Now You Can Hear a Recording Of Terrifying Abstinence-Only High School Speaker Bellowing For An Hour

The recording plays like a longer, crazier, and much louder version of the sex ed scene from Mean Girls: the gist of it is that if you have sex, you will get chlamydia, and you will be infertile and die. Here is a direct quote from Ms. Stenzel, on living with an STD:

You’ve got it for life, which is a lovely thing, boys, if you’re getting ready to get married… Pull out that diamond, look her in the eyes… and say, “Marry me. By the way, I’ve got genital warts. You’ll get it, too, and we’ll both be treated for the rest of our lives. In fact, you’ll probably get a radical hysterectomy, cervical cancer, and maybe death. But marry me.”

Here is her advice to young women, who, as Stenzel rightly warns the crowd, are at a much greater risk for having serious consequences after contracting STD:

Girls, [you should be with] boys who care about you — the kind of boy who, if you were to date, would look at you and say, ‘I do love you, and you matter. And I might be able to walk away from sex with you without permanent damage, but you won’t. And because I love you so much, because you matter so much, I would never to ask you to put your life on the line, your ability to have children, your future, your self-respect on the line, to meet my momentary need. I would never pressure, demand, hurt, take, and walk. I care too much about you for that.”

How is this grossly-exaggerated claim even allowed in a public school? The idea that extramarital sex may lead to death is quite obviously problematic, to put it mildly. As are her beliefs about STDs: she sees them as incurable for the most part, because “the only way you’d know is if you got tested, and you’re not gonna get tested because you don’t think it’s gonna happen to you.” Oh, okay. Well, if no one’s going to get tested, let’s not try to encourage them, because we all know what teens are like. I mean, if a young, sexually active woman were to be vigilant about making sure that she and her sex partners had been tested, that might keep her from dying alone with a barren womb. But, nah. Teens are so lazy and they have that whole immortality complex thing anyways.

One of the most deeply troubling attitudes she displays is her view of gender relations. While she professes to have an ardent enmity for the idea that “boys will be boys,” she doesn’t disagree with it. Stenzel exemplifies the patriarchal notion that sex is something all men desire and all women withhold. Although she believes in some form of essentialized aggressive male sexuality, she thinks that men should train themselves to ignore it, lest they selfishly coerce those passive women who surround them into sullying their carnal treasure. Taking this view of sex has the doubly-negative effect of implicitly expecting teenage boys to be sexually enterprising — essentially circulating a discourse that encourages young men to be forceful as it feigns to forbid it — and of denying young people sexual agency by portraying them as helpless before their overpowering urges.