November 2011
Ask the Siri, the new iPhone 4 assistant, where to get an abortion, and, if you happen to be in Washington, D.C., she won’t direct you to the Planned Parenthood on 16th St, NW. Instead, she’ll suggest you pay a visit to the 1st Choice Women’s Health Center, an anti-abortion Crisis…
And clearly that is no bueno. Here’s an except:
Is truly comprehensive sex education an idea whose time has finally come? Let’s hope so, because as the sex educators in the Times piece make clear, if teenagers don’t learn much about sex beyond how to use a condom from trusted adults, they’re going to turn to porn. And while porn has a great many valid uses (OK, one really), sex education isn’t one of them. Porn is especially bad when it comes to educating about women’s pleasure, as you noted, Bryan. At best, women’s pleasure is treated with indifference in porn, and often, especially in the kinds of porn most likely to be discovered by inexperienced teenagers, women’s pleasure is antithetical to the whole enterprise, a subject I addressed in more depth yesterday at Slate. The result of leaving it up to porn to educate kids is that young women aren’t getting a whole lot out of sex.