Up there, in the strip ads on the No. 12 bus running up Market Street and over to Gray's Ferry, between the transit poetry and the kiddie clothing store ads, there's that weird message again. A feverish sun (setting? rising?) behind big green and blue letters that read, really big, SECONDARY VIRGINITY. Then on the same blue placard to the right: a new beginning. Below that:

Then, save sex (the 'v' looks like a check mark) in a yellow box at the lower right. Running across the bottom the name of a Montgomery County pro-life organization, the Family Life Education Foundation (FLEF), and a phone number.

Call that number. If you say you're pregnant and you think you want an abortion, they'll try to talk you out of it and give you the names of groups that will support you till you give birth. If you say you're 16 and have had sex and you're feeling bad about it they'll talk to you about it in a kindly way — and tell you, matter of fact, you can be a virgin again.

No, you don't get a new hymen or a ceremony performed over your now-jaded teenage male member.

"They can never have a virgin body again," says Kim McBryan, a member of FLEF who gives lectures to school, youth and health groups on secondary virginity. "But they can have something just as precious. A virgin heart. We hope we can give teens a renewed sense of hope, self-esteem, dignity. A teen may not get pregnant, may not get a sexually transmitted disease, but she will be dealing with regret, loneliness, guilt. We acknowledge those feelings in a positive way, never in a judgmental way."

The ads are running through January on various mass transit lines. FLEF bought 75 of them, sized to fit subway cars as well as buses.

McBryan says FLEF has gotten an "overwhelming response, more than any other ad." FLEF representatives have talked, she says, to the curious, to people asking for speakers, and from teens who want to find out how to go virgin again.

"We talk about saved as opposed to safe sex," she says. She says anybody can become a secondary virgin, but her focus is on teens. "We tell them if they haven't already given the gift away — because we see virginity as a gift — there's still the future to plan for."

To that end McBryan brings "commitment cards" to her lectures, which students can sign, stating they'll abstain from intercourse till they're married. One girl who signed a card told McBryan she planned to frame the card to give to her husband on her wedding night.

Once you've promised not to have sex anymore, whether or not you've done it before, you're a virgin again. McBryan says as often as you fall off the virginity wagon, you can climb back on. But she likes to demonstrate at talks what happens, the more times you have sex outside of marriage.

"I'm big on props," she says. "I do this thing with sticky packing tape. I get one of the kids to come up, and I try to get a boy because they have hairier arms. I say, 'This tape will represent the bond sex creates between a man and a woman in marriage.' And then I talk about a girl and a guy who love one another and are at a point where they think to express that, they have to have sex. So, OK, I put the tape on the guy's arm. But with sex outside of marriage, there's a good chance that bond will be broken. I mean the guy instinctively realizes sex means commitment and it scares him away, while the girl is willing to give up her virginity to show that commitment. What happens when the relationship ends? I pull the tape off. It hurts! And then I say, you make sex part of your second relationship and this relationship ends, and you pull the tape off and it doesn't hurt as much. By the time you meet you're one and only the bond created by sex becomes weaker and weaker."

McBryan says it's OK for teens to fool around, as long as they don't have intercourse. But she absolutely does not talk about contraception, believing that it's contradictory to say "don't do It, but if you do do It, protect yourself."

"Contraceptives give you a false sense of security," McBryan says. "We don't talk about birth control, only self-control. If you have self-control you don't need to rely on a condom or a pill."

"With drugs, we say 'just say no.' You learn that in sixth grade. But some young people are going to be on drugs. We challenge young people in many ways. Academically, musically, athletically. Why not challenge them with abstinence? But, well, not everybody is up to the challenge."

That's an attitude that bothers Dr. Liana R. Clark, an adolescent medicine specialist at Children's Hospital. Clark says the concept of secondary virginity is "half good. The idea that once you start sex you don't have to continue is a very reasonable thing to teach adolescents. But I don't like the way [FLEF and similar groups] go about it. It's too pejorative. I don't talk about 'purity' — that's garbage. It's harmful to class kids into categories of good and bad. They say they're creating a standard which kids should live up to. That's fine if kids do. What happens if they don't? You ask them that question and they just say, 'Well, they should.'"

Clark tells kids it's OK not to start, OK to stop if they've already started, and she makes them practice saying 'no' and meaning it.

"But you have to teach kids where they are. If they are not having sex, you try to teach them that having healthy sexual relations does not necessarily mean intercourse. If they are having sex, you try to find out why."

Clark follows a statement endorsed by groups as diverse as the American School Health Association, the American Association on Mental Retardation and Catholics For A Free Choice which says, "Society must recognize that a majority of adolescents will become involved in sexual relationships during their teenage years. Adolescents should receive support and education for developing the skills to evaluate their readiness for mature sexual relationships."

The statement defines a mature sexual relationship as "consensual, non-exploitative, honest, pleasurable, and protected against unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases if any type of intercourse occurs."

The problem, Clark says, is a lot of teens aren't assessing whether the relationship they're in is healthy. She says most current sex education programs, whether they urge only abstinence or also teach prevention, often fail to talk about intimacy, setting sexual limits and resisting peer pressure.

"Kids who are going to be abstinent are going to be abstinent, whether they sign a card, stand on their heads, sew up their vaginas or cut off their penises," Clark says. "If they aren't, then you have to ask why, what is it they think they can get from sex. A lot of times they think sex gives you shiny white teeth, long hair, and people who love you. They believe it's like the Holy Grail. And if you can say 'ah ah, it ain't gonna happen,' instead of talking about purity, then you're going to have more of an impact. But if they are having sex, you try to teach them ways to keep themselves safe and alive."

Paul Hanson, a spokesman for the School District of Philadelphia, doesn't comment on the ads. But he says sex and sexually-related health education is conducted in an "age appropriate" fashion. "We don't talk about safe sex till the upper elementary grades. We tell children abstention is the best way to prevent pregnancy, but that if they choose not to abstain, that there are safer sex techniques."

Condoms, available at public high schools in Philadelphia, are donated by the city's Health Department and facilities are funded by outside health agencies which provide personnel and educational materials.

"We are concerned with health," Hanson says. "We are not in the business of imposing values on children."

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