Letters to the Editor
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um, no...
Ideally, we shouldn't be "liberating" young women to behave as young men have (at least in this country, at least in this past century) been expected to--that is, to get a wide variety of sexual experience as soon as possible, or at least before the age of twenty. Ideally, we ought to be raising the standard for young men.
Teen sex isn't "inevitable," nor is it inevitable that teenage boys are more interested in sex than girls--we just perceive it that way. On the first, look at the modern Asian nations such as Japan--you'll find that most kids--girls AND boys--are virgins throughout the equivalent of high school. Do Japanese kids have fewer hormones and less exposure to the media, or not fall in and out of love like American kids do? Somehow I doubt it.
And as for the "boys will be boys" mantra, look at the literature and attitudes of the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Back then it was the GIRLS who were thought to be hornier (and this isn't some medieval Church paranoia--stuff like Boccacio's "The Decameron" was meant as secular entertainment). And pregnancy and childbearing often meant a horrible, painful death in those days...and you know THOSE girls were well aware of the risks.
Yes, we ought to be supporting teenage mothers and not ostracizing them. And we ought to not tell kids outright LIES about contraception in the name of "promoting abstinence." But shouldn't we be "promoting abstinence" among high school kids anyway? Does anybody really think it's a good idea for 14- to 18-year-olds to be having sex?
How to go about this, though, without a religious affliation: an interesting take on this is in Viktor Frankl's "The Doctor and the Soul," in which he advises that the doctor (or teacher, or whoever is in charge of sex education) must both have the moral trust of and moral trust in the student, and to advise them to only enter into a sexual relationship with someone they truly love--and by "truly love", they must be willing to put the other person's needs before their own. Because of the risk of a life-derailing pregnancy, that would for most high school kids mean delaying having sex (or at least the kind of sex that would make babies--I'm not quite sure how the good doctor would have dealt with the question of oral and anal sex;).
Of course, this would mean that teachers would have to have few enough students to actually have meaningful interactions with them, and would have to be idealistic enough themselves to capitalize on teenage idealism about love...