Fighting our sexual nature.

Regrettably, teenage pregnancy and sex seems to be a huge concern for the United States. People were in an uproar about the Sarah Palin incident and the fact that Bristol Palin is now a teenage mom. The madness doesn’t stop there. Schools in Texas are promoting an abstinence-only sex education, only to see that this approach is failing them. Why, exactly, is this approach failing them?
It could be a number of reasons. One reason is that there is a correlation between self-esteem and a whether or not the person is sexually active. It’s the reverse of what people think, actually—the more self-esteem a person has, the more likely they are to have sex. Maybe the abstinence-only approach isn’t failing because have a low self-esteem and therefore need knowledge to boost it—maybe these teens have too much self-esteem in general. Teaching them about abstinence probably won’t lower their self-esteem and, therefore, won’t help much on the no-sex front.
Another reason that teaching about abstinence is failing is because the schools in Texas are treating the issue of sex as if it’s only a cultural issue. Sex is both a nature and culture issue. Sex is natural. It’s what all the animals of the wild kingdom do. This doesn’t change for humans. At the very least, the Texas education system should have acknowledged that their teens are fighting against both the sex culture AND their instincts to reproduce.
Alas, the solution to teen pregnancy is still out there. Will we find it? Hopefully we will. We might have to enlist the help of a social psychologist though.