If you’re of a certain mind, then maybe I should apologize for the saucy little photo. If you’re of another mind, then you’re welcome. (Cue rim shot.) The photo is not gratuitous, because this week’s column in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press (Aug. 26) dealt with teen sex. The image is from the Abercrombie and Fitch Web site, which is aimed squarely at adolescents. A&F is one of the usual suspects I allude to in the second paragraph.

Pity today’s poor American teenagers, who get so many mixed messages about sex that it’s a wonder their brains don’t pop.

Combine the various signals from parents, schools, friends, clothing retailers, TV shows, movies, music videos and the occasional celebrity, and the result is something like, “Don’t have sex – unless you do.”

Pam Stenzel, on the other hand, isn’t ambiguous at all.

“The only safe sex is with a safe partner,” she tells scores of teenage audiences every year. That means marriage, she says. Not having sex is a choice you can make. Demand respect and draw boundaries. Within marriage, sex is liberating and terrific. Outside, more than ever it’s a life-threatening risk.

Stenzel was a crisis-pregnancy counselor for nine years in Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul before going on the road six years ago, since then speaking to more than a half million teenagers in public schools, private schools and churches.

She brings her “Sex Has a Price Tag” program to Munsey Memorial United Methodist Church, 201 E. Market St., Johnson City, on Sunday at 6:30 p.m.

She’ll be joined by Mad Dogs and Englishmen, a comedy duo of actual Brits who have lived in the U.S. for 12 years and have worked off and on with Stenzel for the last five.

Colin Hearn, one half of the team, spoke eagerly this week about the teenage sexual landscape and their mission in it. (Stenzel wasn’t available to talk because she was traveling overseas.)

“We want to present a positive message and want kids to understand the dangers of having sex before marriage,” Hearn explained. “In the United Kingdom or the U.S., we don’t understand the consequences. Pregnancy, yeah, but sexually transmitted diseases and emotional effects too. I don’t think the society and media portray that. They portray sex as a fun thing to do with no consequences.”

In a session recorded in 2000, Stenzel (pictured here) explains many of those consequences, often in painful detail, to a room full of high school boys and girls. With the aura of a straight-talking, street-wise big sister, she mixes statistics, clinical information, personal anecdotes and a touch of wit to drive home her points. (While making a case against abortion, she reveals she was conceived when her mother was raped.)

While rates of teenage sexual activity, pregnancy and abortions have declined in recent years, the statistics are still shocking. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that Americans aged 15 to 24 are most at risk for the most common sexually transmitted diseases.

Half of the 20 million reported U.S. cases of human papillomavirus, or HPV, are among teens and young adults, for example. Women that age report the highest infection rate of chlamydia, a bacterial disease linked to various cancers.

“If teens become sexually active as teenager, by the age of 25, one in two of them have an STD,” Hearn said. “Would you want to play Russian roulette?”

Teen sexual activity carries other risks.

“We find young people are emotionally devastated after sex,” Hearn said. “They may not have got an STD or got pregnant, but it messes with your mind.”

It messes with their money too. More than 60 percent of teen mothers live in poverty at the time of their child’s birth, and more than 80 percent eventually live below poverty, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Abstinence-based programs have their critics, who say messages like Stenzel’s ignore the fact that teens will have sex, no matter what. Adults can promote celibacy all they want, the argument goes, but reality demands teaching about safe sex and encouraging the use of condoms.

Some studies apparently support that assertion. A Texas A&M University survey among that state’s high schools, published last year, found students who attended abstinence programs actually increased their sexual activity, like other students in the survey.

But Hearn dismisses such arguments (“Any survey can be manipulated”), and in some ways those debates are beside the point to him.

The fact is that “the only 100 percent safe way to prevent STDs or these other problems is not to have sex,” he said. That’s a message teens don’t hear very much.

“If we don’t present the full truth of the message, we’re leading the kids down the wrong path,” he said. “We can’t make the decision for the kids. At the end of the day, you have to present the facts, and then the students have to decide.”