Cass Avery: Teenagers being set up to fail in game of abstinence

The word "abstinence" is suddenly popping up around the place and I've discovered that I really don't warm to it. It sounds mean, and it means mean. To not have or do. To deny oneself.

And the word doesn't imply abstaining from any old thing, just the things we really want. I never think that I am abstaining from silverbeet or parliamentary radio reports or a Britney Spears concert. These are just sane choices in a world brimming with better options.

Abstinence is really about getting nothing - zip, zero, zilch - of a good thing and there's something about the word that suggests the period of denial will be long. But we just don't do denial in our modern lifestyle.

The living of life on current terms is all about getting as much as possible of the things we want, over and above the things we need. Want is everything. Denial is cultural weirdness.

So abstinence is clearly a hard sell. And right now it is being marketed to teenagers, which has to be the toughest sell of them all. So, abstain from what? Well, abstinence is usually dragged out as a means of last resort on one of the big three - sex, alcohol or food - and what has brought it out of late is the issue of teenage sex.

You may be aware that Miss America, 22-year-old Erika Harold from Illinois, is a keen advocate of no sex until marriage and has been using her beauty queen dais as a platform from which to spread her message across the United States.

Pageant officials tried to gag her but Congress has stepped up to support the nation's queen, and Miss America is now the moral champion.

On the surface, her message looks squeaky clean but don't leap to support good old-fashioned values too quickly. In the American education system there is war being waged over the abstinence issue.

The US Federal Government has poured half a billion dollars in the past five years into abstinence-only school programmes that prohibit the discussion of contraception - other than to highlight its failure rates.

The sex educators want to be able to teach children about contraception and about how to cope in a sexual world.

The abstainers are drawn mainly from the right and the sex educators from the left. And schools in the US are falling to one side or the other, largely depending on whether geographically they are in a right- or left-wing territory.

But most teenagers don't see life like that; they see life as divided down one line - male and female - and they know full well what the difference is.

What amazes me about the abstinence agenda is that it is just another example of something monumentally difficult being demanded of teens, and them being set up to fail. We do it to them over and over again.

Asking children to buy the abstinence policy is asking them to operate outside our anti-denial cultural and it's holding marriage out as the big carrot when, in fact, marriage is a shadow of the institution it once was and people are resorting to it so much later in their lives.

Back when the average age at marriage was around 20, teens could at least count the days until they would be able to live the dream.

But last year less than a quarter of brides were under 25 and only 14 per cent of grooms were under 25. That's asking too much of foreplay.

What is also deeply wrong about the abstinence-education craze is that it implies education can be about withholding information as a means to shape life choices.

Withholding information as a means to ensure teens will make the decision you want them to make is not giving them real choice and it is not sustainable.

When they're confronted with information that challenges what they were led to believe, you lose more than control over their decision. You lose their trust. And teens will fail in significant numbers at the abstinence game - that's a statistical given, and it's part of how we learn.

But the failures of the US abstinence programmes are a bit more serious than just the breaking of a promise. Teens who take abstinence pledges at US school are 30 per cent more likely to get pregnant than other teens when they succumb to temptation because they have been told contraception doesn't work. How betrayed they must feel.

It's a lousy fistful of years, being a teen. And to add to the turmoil, the message they receive is mixed.

We want them to take responsibility for their own lives but we are too scared of the choices they might make to give them the information and respect that breeds responsibility.

So Miss America, I don't agree with your message and you are not the first beauty queen with whom I've been offside.