Last week, in a fit of boredom, I read the House of Representatives’ report on government funded abstinence-only programs—the one that found 80 percent of curricula to contain “false, misleading or distorted information about reproductive health.” I quickly grew nostalgic. The factual inaccuracies the House committee cited, the gentle manipulation of facts and implied moral judgments, reminded me of my rural Kentucky middle school, where sex education resembles the DARE anti-drug program. A propos to this report and to the bittersweet haze of my memory, I’d like to switch into sepia and reminisce about my two years of abstinence-only education, which I’ve come to call my “Scare Therapy.” I’m not interested in proving abstinence-education’s ineffectiveness to you; rather, I’d like to trace out the rhetoric of these programs. I’d like to examine why they invariably turn to the same bag of cheap scare tactics and what we can conjecture about a curriculum that teaches students, however unsuccessfully, to fear sex.

But first, a few anecdotes. In the seventh grade, I learned the slogan “No Ringy, No Dingy” from touring speaker and abstinence champion Lakita Garth. Garth also taught us that one in every three condoms “fails” and framed this particular gem with the question, “Would you jump out of a plane if you knew that one in every three parachutes malfunctioned?” This telling assembly ushered in an abstinence frenzy. Yet 14-year-olds still became pregnant in that school system, and chlamydia still crept about its loins. But I can’t imagine anyone was surprised; we were all as seasoned to the failure as we were to the slogans.The following year we sat through a lecture from the marms warning against the dangers of “prolonged kissing,” namely that “open-mouthed kissing can lead into dangerous territory.” You heard me right: French kissing is the fornicator’s gateway drug, the primrose path to saturnalia. I learned later that these educators represented a faith-based organization that had modified its program to coincide with public school regulations. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with that, but in practice, the modified curriculum shows. In a faith-based abstinence program, the moral guidelines of that faith not only compel the practice of abstinence, but also suggest how abstinence should be taught. Religious leaders consult religious texts and precedents to form a working definition of the boundaries of abstinence. These boundaries, for those who observe them, have a moral backbone and a religious rationale to support them.

But while advising complete abstention might be suitable for a church abstinence program, the logic at work here doesn’t hold in a public school, and trying to make it fit will only lead to a dishonest approach. It seems short-sighted to tell students not to kiss with open mouths because taste bud interaction insinuates too much. I’ve seen more reasonable proposals from secular abstinence groups, who stress the importance of emotional connection and mature decision-making over any close observance of sexual guidelines. Still, there are usually agendas at work. Though the marms presented their material circumspectly, without reflecting on moral matters, they skewed information and framed facts with fiction. As educators, they showed less interest in helping us make informed decisions than in convincing us by any means necessary to keep our appendages to ourselves. I don’t accuse them of harboring bad intentions; they merely conflated their private moral purpose with the material they presented publicly. Hence the scare tactics.

These conflations appear most vividly in a newly developing corner of abstinence rhetoric: the emotional risks of consensual sex. Allow me to quote the online FAQ of a Harvard-based abstinence group, True Love Revolution (which, admittedly, is not a public program, but whose literature sums up an omnipresent argument succinctly): “Sexual activity in both men and women involves the release of powerful bonding hormones that are designed to help married couples stay together permanently and trust each other. For non-married couples, such bonds can cause serious problems. When these relationships come to an end, the partners often feel a palpable sense of loss, betrayed trust and unwelcome memories.” We see here an interesting combination of oversimplified neurochemistry and plain old fear. I’ve heard this same argument pandered by Garth and my beloved marms. It breaks down like this: Sex causes strong emotional ties to form between partners; casual sex can cause you to fall in love with an ill-advised partner; sleeping with someone you don’t intend to marry may cause heartbreak when the relationship ends. A couple of telling assumptions seep into the rhetoric here. First, there’s the assumption that when you sleep with someone you don’t plan to marry, you also don’t plan to fall in love. I suspect that this supports the pretty common (and arguably unhealthy) abstinence-only fiction that all premarital sex is casual and indiscriminate. Second, it’s taken for granted that we all wish to avoid heartbreak, as though there were nothing to gain from experimentation or the pain and self-reflection consequent of a double-edged experience.

I remember an odd tension distending the surface of Scare Therapy. There was a conflict between education and prevention, trust and condescension. I suspect the marms never knew what to make of us. Were we cooperative sinners or only capricious children? There was the pretense of objectivity and a palpable wave of cognitive dissonance. There was a sense of weariness, wrapped in thinly stretched optimism. But mostly I remember tragicomedy. I signed that abstinence pledge with a smirk and watched the marms collect them all, bundle them and file them away like affidavits. I imagine it’s still in their records somewhere, lodged in a pile, invisibly labeled “Impending Disasters/Future Happiness.”