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213 What else is new? The Schools Chancellor and the Board of Education President , those liberal do-gooders, want to make sex education compulsory and give out contraceptives in the high schools; outraged board members, parents, and bishops denounce this blatant promotion of Teenage Sex. The so-called compromise: no contraceptives will be dispensed, only prescriptions, and local boards can choose whether or not to teach baby-killing. Meanwhile, in New York City alone, some teenager commits a sexual act every two-and-a-half seconds. Let’s face it: everyone agrees that TS is evil, but no one has the guts to do anything about it. The liberals, of course, are hopeless. “We don’t like Teenage Sex any more than you do,” they whine. “But we can’t turn back the clock. Sex is all over TV, in the streets, the schools, the parking lots, the closets, and bathtubs of America.” So, they argue, we should concentrate on preventing pregnancy and VD. Give ’em sex education, birth control, even counseling to help them “manage sex responsibly” and (God forgive us!) “have good relationships .” And now our estimable Board President assures us that giving out contraceptives “tends to make youngsters less promiscuous and not more promiscuous .” Sure, and if you put foxes in chicken coops they’ll help sit on the eggs. These boneheads miss the essential point: if you think you can’t stop evil, that’s all the more reason to punish it. Allowing teenagers to have sexual pleasure without paying for it through the nose violates the most basic principle of civilized society, to wit, “For every illicit sex act a baby, a disease, and a partner who hates you in the morning.” (That goes double for girls. I’m all for equal rights, but a slut is a slut.) Conservatives understand this principle, but for some reason they’re reluctant to admit it. Instead they blather on about the need to provide kids with Teenage Sex A Modesty Proposal 214 THE EIGHTIES moral values. They want schools to give lectures on chastity. Give me a break! Does anybody seriously think that if Nancy Reagan went around making a personal appeal to every high school kid in the city to just say no, the TS rate would go down one iota? Have lectures ever stopped your kids? Did they stop you? It’s time to move beyond toothless moralizing and merely negative policies like depriving kids of sex information and birth control; time, in short, to make war on TS. And the fact is, there’s only one strategy that can work: making the very idea of sex so frightening that no sane teenager could enjoy it. I call this practical strategy “benign terrorism.” Here are 12 suggestions for implementing it. Define TS as child abuse. When an adult has sex with a child, it is called child abuse. Why is it any different when children abuse each other? Anyone caught committing TS should be tried as a child abuser. Pregnancy or venereal disease will of course be considered prima facie evidence of TS. Start TS prevention at birth. Everyone used to understand that the best way to prevent Teenage Sex is to scare the shit out of children. But in recent years an unholy alliance of permissive doctors, secular humanists, condom companies, and pornography czars has obscured this basic truth with a relentless propaganda campaign. Parents have been told not to slap an infant’s hand when it wanders down there, not to tell little kids to stop touching it or you’ll cut it off (and older ones that they’ll go blind or crazy), not to punish them for playing doctor, not to tell them sex is dirty and disgusting. We must counterattack with a high-powered media campaign designed to reach every parent with the message that the Victorians had the right idea. We must institute antisex programs in every school, nursery school, and day-care center. Sex-segregate the schools. To prevent homosexuals from taking advantage of this reform, security guards should be stationed in bathrooms at all times. Teachers should observe students closely, and any students caught flirting should be branded “G” (see below). Institute “pass laws” for teenagers. Under these laws, teenagers would be issued national identity cards, which they would have to carry at all times. They would be subject to a daily 4 p.m. curfew. In or out of the house they would have to...

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