*Let me preface this rant that I am no way condoning acts of sexual assault against anyone*

First of all, I believe idealism is a well-intentioned position. I believe that we shouldn’t have to suffer rape, I believe that we shouldn’t have abortions and that those unwanted babies go into adoption to find loving families. I love idealism, it serves as a guiding light to where we as a society want to be. However, the inherent flaw in idealism is that it fails to take into account the status quo of society in the present. It blankets every member of society into a certain way of thinking, be it valuing life in the same respect or respecting another person’s decision to say no. What those who promote the idea of saving oneself for marriage fail to realize is that given our current social mores and customs, pre-marital sex is bound to happen. No matter how loudly and frequently you promote the idea of abstaining from sex until marriage, the culture is fundamentally against you. The same goes for sexual assault. Those who question why we promote the idea of how to protect oneself from rape is fundamentally the same as to why we teach sex education in school. We acknowledge that things are going to happen, you will find yourself in a situation that will lend itself to the aforementioned options and to be in that situation without a working knowledge of what to do is a failure on the part of the education system. Yes, I would love to see abortions diminish to only supreme emergencies in which the woman’s life is endangered and the adoption rate rocket and yes I’d love to see the rate of rape drop to zero, but those are purely idealistic views. In order for those to occur we need to provide the proper education one that couples an increase in promoting the value of life and the fact that there are couples who cannot conceive and would be forever grateful for a child with the proper methods of contraception. Similarly if we want to reduce the sexual assault rates, we need to continually promote the valuation of dignity and respect the choice to say no, while also providing the education to women of what to do in situations that can lend itself to deteriorating into sexual assault.