Alice Dreger Live Tweets Sexual Abstinence Class

Illustrated by Ly Ngo.

Having your mother tag along to a sex-ed class may sound like any kid's worst nightmare, but we're grateful that Alice Dreger's teen son let her join his lesson on abstinence. In additon to being a concerned parent, Dreger is an author and sex researcher specializing in intersex. As she writes in The Stranger, she took the opportunity to sit in on his high school health class for a lesson on sexual abstinence. Dreger writes, "I told my son why I think teaching teenagers abstinence is stupid, channeling all I’ve come to understand thanks to years of listening to the Savage Lovecast: (1) Sex is pleasurable, and there’s no good reason you should deny it to yourself if you have a consenting partner and you’re on the same page. (2) Marrying someone who you haven’t had sex with is a potential disaster. How do you know if you’re sexually compatible? (3) Whomever you love enough to marry deserves to have you well-practiced at sex before you marry." Dreger acknowledges that the sex-ed teaching at her son's school is not abstinence-only ("it's just very shaming about pre-martial sex," she tweeted), but she wanted to observe firsthand the lessons the class was being taught. She also decided to live-tweet the experience.

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I can't stand this. They're teaching "abstinence stories" that worked and non-abstinence" stories that "led to consequences."
— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) April 15, 2015

The visitor-teacher is telling my kid abstinence education reduces premarital sex. My kid is trying to show her studies that dispute that.
— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) April 15, 2015

The whole lesson here is "sex is part of a terrible lifestyle. Drugs, unemployment, failure to finish school -- sex is part of the disaster"
— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) April 15, 2015

This whole story of OD's, people in prison, out-of-marriage pregnancies is ironically a story of this guy's resilience and normalcy.
— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) April 15, 2015

"I finally met a great girl who was brought up in abstinence, and her life was so much better. I put her on a pedestal above everyone else."
— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) April 15, 2015

Now the woman is up. "Sometimes condoms fail."
— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) April 15, 2015

She says per the FDA 1 out of every 400 boxes of condom can be totally defective. "You might get that 400th box." BE AFRAID!
— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) April 15, 2015

Paper babies are being handed out to EVERYONE. They have ALL HAD CONDOM FAILURE AND THE WHOLE CLASS IS PREGNANT.
— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) April 15, 2015

Condoms. They fail. You get pregnant. Your friends leave you. You drop out of school. Your kids end up in the army.
— Alice Dreger (@AliceDreger) April 15, 2015

That's just a sampling of Dreger's outraged tweets, but you can read more here. The upside is that Dreger later bought her son a box of condoms, but is in hot water with school officials for dropping an "f bomb." Here's hoping that won't stop schools from letting other parents take a more active stance in their children's education.

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