to know that white and asian people almost never get HIV in the west, and i wouldn't want to announce it to the US congress when lobbying for HIV funding, but the notion that "HIV is everyone's problem" is a myth. Yes, its a politically useful myth, but its not reality and it makes no sense to have teenage kids worry about something that will never happen to them (unless you have an ulterior motive, like wanting to stop them from having sex cause you think its icky).
In the UK for instance, the HIV infection rate per 100,000 is 3.1 for whites and 1.6 for asians. In other words, if you see 100,000 white people, 999,997 of them don't have HIV. Whats the chance of you having repeated unprotected sex with one of those three? Pretty slim. Not high enough to worry about compared to all of the other ways you could die.
(Source) http://sti.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/80/1/2.pdf
The rate of infection in the US men is somewhat higher among whites (and much lower among blacks) compared to the UK, but its still very low: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance...ort/table5b.htm (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/resources/reports/2004report/table5b.htm)
Now, among that already extremely low risk, teenagers have even less risk of having HIV than adults do. Teenagers account for just 3% of the HIV infection rate (Source: http://www.avert.org/usastata.htm). So, if you're a white teenager in the UK having sex with another white teenager in the UK, the chances of them having HIV are about about 3 in 10,000,000 if i'm doing the math correctly (if not, whatever 3% of 3 out of 100,000 is). Clearly this is not a real risk
All of this however, only points to the risk of having sex with someone who has hiv, not the risk of actually contracting hiv from sex with an infected person. Even if you have unprotected sex with someone who has HIV, the per-act risk for transmission is very very low.
The risk of HIV transmission through unprotected anal and vaginal intercourse is well known. Estimates of the probability of per-sex-act (receptive penile-anal intercourse with ejaculation) HIV transmission among homosexual men in the USA range from 0.005 to 0.03 during the asymptomatic phase of infection1 to as high as 0.1-0.3 during primary HIV infection.2 Analyses of data from North American and European studies of long-term heterosexual couples estimate the per-sex-act probability of HIV transmission through penile-vaginal intercourse to be approximately 0.001.3 However, the independent risk of HIV transmission through orogenital contact has been more difficult to study and is not as well understood.
One study calculated the per-sex-act probability of HIV transmission in a cohort of men who have sex with men (MSM) and determined that for unprotected receptive anal intercourse, the probability was 0.82% per act, for unprotected insertive anal intercourse 0.06%, and for unprotected receptive oral intercourse with ejaculation 0.04%.4 This remains the only study available that provides a probability for oral transmission, and further study is required to corroborate these estimates.
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/epiu-a...ay_04/13_e.html (http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/epiu-aepi/epi_update_may_04/13_e.html)
Clearly the "risk of sex" is magnitudes lower than what people think it is, the only sense in which people are 'ignorant of the risk of sex' is that they grossly overestimate it. (except of course pregnancy, which is a risk of sex that everyone has always known about, fortunately its among the easiest risks to prevent, you can get tested without a doctors appointment and its relatively easy to treat if caught early).
The reason teenagers have sex is because they want to, the reason they want to is because its enjoyable on physical, social, and emotional levels. This is obvious and attempting to deny it is only for the sake of denying that teenagers have the agency that adults do.
Originally posted by bobkindles
as indicated by the current rates of teen pregnancy
OH NO, TEENAGE PREGNANCY, SOOOO SCARY!!!!
Actually not. The fact that people talk about "teenage pregnancy epidemic", has nothing to do with the reality of teenage pregnancy and everything to do with the reactionary, social conservative patriarchal hatred for teenage sexuality.
There is no teenage problem with pregnancy, teenagers get pregnant at much lower rates than every other age group of fertile adult women.
http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/hlth65a.htm
So why isn't anyone talking about the horror of the 25-29 year old pregnancy rate, which is 61 times higher than the under 15 pregnancy rate, about 4 times higher than the 15-19 year old pregnancy rate?
Maybe because they like depicting teenagers as irresponsible despite the fact that this is in no way supported by the statistical evidence!
And before you protest that 20-35 year women have vastly higher pregnancy rates because they're getting pregnant on purpose whereas teenagers are not, this actually isn't supported by the statistics either since people in their early 20s are much more likely to have unintended pregnancies than teenagers, and about half of all pregnancies are unintended.
(source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?c...&dopt=Abstract) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=9494812&dopt=Abstract))
Abortion, both per capita and per unintended pregnancy, are also higher among adults than among teenagers. (and, i frankly think its quite worrying that teenagers with unintended pregnancies are less likely than adults with unintended pregnancies to have abortions; while its possible that they're more likely to want to keep them, it seems more likely that their parents make them keep them, but thats a problem with parental behavior and state regulation of abortion (which often prevents teenagers from getting them without parental consent) not with teenage behavior)
[email protected]
derives in part from the fetishization of sex in the media and also,
LOL the fetishization of sex?
Fetishizing something is to take it as a substitute object for sex, you can't fetishize sex itself, sex is inherently sexy.
The media didn't make people want sex, hundreds of millions of years of evolution made people want sex. People had sex long before they saw it on TV, obviously. Why do you imagine teenagers are an exception to this?
Bobkindles
also, in the case of girls, prevailing gender roles - many girls 'consent' to sexual intercourse only because of the expectations and pressures that they are subject to as part of the teenage community and society as a whole.
Your belief that teenage girls don't actually 'consent' to sex, don't actually want it, aren't actually sexual people with sexual desires of their own, but merely act under the 'expectations' and 'pressure' of teenage boys and society, is one of the most disgustingly male chauvinist statements I've heard here and there have been a lot of those recently.
Of course girls consent to sex, of course girls want sex, this has nothing to do with 'pressures' from society as a whole, because society as a whole gives them every pressure not to have sex, to deny their desires and wants and stay 'pure' and chaste until they're old enough to get married. You are totally delusional and very sexist.
Actually, comments like that remind me of a lot of stuff i've heard about being written in the Socialist worker, i guess thats the sort of thinking that comes from joining up with christian fundie Galloway and political islam.