The Lessons of Gloucester, or It's About Gender, Stupid
A "pregnancy pact" among high school sophomores suggests conventional sex education has some explaining to do. An international consultant on adolescent sexual health offers direction for where changes should be heading.
By: Deborah Rogow | June 20, 2008 | 05:34 PM (PDT) | 
9 Comments
Share:
Photo by Jyn Meyer
Gloucester, Mass., which proudly calls itself one of the nation's "Preserve America Communities," made headlines this week. Seventeen girls at the local high school are pregnant, many of them by what can only be called "unintelligent design."
According to Gloucester High Principal Joseph Sullivan, a group of sophomore girls at the school formed a "pregnancy pact," committing themselves to get pregnant and raise their babies together.
The experts are rushing in to explain this phenomenon.
Explanation No. 1: Sex education at the school is inadequate, ending after freshman year. Young people do need the kind of information that sex education programs offer; heaven knows such programs are light-years ahead of the abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that have wasted well over a billion dollars of our tax money. But hey, the girls who hatched this plot were sophomores, recent graduates of the school's sex education program. Clearly, such programs did not speak to them.
Explanation No. 2: Gloucester High refused to distribute contraceptives, leading the school's doctor and nurse to quit in frustration. (Apparently, some schools still have a nurse and a doctor. Who knew?) Gloucester High's former doc is right: those teenagers who are sexually active need access to contraception. But as Greg Verga, Gloucester School Committee chairman, reasoned, "Even if we had contraceptives, that pact shows that if they wanted to get pregnant, they will get pregnant. Whether we distribute contraceptives is irrelevant." It doesn't sound pretty, but the man has a point.
Explanation No. 3: The Gloucester girls are isolated individuals who needed counseling. Sure, these girls are immature and lost. But these mommies-to-be are not exactly salmon swimming against the current. The fact is that teenage pregnancy rates are rising again. Every day, more than 2,000 girls in America become pregnant — on purpose, accidentally, and everything in between.
There is a deeper problem at work here: Stubborn gender norms are perpetuating girls' sense that their worth is tied to their sexual and reproductive roles. Sadly, by and large, even the most "comprehensive" sex education programs fail to address gender issues in any meaningful way.
Limited sense of opportunity has always pushed girls into the mommy track. For example, the pregnancy rate among Hispanic girls aged 15-19 translates to 50 pregnant girls in a high school the size of Gloucester. (What kind of attention would the pregnancy pact have generated if the Gloucester Cluster were in East L.A.?)
Culture plays a role as well. From Britney Spears' little sister to movies like Knocked Up and Juno, popular culture typically romanticizes pregnancy while demonizing abortion. The press never tires of glorifying educated stay-at-home moms.
Gender leaves a heavy footprint on all aspects of adolescent sexuality. Research shows that girls who are submissive to male partners or who agree that males should "have more power in the relationship" are less able to negotiate condom use or to refuse unwanted sex. Middle-schoolers report pressure to give boys oral sex (developing intimate bonds with other girls and with babies starts to look more comprehensible). Boys learn to equate masculinity with physical and emotional toughness, proving their heterosexuality, having multiple sexual partners and fathering a child.
The result?
Young people who hold conservative attitudes about gender roles actually have worse sexual health outcomes than their peers. Studies from around the world suggest that they begin having sex at an earlier age, have more partners, and use condoms and contraceptives less. They are at greater risk of pregnancy, report more sexually transmitted infection (STI) symptoms and have higher rates of HIV. And their relationships are more likely to be characterized by violence.
Indeed, adolescent pregnancy rates are not the only worrisome indicator on the rise. This year, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention sent parents and educators reeling with the news that more than 1 in 4 girls aged 15 to 19 has a sexually transmitted infection. (Since the Gloucester girls obviously had sex without protection against HIV or other STIs, let's pray that a baby is all they got.)
The Gloucester schools have the right idea. Their curriculum policy articulates the competencies and qualities that the curriculum aims to foster, such as: an understanding of the major influences on the development of our culture and society ...; [the ability] to apply the knowledge and skills of social and emotional intelligence that form the basis of effective personal, social, and working relationships; a basis from which to make informed and realistic choices and decisions at all stages; [an understanding of] the need to advocate the basic rights of others, particularly those who are not well placed to promote their own needs; and [an understanding of] the causes of inequality of opportunity and treatment afforded to many people on account of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, social class or disability, and the need to remove such discrimination.
