Is anyone, at all, surprised by this?

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Teenagers who take pledges to remain virgins until marriage are likely to deny having taken the pledge if they later become sexually active. Conversely, those who were sexual active before taking the pledge frequency deny their sexual history, according to new study findings.

These findings imply that virginity pledgers often provide unreliable data, making assessment of abstinence-based sex education programs unreliable. In addition, these teens may also underestimate their risk of exposure to sexually transmitted diseases.

"Teenagers do not report their past sexual activity accurately, with virginity pledgers giving more inaccurate reports of their past sexual activity," study author Janet Rosenbaum, of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told Reuters Health.

Consequently, rather than rely on self-reports, "studies of virginity pledges must focus on outcomes where we know we can get good information, such as medical STD tests," she added.

Oooh, people who are browbeaten about how bad sex is are going to lie about whether or not they've had sex?

Does anyone have any data on how many virginity pledgers are male versus female? Most of the information (especially those creepy father daughter dances) that I've seen seems to indicate that (as usual) the girls are expected to be pure and innocent, whereas the boys are given a much freer pass. I haven't researched the issue, though.

Edited to fix tags and note that in my case at least, a pledge similar to this did work, so I don't necessarily think it's a bad idea if executed properly. My father, for those of you who don't know, is a pulmonologist. And as I noted to baltassoc a few days ago, I think that the only thing I could ever do that would get me disowned is to start smoking. I could become a Republican and they'd still keep me in the family. They wouldn't like it, but they'd accept me. Smoking, on the other hand. I don't even want to think about it.

Anyhow, when I was very, very little, every now and then my father would tell me about a patient that had recently died, and he'd emphasize that the patient died because he or she smoked. When I got to high school, my parents and I sat down at the dining room table, and they wrote out a contract that I signed. The contract said that if I got to high school graduation without smoking a single cigarette, I would receive a thousand dollars. I was totally honor bound by the contract, I probably could have smoked a cigarette without my parents knowing about it, but it gave me an extra incentive not to start smoking. The day I graduated from high school, I truthfully swore that I hadn't ever smoked anything, and I got a check for $1000. Funny enough, I tried my first cigarette two days before I graduated college, and I never smoked pot in college. Since then, I've probably smoked a grand total of four cigarettes in my entire life (and a lot more pot), and I've never really had any desire to. I probably wouldn't have started smoking in high school, but that contract was always sort of in the back of my head when the opportunities to smoke arose. I had an extra reason to say no.

The contract was different, as far as I understand it, from the virginity pledges. There was an expiration to the contract. I was free from my promise not to smoke after I graduated from high school. And I received a reward at the expriation. The "right thing to do" aspects of not smoking were emphasized in other ways, not in relation to the contract. My parents did the same thing with all four of us, and none of us smoke. The disowning wouldn't be just from my parents, it would also be from my siblings.

I also had to sign another contract in order to get my first car. I had to promise that I would do all of the carpooling of my three younger siblings. I would have turned over my first born for that car, so I readily signed. I had absolutely no idea how much my mother had schlepped around town. Art lessons, piano lessons, dance and singing lessons, cross country, school, detention. Ugh. I probably, had I known how much I'd have to drive my siblings around when I signed the thing, signed it anyways. I desperately, desparately wanted a car.

Tags: reproduction, sex