It’s the National Sex Ed Week of Action! Now with PRIZES! (For the first reader who emails me with answers to the quiz below!) But first, a quick true or false:

• The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate among the world’s developed nations.

• According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least one in four teen girls has a sexually transmitted infection.

• Half of sexually active young people in the U.S. will contract a sexually transmitted infection by age 25.

• Approximately 750,000 teenagers in the United States will become pregnant this year.

• The health care reform bill  included a renewal of $50 million per year funding of abstinence-only education for states until 2014.

• This Op-Ed by an Atlanta teen about the importance of comprehensive, accurate sex ed is awesome.

Answer key: TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE.

Which, now that we’re all riled up, brings us to the one with PRIZES! Planned Parenthood of NYC, BG’s local affiliate, is giving away a package of safe-sex goodies to the BG reader who emails me with the correct answers to all five of the following (at least peripherally) sex-ed related questions. Pencils ready?

1. In how many states is it still illegal for an unmarried heterosexual couple to live together?

2. What was the name of the first daytime television show to feature a same sex wedding?

3. What famous female advocate founded the first birth control clinic and later founded Planned Parenthood?

4. Japanese love pillows, which usually decorated with life-size animae characters are called what?

5. What species was the famous gay couple who raised an offspring named Tango together?

(And now, New Yorkers, join the campaign!)

Is it or isn’t it? In an article set to appear in the June 2010 issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, researchers found that oral sex is … not.

Only about 20% of university students participating in a 2007 survey agreed that oral-genital contact constituted sex, yet the majority believed that penile-vaginal and penile-anal intercourse did (98% and 78%, respectively)…

While I agree that demoting oral sex to, say, just “fooling around”  doesn’t quite work either, I am most disturbed by:

a) The 2 % of university students who don’t believe penile-vaginal intercourse constitutes sex, and

b) The 22% of university students who don’t believe penile-anal intercourse also constitutes sex.

Um, then…what does? Sex obviously feels good — and is, arguably, essential — to many humans of all orientations, but if we want to get biological and scientific, it is essentially about reproduction, propagating the species and all that. Therefore, one would think, college kids, who have had at least high school biology — and social lives — would be 100% certain that penile-vaginal intercourse is mostly the way that happens. The fact that even 2% of them don’t know that makes me hope there is some margin of error with the study’s statistics or there are some smart gay students who are subversively protesting the common perception of vaginal penile sex as normal. Most likely, we seriously need to revamp sex education.

Apparently, the authors of the study also suggest that sex education may be to blame for this oral “sex” business as abstinence-only education as well as more comprehensive sex education programs focus on penile-vaginal intercourse. There is indeed danger — sexually transmitted and otherwise — in disassociating oral sex from “SEXsex.” Oral sex can spread disease more easily than, say, a back rub or a hi-five. So, why don’t we, as a society, recognize that education and making facts available to our young people is the best preventative medicine for both teen pregnancy and STDs? Oh wait: because — as at least the grownups known — addressing even the matter of oral sex is, yes, talking about SEX.