To help achieve these goals, we must reinvent sex education — as something perhaps more akin to social studies than to conventional "health" class. Policies and programs must emphasize young people's critical thinking skills, particularly about gender issues.
For example, Scenarios USA (which asks teens to think and write about the question "What's the Real Deal about Masculinity?") has successfully promoted attitude change about what it means to be a man. And a consortium of agencies convened by the Population Council is about to publish guidelines and lesson plans for curricula in this vein, offering a resource package that goes beyond the commonly accepted plumbing and communications aspects of sex ed to include discussions of gender, rights and even civic participation.
We can and must do better by the young people in Gloucester and across the country. Let's make all of our towns and cities "Preserve America Communities."
Sign up for our free e-newsletter.
Are you on Facebook? Click here to become our fan.
We encourage you to share any articles or material you find on Miller-McCune.com with friends and colleagues. Please fill in the fields below with the name and e-mail address, separating multiple addresses with semi-colons (;). Then fill in the same information for you. Miller-McCune will not keep any information about you or your friend, and the e-mail your friends receive will appear to have come from your e-mail address. The asterisk (*) denotes a required field.
Post A Comment
We want your feedback but you must be logged in first.
Trenchant and snarky are cool but all comments are subject to approval/removal.
Want more space than a little box? Write for us!
Written By:Deborah Rogow
Deborah Rogow has worked in both the U.S. and in developing countries in the area of gender and adolescent sexual health. She has consulted with the Population Council, the Ford Foundation, International Planned Parenthood Foundation,…
Comments
POSTED BY: Smith Lance, June 23, 2008, 08:52 PM
Debbie, in your (Jun21 - 9:52am) comment you note that boys are "socialized and pressured to adopt roles that in many ways can be harmful both for themselves and girls"...ok, but one could say the same about girls. Girls are socialized that they are entitled to anything they choose regardless of who they hurt and that respect is something they deserve but need not bestow. In this case, both the children and the fathers are hurt simply because these girls felt they are entitled to children. And in terms of your program, it is great that these boys discuss their masculinity, but the question that I must ask: are they indoctrinated on how terrible and evil their gender is (instead of how creative and innovative)? Will they be taught that their sexual desires are natural or perverted? The problem with these programs is they are often run by gynocentric feminists who believe that boys/men are simply broken girls/women and that women are the gold standard to which all men should aspire. And considering more and more evidence is coming to light that women are just as violent as men (if not more so) in intimate relationships, it seems that women are part of the problem and that we will only address the problem of intimate violence once we recognize that it isn't a gender issue. Therefore, it just doesn't make sense to engage in a blame-and-shame campaign espoused by many of these programs instead of a more egalitarian exploration of the different strengths and weaknesses of both feminine and masculine. Unfortunately, mainstream (gender) feminists don't like scientifically-sound evidentiary support very much when it doesn't support their agenda, and instead like to manufacture "mounds" of their own "evidence" born from studies designed not to enlighten but to support an already established POV. I guess that's why most scientists I know - male and female - don't identify with mainstream feminism: their "evidence" is often specious at best and fully politics-driven and bigoted at worst. As Wendy McElroy recently wrote: "It has become commonplace to hear that feminism is dead. I don't know if that's true but I do know that feminism's best hope...maybe its only hope of becoming relevant again...lies in listening to the voices of men demanding justice." I think there is a lot of truth to that. Too much of gender politics has been dominated by women instead of both men and women and perhaps more importantly, both masculine and feminine (since an individual of either gender could be more masculine then feminine and vise versa).
