Politics & Power Quote by Piers Anthony

Piers Anthony’s line has the plainspoken snap of someone refusing to let “polite society” outsource reality to rumor. The intent is pragmatic: teach kids early, teach them clearly, and stop pretending that ignorance is a moral safeguard. He frames it as cultural self-critique, not individual blame. “In our own culture, here in America” points the finger at a national habit of treating sex as simultaneously ubiquitous and unspeakable, then acting shocked when young people learn the hard way.

The subtext is where the sentence does its real work. Anthony isn’t arguing about pleasure or permissiveness; he’s arguing about consequences, and he picks venereal disease as the bluntest possible proof that the stakes are physical, not theoretical. The phrase “before they encounter it” is quietly damning. It assumes encounter is likely, perhaps inevitable, and suggests the culture’s current approach amounts to sending adolescents into traffic with a blindfold and calling it virtue.

Contextually, this sits comfortably in the late-20th-century American cycle of abstinence rhetoric versus public-health reality, when sex education became a proxy battlefield for religion, politics, and parental control. As a writer known for courting controversy, Anthony uses a seemingly modest claim to push against euphemism and censorship. The rhetoric is almost disarmingly reasonable, which is the point: if the counterargument requires keeping kids uninformed, it starts to sound less like morality and more like negligence.