Early on, Pearson poses a question to her students: How long do people wait before they have sex with the person they’re dating?
They shout out answers. “Two months.” “Three weeks.” “After dinner.”
Pearson smiles at the joke, then gets serious. “Sex happens awfully soon, awfully early in a relationship these days. Imagine a world where everyone waited at least six months.” The class guffaws, but Pearson holds her ground. “I’m gonna tell you, nobody died by waiting.”
On the contrary, she lectures, rushing into sex gets people in trouble. They get entangled in bad relationships. They can contract STDs. And they can get pregnant.
“You can always hook up with a jerk and you can always dump a jerk,” she says. “But if you make a baby, guess who can’t dump the jerk?”
Part of what drives Pearson is her concern for the welfare of children. In 1970, only 12% of the nation’s children lived with single mothers. By 2003, that number had more than doubled, to 26%. Half of all children born today will live apart from one parent before they turn 18. And 38% of children in single-parent families end up living in poverty, compared to 8% in two-parent households.
“Children’s lives have become too unstable,” says Pearson. She notes that many women in impoverished communities are having multiple children by multiple partners, and bringing home an endless stream of sexual partners. “It’s a maelstrom of jealousy. It’s not a good scene. Look at those children — they are suffering already.”
In class, Pearson plays “Runaway Love” by rapper Ludacris. She urges her students to listen closely to the lyrics, about a 9-year-old girl named Lisa who gets sexually assaulted by her mother’s boyfriends. Then Pearson plays “S.E.X.,” by R&B singer Lyfe Jennings, which touts the value of virginity:
Baby it’s a fact,
that once it’s gone you’ll never get it back
Hold on to your innocence
Use your common sense
You’re worth waiting for.
Pearson’s message on the importance of delaying sex sounds uncomfortably like the admonitions of the religious right against sex outside of marriage. But Pearson does not advocate abstinence-only sex-education classes and in fact avoids the word “abstinence” in her relationship courses, especially those designed for teenagers.
“I always talk about the benefits of delaying,” she says. But she admits that most teens will try it anyway. This being the case, she thinks they should have a better set of tools.
“All we do for teenagers is teach them sex ed,” she says. “We either say, ‘Wait until marriage’ or, ‘If you’re going to do it, use condoms.’ How about teaching them about relationships?”
Professor B. Bradford Brown, a psychologist at UW-Madison who specializes in teen relationships, agrees with Pearson on the value of teaching relationship skills to young people. But he’s cautious about endorsing her class or any other.
“There’s a certain value orientation in it,” he says. “There’s a danger in imposing a set of values not consistent with someone’s cultural beliefs or personal beliefs.”
Adults, says Brown, are mature enough to recognize an instructor’s bias. But “Adolescents don’t have the same base of experience as adults do to discern the implicit values that lie behind a presentation.”
Pearson dismisses the concern. “I think respect, equality and responsibility are values that most of us can get behind,” she says. Besides, many teenagers today come from single-parent homes. “We’re dealing with a whole generation of people where things have broken down. There are not a lot of guides for them.”
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