I have come to loathe the days when TIME and Newsweek arrive at my house. I have nothing against current events, but it seems like every week, no matter how hard I try to hide them, one of these publications prints some article that whips my mother and father into a disapproving parental frenzy, and I have to shield myself from the fallout. This sometimes awkward, always irritating phenomenon occurred yet again a couple weeks ago, when my mother brought up a study that was recently published relating to racy television shows and teenage pregnancy.

According to a study released at the beginning of November, teenagers who watch TV shows with more sexual content, such as Gossip Girl and the new 90210, Sex and the City, and even the now-old Friends, are about twice as likely to get pregnant or cause a pregnancy (Digression Alert: Cause a pregnancy? Do guys even watch these shows?). My mother delivered this information to me with an accusatory tone and a shake of the head, as though at any second I was going to abscond with the nearest sixteen-year-old guy I could find and do God knows what with him. Unfortunately for her, the impact of this little lecture was lessened by her immediately turning back to the TV screen and proceeding to watch Chuck and Blair as they nearly got it on (again!).

Teenagers are not always the brainless lemmings that adults seem to think we are. A good portion of us are able to differentiate between real life and what we see on the magic box that shows us moving pictures, thank you very much. Just because instances of limo sex and nasty deeds in the school parking lot abound on TV today doesn’t mean that we’re all going to rush out and follow suit. Teenagers have sex for a lot of reasons, but seeing Ross and Rachel do it in a museum is not one of them. They are not going to stop any time soon, even if these shows all suddenly disappear.

If anything, these shows probably frighten adolescents off sex. Think about it. These shows are all about insane drama, most of which stems from convoluted love triangles and hookups, and most (most!) of these do not end well. What poor young girl is going to go out and try having sex for the first time after she sees what happens to Blair Waldorf: dumped by her boyfriend and alienated by all of her friends after a pregnancy scare? There is nothing even remotely appealing about that situation.

Unsurprisingly, abstinence advocates are using this study as ammunition, and their arguments basically boil down to “Kids seem to be having more sex, so we need to try even harder to keep them in the dark about it! That will solve everything!” This is just another way of saying that we teenagers don’t know how to take care of ourselves. When will people learn that, for the most part, we are not stupid, and that if there is the odd one of us who is impressionable enough to mimic fictional characters, the only thing that can be done is to arm them with some condoms and some knowledge?

If there is any sort of relationship between sex on TV and sex in real life, the problem stems from a lack of outside education, not from the unrealistic and slightly messed up portrayals of teenage sex lives in pop culture. If we aren’t taught what’s normal with respect to sexual activity, how are we supposed to know that most of the time you can’t actually get freaky on a bar stool at a wedding without major consequences? That’s the only possible explanation for this so-called “phenomenon.” And actually, there were consequences for that bar stool thing. Just not the ones you would expect with, you know, the police getting called, or something.