I heard about this a while ago when it first came out on MSNBC, but, after Rachel’s article on it, I think I’ve finally figured out what I want to say about it.

Back story:  Some teenagers in Massachussets thought it would be cool to have a “pregnancy pact”.  At least one of them slept with a homeless guy to make it happen.  They were largely successful, created a nice little media storm, and generally made asses of themselves.

Way to go.

Naturally, the supposed problems are all over the place.  They’re being oversexualized.  It’s all Paris Hilton’s fault.  The Spears family makes being a slut look so gosh darned cute. Their parents didn’t teach them sense.  The community thinks they need access to birth control (I’m with Rachel on this one:  Pregnancy Pact + Birth Control = You’re kidding, right?).  The list goes on and on and on.

They’re all wrong.

Look, I’m sure there are some cultural factors at play here.  However, oversexualized teenagers were around when I was a teenager, and that was ten years ago.  I mean, does anybody remember The Crush?  Heck, every single Nightmare on Elm Street movie started with a couple of teenagers getting frisky.  Teenagers have been sexualized since, oh, I don’t know, puberty. Besides, we didn’t see this sort of thing happening when Britney Spears was still in her prime.  Oh, I know, teenage stars weren’t always this slutty, but, let’s get real here - before we had open sluts to lust after, everyone just went after Farrah Fawcett or something.  Point being, it really doesn’t take much for teenagers to feel frisky and decide it’s okay to act on that.

Friskiness, however, is not what this is about.  Girls don’t have babies when they’re feeling frisky - oh sure, they’ll do things that lead to having babies, but they’re not going to intentionally impregnate themselves.  This is something very different.

The trouble is that the girls had absolutely zero concept of what responsibility over a living thing entails.  Consequently, they thought, being the usual strain of narcissistic bitch that most teenage girls are, that this new being that would take over their lives in under nine months would exist merely for their personal amusement.  This could have been solved any number of ways:

1. Buy a dog and make them take care of it.
2. Tell them to get a job.  Then start cutting off their food supply until they make rent.
3. Give them a little sibling so they can see how much work a small child is - this kept me celibate through high school, by the way.  Thanks, Mom.
4. Make them babysit obnoxious family members.
5. Buy them a dildo so they can stop thinking with their dick-equivalents.  I’m betting that, if female masturbation was encouraged, fewer teenage girls would feel the need to entertain the sloppy desires of teenage boys.  I could be wrong, though.

Look, nobody - that’s right, nobody - that has direct experience with children says, “Boy, I should go lose my virginity to that homeless guy so I can have one of those.”  I guarantee you that, even if your daughter watches nothing but Tila Tequila reruns and the porn you leave in the DVD player, nothing will keep her legs shut faster than having to deal with the consequences through someone else’s child.  If, after being around a child, your daughter says, “Boy, I want one of those,” what you should conclude is that she clearly hasn’t spent enough time around them.  The solution to this is to give them night duty over an infant, make sure they lose desired freedoms while you use them as your personal babysitting slaves, that sort of thing.  Make it inconvenient to take care of the children (y’know, like real ones) and they’ll pull their heads out of their vaginas before you can say, “Stop letting your teenage daughter live with college-age boys, Mrs. Spears!“  Yeah.

That’s a David Colborne Guarantee.  You can take these to the bank.

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