I was utterly amazed at the naivete of Kathleen Parker in her column on the television program co-sponsored by MTV and the Kaiser Family Foundation designed to teach kids about healthy sex (Commentary, Nov. 3). Parker suggested that the program should have stressed abstinence and that the reason it didn’t is because MTV is “in the business of selling sex.”
This is completely unrealistic. I went to high school in a sheltered, relatively conservative, wealthy suburb of Chicago, and am now a senior at Northwestern. Students at both of these high-ranking educational institutions are having sex. And guess what, a lot of them aren’t telling their parents.
Parker claimed disgust at the fact that condoms, birth control pills and abortions are available to children without parental permission. Sure it would be better if kids told their parents they were having sex, and in an ideal world maybe kids wouldn’t be having sex at all. But in the real world we live in, kids are having sex. It is far better for kids who are sexually active to take measures to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies than to go into it unprotected.
I, for one, applaud the people at Kaiser and MTV for taking the initiative to educate kids. Yes MTV’s music videos do show scantily clad people, and much of its programming is sexually charged. In our society sex sells, and MTV is a master marketer.
But in a society where sex is so prevalent on television, in movies, music, etc., sex education in schools is not always adequate (and often not even available). As a network with a huge teenage audience, I think it is admirable of MTV to use its clout among kids to promote healthy practices.