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(238) Sat 23 Nov 96 17:28 By: Sean McCullough To: Joe Shedlock Re: Public Service Ads > Is it true that many teenagers do not know how to say "no" to sex? No. It is as it always HAS been: Teenagers DON'T say "no" to sex. > How can that be? Is the world so different today from what it was > when I was a teen in the early 70s? YES. In the early 1970's, an American male graduating from high school was capable of doing right by a family without further formal education. Thus, when people had sex according to their biological drives (which are still set up based on an estimated death age of 35-40), they were still in a position to "handle it" in the event that an unwanted pregnancy occurred and abortion was still not an option. The major difference today is this: A man usually does NOT make enough to support a child and a non-working spouse (the ONLY realistic way to provide for a kid) until he IS 40 years old or so, on average. But our biological drives are still expecting us to be DEAD by then, male and female alike. In other words, in the early '70's, teenaged kids had sex all over the friggin' place. Most were lucky enough to get to graduation day childless; they tended to marry immediately thereafter. (My OWN high school graduating class in 1976 was over half married by December of that year; we graduated in June.) Today, NO ONE can properly provide for a family without another four to six years of formal education -- and then another 10 to 15 years thereafter paying the gargantuan debts racked up GETTING said formal education. Thus, by the time a typical modern highschooler CAN do right by a family, he's 40 years old OR OLDER. Look at the increase in the number of Down's Syndrome kids in the elementary schools today. Back in the 1950's, most American cities didn't even have ONE such child in its schools. Today, even SMALL towns have several. Down's Syndrome occurrence increases as the mother's age of first pregnancy increases. It is a disease of children with parents too fucking old to start having kids (i.e., over 22-25 or so). Other factors also mean you're more likely to see a Down's sufferer, granted (they now have reasonable life expectancies, an innovation only one human generation old); but us human critters are still machines. We start showing wear at about 30-35 years or so, even with modern technologies. Just like chimps and gorillas do -- again, beneficiaries of the SAME technologies. Biology doesn't change just because society does. In this specific case, Alas. We're probably the ancestors, not of Eloi and Morlock, but of the white humans dwelling on The Planet Of The Apes. Yucko. slack -- s. --- FMail 0.94 * Origin: Vox Anarchistica! (1:128/203.666)

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