On his wonderfully-titled Armed and Dangerous weblog, Open Source evangelist Eric Raymond suggests (in an article entitled Teen Sex vs. Adult Resentment) that both liberals' and conservatives' attitudes toward teen sex are due to a deep-seated secular or religious puritanism. He suggests that adults are "attached to the idea that sex ought to be controlled, be heavy, have consequences." We are "terrified of...the pure friction fuck," and beneath our taboos (whether religious or secular) we believe that "too much pleasure will damn us--or reduce us to the status of animals." Deeper than that, he says we are at heart envious of the hard-core sexual energy teenagers possess.

I'm a big fan of Eric Raymond's work, so I hate to be so sarcastic, but...

...could he possibly pack more trite cliches into so few paragraphs? I'm really not sure. Maybe he could throw in a few names like Tipper Gore and Pat Robertson, just to make it more obvious (although I suppose that would date him).

Eric, I'm a fan of yours. I loved The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and I also share your generally libertarian mindset. But look, man, I've been sexually active since I was 15. I confess, I wish I could get jiggy like I did when I was that age. Until I was in my mid-20s I used to have some pretty wild sex, a couple of times with married women (which is not something I'm particularly proud of).

Ya know what? I'm worried about teens having sex, and I'd like to do more to encourage them to abstain. I say it's like parents who tell their kids to stay away from drugs when they themselves indulged. You see, I've used quite a few illegal drugs, but I won't hesitate to tell my son that I hope he won't. I will not feel hypocritical about this. Why should I? I plan to tell him the truth: I know people whose lives were destroyed, I knew at least one person who died, I know others who are doing okay but suffered negative consequences, and I know quite a few who are fine but had some close calls.

I can say most of the above about sex.

I came of age in the 1980s, when the big scare was Herpes Simplex II. Then AIDS hit and, although we now know that AIDS is nowhere near the threat to the heterosexual population it was made out to be, it sure changed attitudes. I certainly remember having a few close calls with STDs.

I also remember several close calls involving unwanted pregnancies. Now that I'm turning 36 and on that luge-run toward 40, I look back on it all with a bit of nostalgia and a bit of regret. My son will be a teenaged boy by the time I'm in my early 40s, and I'm sure he'll be every bit as obsessed with sex as I was at that age. I hope to share some of what I like to think is my wisdom with him.

To start with, I won't say vapid things like, "I know you're going to have sex, so here's some rubbers." Nor will I make the even more idiotic mistake of assuming that unwanted pregnancies happen because my kids just don't understand how babies are made. Sure, I'll make sure they know it all well before puberty; what a penis is, what a vagina is, eggs and sperm and pregnancy and all that. I want my kids to know all that, and know it early. But I'm not dumb enough anymore to think that these are remedies to the genuine personal and social ills caused by casual sex.

I grew up when it first became commonplace to see pregnant girls in High School. I knew lots of them. Not a single one (not a single one) got pregnant because she "didn't know you could get pregnant from just doing it once" or "thought it wouldn't happen to me" or "had no access to birth control" or any of the other mindless assumptions the oh-so-enlightened liberal elites of the day told us. No, except for the girls who did it on purpose (and you'll never view the term "welfare queen" the same way again after you meet your first girl who says she got pregnant so she could get food stamps and her own apartment), most of them did it because they were passionate. If you asked them why they didn't use protection, most would give the lame, childish answers kids always give when caught doing something they knew better than to do.

Sometimes you would even hear them tell adults things like "I didn't know I could get pregnant from doing it once!" but then, when the adults weren't around, you'd suddenly realize they knew the score and were just saying words that they knew the adults would accept. In my experience, teen girls almost never get pregnant out of ignorance or lack of access to birth control. They do it out of carelessness or out of some emotional need they may not even be entirely conscious of. (Don't be tempted to accuse me of stereotyping on this. My mother was 15 when she got pregnant with me, and I was her second child. My sister waited until she was a little more mature than our mom; she had her first child at age seventeen.)

