VIDEO.RttP{High School student pwnds bill o'reilly}

Joel Becker: Hi. My name is Joel Becker, and I’m a clinical psychologist. I’m going to ducktail off a little bit of what Andee said, but I think I’m going to go in a little bit of a different direction, because I’m going to encourage you to have sex, and I’m going to encourage you to use drugs appropriately. (applause and cheering from audience) And why I’m going to take that position is because you’re going to do it anyway. So, my, my approach to this is to be realistic, and I think as a psychologist and a health educator, it’s more important to educate you in a direction that you might actually stick to. So I want to, I’m going to stay mostly today talking about the sex side, because that’s the area I know more about.

I want to encourage you to all have healthy sexual behavior. Now what is healthy sexual behavior? Well, I don’t care if it’s with men and men, women and women, men and women, however, whatever combination you would like to put together. But I think that we know enough about what constitutes healthy sexual behavior to think about it along two lines. One is, the issue of health and disease. So all the information that you can get about the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, you should have. And then we should be realistic about what you are actually going to stick to, and what you are not. We were handed this survey that was done here at the high school, and one very shocking statistic that came to me was, and actually the people that compiled it missed something here, there was a question ‘have you had sex?’ and 33 percent of the respondents, and I guess this goes all the way from the ninth grade to the twelfth grade so we’d expect it to be lower in the ninth grade, higher in the twelfth grade, 33 percent, so a third of you copped to having sex. How many were under the influence of drugs or alcohol when you had sex? Eight. That would be 8 of the 15, which is actually more than 50 percent, because they saw it was what percent of the total, its over 50 percent of you who are having sex are having sex under the influence of alcohol and drugs. If you look at the AIDS transmission literature, this is a major route of transmission. People having sex under the influence because you get careless, and you get sloppy. (laughter from audience) So that’s very important to look at that relationship between those two variables.

So, what else do I mean by having healthy sexual behavior? I think that we also want to have a definition of healthy sexual behavior as sexual behavior that is appropriate to your level of emotional development. Now what does that mouthful mean? Well, I’m not sure that ninth graders, tenth graders, eleventh graders, and twelfth graders are all exactly equal, in fact I’m fairly sure you’re not, in your level of emotional development in terms of what you can handle. And if you think that having sex doesn’t come with feelings, that’s where you’re mistaken. Sex does come with having feelings, and that’s what you have to have to be prepared for. I’m going to come back to that in a second, but I also just want to just comment on, you know, I’ve been told that this is a very liberal high school, and I’m probably speaking to the choir by encouraging you to have healthy sexual behavior because most of your parents probably have given you similar views, but you know, when you are 13, 12, 13, 14, certainly one of the most appropriate sexual behaviors would be masturbation. (laughter from audience) Masturbate. Please masturbate.

Now, if any of you have been told, and one of the problems that we have right now is that religious communities are trying to give us information and sometimes that information isn’t correct. So I went to a very interesting panel this morning, and I just reference the story of Onan. You know that the sin of masturbation is the sin of onanism? Does anyone know what that Bible story was? Well, where it came from I found out today, was that you know these people were all Jewish because this was the Old Testament, and in the Jewish law, when a man dies, his brother automatically becomes the woman’s husband, so the brother inherits his brother’s wife and becomes father to that brother’s children. Well there was this one very wicked man named Onan, and Onan was evil in the following way: he had sex with his brother’s wife but he refused to make her pregnant because he was evil and it was a woman’s right to get pregnant, and instead, he spilled his seed on the ground. How they got from there to there, that that meant that masturbation is not okay, no one seems to be able to figure out, but that’s where it came from. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, and it doesn’t even address the issue of masturbation in women. So, it’s not a sin to masturbate in my world.

So, lets go back again to the issue of developmental, emotional development, and what you can handle. I’m going to reference right now a famous article by a guy I don’t reference much, whose name was Sigmund Freud. Ever hear of him? Okay. Well, Sigmund Freud, for which we’ve actually proven most of what he said was untrue, so you’ll know that, but he happened to write this paper in 1923 that had the following title, “The Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinctions Between the Sexes.” Let’s interpret that. In other words, how is your reaction to intimacy or sex different based on the layout of your sexual organs? Where’s a woman’s sexual organs? Inside her body. Where’s a boy’s sexual organs? Outside his body. (laughter from audience) We’ve got a set-up here, if you take a look at this. In order for a girl to have sex, she makes herself vulnerable, she “opens herself up to the male” and inevitably, feelings follow that. So girls, this is really tough for you. Boys don’t have that reaction. Their sex organs are outside their body, we older people make jokes and say teenage boys will stick their you-know-what in a melon, (laughter from audience) I mean, that’s about as much feeling as they need to have for the object. (laughter from audience) And after it’s over, it can be as meaningless as you could imagine. So you have to all be prepared for those differences between the two of you. In today’s world, I’m understanding also that girls have become the aggressor. So I’ve had patients who have had 13 or 14 year old boys in high school, and they’ve been very worried about the girls, the girls who want another notch in their belt for how many boys they’ve performed oral sex on. I think that’s having sexual, I mean emotional, consequences for the boys also. So what I’m saying here, and then I’ll wrap up, I encourage you to have a healthy sex life that is both responsible and appropriate for what you can handle emotionally.

Thank you.

(applause and cheering from audience)