How stupid does The Human Life Alliance think teenagers are? If someone handed me a copy of Just for Girls, the latest hip "cutting edge" abstinence magazine when I was thirteen, I would have smelled a rat immediately and asked who stole my Sassy with Courtney Love on the cover.
Why? All the girls in the pictures are wearing clothes from Sears. There is not one photo of Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh, and the writing is bizarrely focused on telling young women how they should keep the innocent baby after getting raped and wrap their "second virginity" back up as a gift to their future husband.
What happened to teen magazines about eliminating razor bumps and scoring Tiffani Amber-Thiesssen's makeup bag must-haves? I suppose the HLA figures that if a glossy advertisement can sell millions of dollars worth of Maybelline lip-gloss to insecure adolescent girls, certainly it can also sell them sexual shame and misinformation.
The answer is yes and no. Yes, this medically inaccurate propaganda contributes to the idea that a woman's primary value to others is her virginity, that women who have premarital sex are ruined and used, and that sex without proper commitment automatically leaves all parties diseased, disrespected and miserable.
But no, Just for Girls and the companion pamphlet Just for Guys won't keep teenagers from having fumbling, sloppy, mediocre sex, judging from recent studies on abstinence-only "education." Furthermore, I think the average kid will realize that dressing up an out-of-date message in modern youth-friendly lingo is like your grandpa walking around telling people his calculator is an iPhone.
Sexual naiveté, repression, and ignorance make for a bad wedding present. Wow, thanks honey, you don't know a uterus from a uvula! I'm so glad I married someone who thinks we pee out of our belly buttons!
Actually, I'll take filthy impurity over wacky sixteenth century religious nonsense any day.