Cutting past spin

Remember back in March a piece circulated in the media about virginity pledgers experiencing the same rate of STDs as non-pledgers? Sometimes in contentious issues, it's useful to go to the source to see what's really being said. No offense to blog or op ed types, but pundits making conclusions based on a selective reading of media reports are potentially compounding error upon error. One of the authors of the report, Bearman, has a web page where the relevant paper is available as a PDF under the heading "Rules, Behaviors and Networks that Influence STD Prevention among Adolescents. National STD Prevention Conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania." I found the paper there far more insightful than what I gleaned from the he-said, she-said media reporting:

For those who do not like detective stories: Pledgers have STD rates as young adults as high as non-pledgers. More interesting, where the proportion of pledgers in a community is high, STD rates in that community among both pledgers and non-pledgers are high...
What causes STD rates to be high in contexts where there are a lot of pledgers? Simply put, where there are a lot of pledgers, young adults don't get what is going on.
...STD rates are highest when people underestimate their risk of infection... Because pledgers make a public pledge, the sex that they have is more likely to be hidden. It is also more likely to be unsafe. The combination of hidden sex and unsafe sex fuels the absence of knowledge that pledgers and others have about the real risk of STDs.
In this regard, just saying no, without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to create greater risk and heightened STD acquisition than should be the case.
Pledging does not protect young adults from STDs; in fact, in some contexts it increases their risk and the risk for others.

To use an economics analogy, risky behavior tends to be covert and hidden from potential investors. The resulting cost-benefit analysis is then based on public information, which falsely underreports risk. It's a crooked market. Lack of condom use is not the key problem; it's merely a symptom of a larger systemic problem which neither the left nor the right appears to have caught on to. From an objective results-based perspective, it appears neither the left nor the right has a superior solution, given the compariable long-term STD rates of pledgers and non-pledgers. More creativity is needed here.