I didn’t quite realize that virginity pledges were real until recently. They just seemed the stuff of religious satire, but evidently they’re real and they’re not all that great at fulfilling their cockblocking function. In fact, the only correlation pledges have is with hitting it raw. So while virginity pledges have nothing to do with preventing teenage sex, they seem to have a lot to do with unsafe sex.

MSNBC reports:

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

Okay girl scouts, you can put your hands down. We don't need you to pledge to keep your hoo-ha on lockdown. What we need instead of false promises is education because though they say ignorance is bliss, when it comes to sex, ignorance can mean blisters.