ABSOLUTELY shocking.

Remember a 15-year-old girl, Aishah, who was featured in the opening lines of an article in The Straits Times a couple of weeks ago?

The one who said she was taught how to say no to sex but did not know what sex was?

I hope her teachers take a long, hard look at themselves. How can a 15-year-old girl not know by now that you are not supposed to lie to the press?

That said, I agree that we need to take a long, hard look at how to discourage irresponsible teenage sexual activity.

True, I am not a sex guru. But I do know a thing or two about not having sex.

Dispel myths

To start, let us dispel myths about why we want teenagers to abstain.

The usual answer is that teenagers are reckless and can't make good decisions.

Well, how do you account for the scores of adults who borrow beyond their means and bring down the global economy?

Another justification is the phrase, "If you are not ready to have babies, you should not have sex."

That's just daft.

Think about it. Being ready to have a baby means being able to support a child to adulthood. For most people, this means you should be able to afford a home, have a stable career, an understanding employer, savings and a responsible, fully adult mind.

I mean, I'm not sure my own father has a fully adult mind yet and he's nearly 60.

The truth is that being a parent can't possibly be all that difficult. Fish have a gazillion babies at once and they don't even have fingers to count them on.

Besides, the threshold is really low. As far as I can tell, the law requires only that you be more responsible than Britney Spears. This includes Kevin Federline.

No, the real reason is that parents are annoying. Put a bunch of mums together with their babies and all they want to talk about is milk powder and diaper disposal methods.

Combine the two - mums plus teens - and you create the most annoying thing in the universe: The Twilight Saga.

Hold on, I mean the second most annoying thing in the world, which is why if you do anything that might make a teenager pregnant, we send you to jail.

Teaching teenagers to say no to their boyfriends and girlfriends is good, but let's be honest, you're really teaching girls to say no to boys and not the other way round.

We can achieve this with the truth: By showing the girls that sex in reality is slimy and gross. Most teenagers are exposed only to the kind of hyper-idealised stuff shown in movies, on TV and in the incognito mode of your Internet browser.

But the truth is that most sexual activity takes place not between supermodels but people who look like Malaysian politician Chua Soi Lek.

And it is not a lie to point out to girls that their teenaged suitors were probably brought up on anime and porn, and thus utterly depraved.

Teacher: "Look at this video. If you let your boyfriend do this (points with a laser pointer), he will soon be asking you to do this (class gasps) and before you know it he will be trying to do this!" (Several girls scream, one faints)

But just in case this doesn't work, teach them how to use contraception. If the school won't do it, who will?*

*Ris Low will.