POSTED BY: Smith Lance, June 23, 2008, 08:10 PM
Debbie, I can't believe you can say with a straight face that the law - and perhaps more importantly our society - does not favor women's reproductive rights over men's. Your steadfast belief in such a fallacy, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, betrays a gynocentric (instead of egalitarian) world view. Prior to birth (and soon thereafter with abandonment laws), thanks to Roe v Wade, women have choices and men have responsibilities. Prior to birth, a woman can unilaterally choose to abort the child when she feels that she is not ready to be responsible for a child. Being pro-choice myself, I'm ok with that. The problem though is that a man does not have the same choice and he can not choose abort his responsibility for an unwanted child prior to birth. This is inherently sexist and pro-female (and anti-male) and therefore non-egalitarian. After birth, the woman in our society is treated as the maternal gate keeper to the child and she can unilaterally decide that the father of the child is unfit with little or no evidence. As has been explored by more egalitarian activists such as Wendy McElroy, Glenn Sacks, Christina Hoff Sommers, Warren Farrell to name a few, the balance between the genders in terms of reproductive rights has swung far too pro-female to the point where the interests of the father (or potential father) are completely and utterly disregarded in favor of the interests of the mother. As for your desire to blame men for the actions of these girls, it is quite evident. I fail to see how asking this "What it means to be male" question would serve in this case. A better question would be "what it means to be female" since these entitlement princesses chose to do this on their own volition most likely without consent or knowledge of the men they victimized to produce fatherless children. In this case, men had nothing to do with it other then they provided the (sometimes purchased) seed. Incidentally, condom use... it is easy for you, a woman, to demand that men wear condoms: your genitalia most likely remain un-scared and fully sensitive and have not been mutilated. (most) western men can't say the same thing and a condom is a serious impediment to something they should be able to enjoy just as fully as women: a healthy sex life. The underlying issue: unlike what feminists would like us to believe, boys (men) aren't broken girls (women), and to address these problems we need to stop shifting blame and vilifying men/boys and masculinity at every turn and instead work on tolerance and mutual respect.
POSTED BY: Debbie Rogow, June 21, 2008, 09:52 AM
Hi Derek, You are the second male who responded thinking that I am trying to blame men, so I am realizing I may not been as clear as I wanted. Boys are socialized and pressured to adopt roles that in many ways can be harmful both for themselves and girls. Boys in the program I mentioned in the article couldn't stop talking about their disappointment in their own fathers (who have often, although not always, been locked up by a racist judicial system), about their desire to be a better father to their own kids, about the pressure they feel to maintain an outer "thug" image when they are really (as they put it) "good boys." But the article focused on girls, and it is simply an indisputable fact -- supported by mounds of research that male-female relationships are often characterized by power differences that manifest themselves, for example, in exceedingly high rates of physical violence and of sexual coercion, including without condom use. I'm sorry that you think that trying to help boys reject pressures that are linked to these behaviors is tantamount to "pacifying the feminist vote." On this point, I could not disagree more.
POSTED BY: derek eddy, June 21, 2008, 05:18 AM
I’m not quite sure where you people have been but growing up in Boston’s inner city it was fairly common for teenage girls to get pregnant. These girls are rewarded with child support payments, housing vouchers, food stamps, fuel assistance, educational assistance and even day care assistance. Many of these girls can’t be sure who the fathers are of the children. That is why I was disturbed by Obama’s scathing attack on the young men in the black community. If the women are unsure of the fathers, how can you blame the boys/men? Obama tried to simplify the situation and play the blame game in order to pacify the feminist vote. But these are complex issues. To lay them at the feet of young men is misguided and oversimplifying the problem.
POSTED BY: Debbie Rogow, June 20, 2008, 11:51 PM
Lori and Lance, Thanks to both of you for posting, and I'll try to respond to each. Lance, I agree completely that the solution is NOT to blame men and boys, rather it is to support them in understanding the ways that social norms can undermine the wellbeing both of themselves, of each other, and of girls. In this piece, I focused on the evidence regarding girls' socialization, but I did refer to the intense pressure boys experience to "perform" in what is often a narrowly defined and unrealistic role. Boys (mostly non-white, inner-city) who have participated in the masculinity program I mentioned (Scenarios USA) have responded powerfully to the opportunity to reflect on their own experiences, their feelings about their own fathers and the kind of fathers they want to be, their pressures to be sexual, to engage in violence, etc. So I think we agree quite a bit about supporting boys. That said, a number of your statements about girls' experience are not supported by the evidence. For example, girls who try to involve boys in decisions about protection against HIV and pregnancy often face resistance. Also, your statements about the law favoring females and about women having every means to abortion are not accurate. In any case, the resources I mention in the article aim at just what you say: encouraging shared respect, responsibility, and decision-making. Lori: As a mom, I agree that we cannot overemphasize the importance of having emotionally stable, capable children that know how to make wise choices and who can talk to us when they make unwise ones. But the points I was trying to make are different ones: First, that we make choices in life (including about having a baby) based on what opportunities we perceive for ourselves, and that opportunities are not shared equally in the society. (The patients James describes in his post below, who seem not to be able to envision succeeding in the larger world, are a case in point.) And second, to point out that girls are getting "messages" from the culture that pregnancy and childrearing are easy. As you say, it is a LOT more complicated than they think.