But let's even lay all that aside. Condoms break--I've had it happen. Birth control pills fail--my son is living proof. Abortions are painful, in more ways than one--ask anyone who's had one (if you can get beyond self-righteous "choice" rhetoric). STDs suck--ask anyone who's got Herpes. And then there's that emotional part no one likes to talk about for fear of being called a prude or a sexist.

The "pure friction fuck" seems to be beyond a lot of people's experience. I feel an emotional bond with every woman I've ever had sex with, and I have a hard time believing that's due to my rigorous religious upbringing--since I didn't have one. I've met few--very few--women who don't feel that even more strongly than I do.

In Harry Stein's wickedy funny and insightful How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace), he recounts the story of a young female porn star. In interviews she often talked about how women should see sex as fun and powerful, should be wild and free and not bound up by all those terrible Judeo-Christian morals. She lived it, and seemed to be enjoying it. But she got caught one day alone, on her knees, sobbing, slicing the flesh of her arm with a knife and saying she just wanted to feel something.

Yeah, big bad sexist me, I think women look for, need the emotional aspects of sex even more than men. I don't see how any man who's dated more than a handful of women can think it's otherwise. I've even had girlfriends who acted like they were "liberated" from that old-fashioned nonsense, but once the sex began, you'd better believe they expected a lot more. This is a generalization of course; there are certainly exceptions. But I assert that they are exactly that: exceptions.

Furthermore, I don't think they feel that way because of moralism. I suggest the opposite: that many young women feel obliged to bury their emotional connection to sex because of the libertine mindset so pervasive in television and movies. No one wants to be a prude.

In other words, the prevailing culture, far from being repressed and puritan, really tends to lead them toward behavior that, instinctively, they would not otherwise seek out. I suggest the "fucking is just fun with friction" mentality is, at very deep levels, at odds with our humanity. Not for all of us, perhaps, but for an awful lot of us.

Look at the history of the human race. In any large society--one at least large and complex enough build cities with thousands of people in them--what, prior to the invention of antibiotics and reliable birth control, would be the result of lots of casual sex with multiple partners? Not to be dramatic here, but I suggest that it would mostly be suffering and death. Prior to antibiotics, STDs would kill, usually in horrific ways (open up a medical book and read about the advanced stages of Pelvic Inflammatory Disease or Syphilis, for example). Unwanted pregnancies would often result in children without fathers, which would be disastrous in most large societies. Sure, some small tribal societies adopted strategies for multiple sex partners and communal care of children--but most societies never evolved this way, and no large ones ever did.

Furthermore, let's leave aside the question of God for the moment. Let's take a completely atheistic view of things: is it possible that the Judeo-Christian morality so commonly sneered at has stuck around so long because it is, quite simply, functional? That it serves both practical and even Darwinian purposes?

Let's pretend it's 500 BC. If you have sex with a lot of women in Babylon or Jerusalem, you probably wind up dying a horrible death. If you're female, ditto that, and add into the equation pregnancies you may have to deal with alone. Not to metion kids who are born blind, have other birth defects, or are stillborn--if you aren't lucky enough to wind up sterile from PID or something else first. Small wonder the religious works of such societies would frown on certain kinds of behaviors.

If you believe that human attitudes can be influenced by genetics, one might well suggest that once most humans evolved beyond tiny tribal societies, those who most often survived to have multiple progeny were the ones who took that silly "traditional values" stuff most seriously. I don't believe humans are completely beyond Darwin. Do you?

Is it really wise to dismiss an idea simply because it comes from religion? Does it make sense to view every concept with roots in religion as irrational and arbitrary? Does it make sense to view an attitude as hypocritical simply because it comes from someone who has been an imperfect example of what he espouses? Isn't it more wise to ask whether certain religious beliefs have held on because they also happen to contain valuable survival strategies? You're the anthropologist, you tell me.

Yeah, I'd like to have the neverending hard-on again, Eric, and I'm sure you would too. But do you really think that most of us who worry about teen sex are that shallow?