Sex Has a Price

By Alan Caruba

There is often a price to pay for sex and I am not talking about the dollars former Governor Elliot Spitzer spent or even his downfall, which everyone keeps saying is a tragedy. It’s not. It’s the judgment society should correctly require of a public servant whose private life does not conform to moral standards.

If you want to spend time with whores, don’t run for public office. It’s not a tragedy. It’s arrogance, hubris, and your bad judgment. When caught, it’s a problem for family and friends.

Talking about moral standards almost seems out-of-date. Other than clergy, who discusses such things any more? The talking heads and chattering class on television seemed more concerned with who would replace Spitzer and whether his downfall would affect Hillary’s campaign.

Still, moral standards do exist and many have been codified into laws intended to protect us from ourselves and others. It is still wrong to lie, cheat, and steal.

It is still wrong to be a whore or one’s customer.

I was thinking about this because the Spitzer meltdown and a report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, with exquisite timing, occurred the same week. The CDC released a study that revealed that about one in four teenage American girls has a sexually transmitted disease (STD).

For every four girls existing the local high school every day one of them has human papillomavirus, chlamydia, trichomoniasis, or genital herpes. And those were just the STDs the study examined.

Statistically, the study adds up to more than three million teenage girls nationwide. Only about half the girls in the study admitted to having sex and some of them defined it only as intercourse though oral sex can spread disease as well. The study found that 40% of those who admitted to having sex had an STD. The CDC report is probably just the top of a very big iceberg.

In the Nineties, thanks to Bill Clinton, a generation of parents had to explain to their children what oral sex was. Apparently, permitting the school to instruct pubescent young ladies in the arts of oral, anal, and vaginal sex, has helped to spread the word.

I had already graduated university by the time the sex, drugs, and rock’n roll generation arrived along with the hippie scene, the beatnik poets, and various icons of that era let it be known that “free love” was okay.

Only there is no such thing as “free” love or sex. It always comes with a price.

That, apparently, is not being taught in schools that often seem to be teeming with women teachers eager to seduce their male students or male teachers who find their female students irresistible.

One way or the other, the young woman who serviced Elliot Spitzer had learned that free love was for suckers. Barely in her twenties, she had absorbed the message of MTV, the tabloid television shows like Entertainment Tonight reporting on yet another pregnant, but unmarried actress or the “reality” shows that pit young women against each other to snag a hunky bachelor.

This is how societies eventually come to ruin. By the time the barbarians are at the gate, it’s too late.

The next time you hear someone sneer at the evangelical Christians and others who want to home-school their children or send them to a parochial school or yeshiva; who make sure they attend Sunday school, church or synagogue with the family, you can be pretty sure their girls are not the one out of the four teenagers with a STD.