POSTED BY: Smith Lance, June 20, 2008, 09:42 PM
Lori, in addition to the "single moms et al" you mention, I would also add men men who don't have the reproductive choices women have and who are therefore saddled with child support payments regardless of economic realities such as loss of job/income. Most boys don't know that the law is not fair to males and while women are provided with every means to give up an unwanted child - such as abortion, adoption, and even abandonment - men have no rights except whatever the woman wants. Further, to add insult to injury, while effective birth control is available to and prevalent among women, men really have very few options...and no options that come even close in effectiveness to that of the pill available to women. While we are at it we should add success stories to the list of speakers as well. Fathers and mothers who are successful and can therefore teach via example. As long as fathers are included, the value and importance of fatherhood could be explored so that it is looked upon with the dignity and respect that it deserves. This will encourage girls to include boys in their decision making while at the same time encourage boys to take an active role in the decision making process. We hear everyday about good mothers...how about we talk abut the great fathers while we are at it.
POSTED BY: Buck Lori, June 20, 2008, 08:54 PM
As an intelligent woman who has done it all, I don't believe enough education has been done on the CONSEQUENCES of any of the results of being sexually active. Let them talk to single moms, women who've had abortions, REAL people that have STDs,and yes, stay at home moms,working moms, etc.. Let them know that every choice they make and responsibility they take costs a price and NONE are easy. Obviously what they see in their community isn't what they desire, so they are trying another way to create a 'good' life. In reading this article I am amazed at the author's hate for the traditional female. Believe me, there is NOTHING easy about being a traditional stay at home mom; but the cost is worth having emotionally stable, capable children that know how to make wise choices and know that they can talk to their parents when they make unwise ones, with the knowledge that will to have failed and are willing to help them try to make the best out of any situation. Sound too 'Cleaverish"? Hardly, when many liberal and conservative agendas forget that these are our children, the future leaders we are raising. Heaven help these girls for the times ahead!
POSTED BY: Smith Lance, June 20, 2008, 08:39 PM
Interesting thoughts and while I agree with #1, #2, and #3, I find a key undertone of your thesis to be offensive. That is you try to blame men for the actions of these girls. Instead of focusing on educating our children - both boys and girls - you suggest that these girls were simply "submissive" to "powerful" males. And that in order to fix the problem we must have our young people ask the question: "What's the Real Deal about Masculinity?" Ok, but what about the "Real Deal about Femininity?" as it appears to me that these girls made a pact on their own most likely without the consent or knowledge of their male partners. A truly progressive world view would accept that women/girls can be just as sexual as men/boys even without coercion from the "evil male." After all, to many women/girls, sex is seen as power over men/boys and therefore who is the more evil: the individual who goes along for the ride or the sexual predator who searches for a contribution of DNA to fulfill some adolescent dream? So no, we don't need to teach feminism in our schools. What we need to teach is good, hard science. The type of feminism you are espousing amounts to blame and shame. Blame men/boys for all the world's problems then shame them for being male. So while I agree that our educational system is truly lacking in real ways to address and teach responsible sexuality and reproduction, about the last thing we need to be doing is indoctrinating yet another generation of misandry. Instead of blaming and shaming we should be teaching: there is nothing inherently wrong with masculinity (or femininity) and each individual should be free to choose his or her gender identity without fear of social reprisal.
POSTED BY: jones james, June 20, 2008, 08:23 PM
Why do teenagers get pregnant? Because they can. There is no penalty for getting pregnant. I'm a gyn physician at an inner city hospital. I counsel young girls about pregnancy every day. It's not lack of access or knowledge, they WANT to get pregnant. The idea of finishing school, getting a job, having a partner is foriegn to them.. I don't want to pay for it..