Penn & Teller: Bullshit! · Season 4, Episode 10
“Abstinence” · Season 4, Episode 10
In this episode: Penn (6)
[The scene cuts to a woman walking through a parking lot carrying large manila shipping envelopes.]
To learn about abstinence, we told our producer we wanted to talk to a woman with really… huge… envelopes. He's foreign. He didn't know that in America, every plural noun means "tits".
I'm against abstinence programs because I really consider "abstinence only" child abuse.
Oh, SNAP.
Today, a disturbing 35% of our school districts require that abstinence be taught as the only option for teens. Even worse, these programs prohibit the discussion of contraception, unless it's about that stupid small percentage of time when it doesn't work. Fuck! When did Washington turn into the Vatican?
[Steve Trombley, Chicago president/CEO of Planned Parenthood, talks about "abstinence only" programs.]
I think, in fact, we should really call it "ignorance only" education.
. . .
We teach abstinence in every course we do…
[voiceover] Yeah! Planned Parenthood tells kids not having sex is okay, too! The difference is they realize that kids don't fucking listen.
But we also live in the real world, and we know that over half of teenagers in this country engage in sexual activity.
[Cut back to Elders.]
We've tried ignorance for a thousand years. It's time we try education.
Now, we're not saying you should have sex because so many other people are. We're saying you should make your own rules, decide what's good for you, based on what you think is important. And don't let anything be thrust into you against your will — not a dick, and not someone else's psycho-religious kink.
So what have we learned? The U.S. government continues to dump hundreds of millions of our dollars a year into misleading, religion-based, anti-sex education. The only good thing about the program? It doesn't work. Most kids just ignore it. Sure, we're throwing away money, but only really religious kids are hurt by it. Our religion-based government can't fuck us up on this because bullshit detection is written into our genes. The sex switch gets turned on at puberty, and no matter how much government or religion twists the truth, they're fighting the honest beauty of love and sex. That's like bringing a knife to a gun fight.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's Penn & Teller: Bullshit! pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
