UK Public Health Program Encourages Masturbation

The British government has thought up a new way to stem that country's high teen pregnancy rate: The National Health Service has issued a pamphlet encouraging teenagers to take their sexuality into their own hands and masturbate.

The reactions on all sides of this issue are very curious. Some welcome it; others believe that teens will take the advice too far and engage in unsafe sex; still others are mortified and think that sex education should be left up to the parents ('cuz they're doing such a great job so far).

Abstinence-only sex education has been an unqualified failure, but for some reason parents get very skittish about sex education. When Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders suggested during a talk at the United Nations AIDS Day 1994 that kids should learn about masturbation, she was asked to resign by President Clinton, who caved in under intense pressure from conservatives. Elders had simply suggested that age-appropriate information about masturbation should be included in school curriculum.

In education circles, Elders wasn't saying anything particularly new or revolutionary: the guidelines for the Sexuality Information and Education Council (the main source for sex education materials adopted by the Dept. of Education) support the dissemination of accurate information about masturbation.

While most sex educators agree that teens need better information, the premise of the program seems very flawed. Government efforts to encourage teens and children to do anything — eat right, avoid drugs, not set themselves afire like Beavis and Butthead —have generally been very poorly received and largely ineffective. (Anybody remember Nancy Reagan's quaint solution to American drug use: "Just Say No"?)

The idea that teens need to be encouraged to slap the clown or rock the little man in the boat is bizarre. Some parents are apparently concerned that their teen son or daughter might come across the pamphlet, finger through its pages, and think, "Hey, that's a sharp ideanever thought of that! If the National Health Service says I should be wanking once a day, who am I to argue?"

Benjamin Radford is LiveScience's Bad Science columnist.