I started this blog awhile ago to have a place to write random things no one wanted to read. I started one prior to this but never used it, except for the original entry, due to time constraints and things that kept me otherwise occupied. Weirdly enough people did read it, sometimes even commented. Some people don’t comment, they send emails. Some of the emails are anonymous and not nice, and . I am cleaning out my email box, deleting all this stuff and decided to use them as a basis for a post.
I am supposed to be doing a comparative on family and kinship as related to two major religions, but I have most of it done. I am taking a break.
I recant. I am only using one email as the response is long winded. This will go to show that though one can actually infer many things from reading the journals of others much of what you assume may be wrong.
Email from anonymous:
I would be proud to have you as a daughter. I think your views on sex are right and hope that my daughters will abstain from such activity until they find the man they would marry. My daughters are eight and ten. I want to know exactly how you were brought up I find that I want to get clues as to what to do to convey such things to my girls. You use a word now and then that I don’t like but otherwise I find some insight here.
This goes to show that inferences are not always accurate. I hate writing this as I do so love to be liked, and maybe this woman — I assume it was a woman even though it was anonymous and could I suppose be a man — won’t think so highly of me after this.
I don’t know where I suggested I believed in abstinence, I don’t. I believe in self preservation. I also don’t think it matters one way or the other how you bring kids up, except you must allow them to do things on their own thereby giving them a healthy dose of self esteem, teach them to respect others, and to respect themselves, and in the end hopefully it will all work out; if they end up remaining abstinent until marriage due to something they feel strongly about then so be it.
I am not real big on sex for the sake of sex. I am also not an advocate of abstinence. Teach kids to respect themselves. Teach them to think for themselves and it’s likely they will not be taken advantage of, and will not do something they regret. The people I know who were most heavily indoctrinated with abstinence as the only way were also the most promiscuous people I know. They are needy in other ways as well. I am not saying all the people I knew who were taught abstinence as the only way were promiscuous, or that one should not as a parent have the right to teach it, but sometimes parents have blinders on, they think taking their children out of health classes in middle school because they don’t want them listening to talk about vagina’s and penis’s in a mixed gender classroom will save them and preserve their innocence. These parents think that preaching abstinence and telling kids that no self respecting girl (or boy) for that matter, would have sex outside of marriage, or at least outside of a relationship that was seen as permanent, will keep them safe and free from such.
Too much fear prevents people from obtaining necessary knowledge, and too much “sin rhetoric” puts your kids onto thinking they are sinning if they are having sex, leading them always to have some lingering feeling that sex is bad, and this will carry over into their later life. How are you really going to enjoy something that someone has portrayed to you as either being kind of dirty or extremely sacrosanct? It’s neither really, and I think that in even in the most religiously based unions, once in awhile people fuck without all the “OMG this is such a totally uniting like with god experience”. They fuck just to fuck.
I think it is better to be practical and to put it all out on the table with kids. I think going out into the world armed with knowledge is the most empowering thing you can do for your children. Letting your kids know you want them to remain abstinent is your prerogative but really believing they actually will remain so is putting blinders on. Your best bet is arming them with knowledge, and filling them with some degree of self importance, as well as teaching them respect for self and to respect others.
Most likely your child will not remain abstinent. arm them with enough self esteem and knowledge to not get carried away on some spur of the moment passion filled night and be able to think clearly and for sheer self preservation consider not ever having sex with someone that has not been recently tested for sexually transmitted diseases. I am not kidding.
I am not big on abstinence except for the reason of self preservation. My parents did not teach abstinence, my brother did, but not my parents. (damn yuppie wanna be but missed it by a few years hippies) I am very big on self preservation, and knowledge, and as we all know knowledge is power. Although in many cases self preservation may invoke abstinence, at least for extended periods of time, it is not the same thing.
The redundancy in this post is intentional. If I lived in a less, shall we say, virus prone time, I would probably be a lot less likely to care about any of it and would probably be out doing some lanky blond film student who had nothing more going for him then being aesthetically pleasing, staying power and magic fingers.
