Alice Dreger sat in on her son’s sex-ed class, tucked away in a back corner, where she could live-tweet the whole thing. The class was worse than I could have ever imagined: it was story-telling about how pre-marital sex is awful and dangerous and will screw your life up and you’ll end up with a disease and a baby.
You know what’s going to happen? Those kids will experience sex at some point, discover that it is absolutely wonderful and fun, and they’ll realize, maybe, that what they were taught was a lie, so they’ll do it over and over again. Unfortunately, they will have absorbed the shame and guilt, so when they grow up and have children of their own, they’ll send them off to school and demand that they also be taught how wicked sex is, to ameliorate some of that guilt.
And so it goes.
We’ve learned nothing in the last century or so. I ran across this letter about Victorian sex problems.
Don’t you just want to hop in your time machine and tell this poor guy to relax, enjoy his time with the lady, and everything will get better with practice and cooperation?
The standard Victorian regime of diet and exercise does sound rather interesting, though.
Side effect: the shame and guilt and teaching how it is bad and wrong will keep them from going to the store/doctor and getting birth control, because that means they’re awful people who are obviously IN PUBLIC and IN FRONT OF OTHER PEOPLE planning to have the sex, which means they will not do so and STDs and pregnancies will abound.
Once kids realize they’ve been deliberately lied to by authority figures, natural cynics that they are, they’ll assume that everything said authorities tell them is a lie. Sex ed in my school years was honest, if basic, but the drug education was the worst nonsense the late 1960s could produce. Anecdotally, once we tried pot and it didn’t turn us into ravening junkies, this led to a lot of much riskier drug-taking behavior – that not all of my cohort survived – because we assumed all the warnings were bullshit. SPOILERS: Heroin really is addictive. LSD does pose a small but nonzero risk of permanent psychological damage. Etc.
I am glad I went to school in the northeast. Sex Ed was straight forward without all the shame and guilt. I don’t think we got much education about homosexuality unfortunately, but it was almost 40 years ago. I was also taught to focus on school and not let too much to distract me from this and to learn how to balance everything with school. Teenagers can be taught to make good decisions for themselves instead of telling them what to do or what not to do
Sounds a lot like My experience with sex education, the only difference being that “…will experience sex at some point…” part.
carlie @ 1
In my experience, the matter of buying birth control was one less of “shame” (though it was in there) but mainly the oft-repeated right-wing “science” that condoms don’t really work and the pill is an abortifacient.
Growing up in a Catholic family really sucks.
If George Grossmith hadn’t been only 9 at the time I would have suspected his hand but, clearly, this is the first recorded example of Poe’s Syndrome.
The sad irony is that with this horrible lack of actual sex-ed, the kids are much more likely to end up with a baby and/or disease.
Though I must say that my sex ed was very “biological” as in getting to know all the parts, internal and external, how they work and a sheet written and read to us by a bett red teacher that mentioned the sentence: “The man inserts his penis into the vagina of the woman. This causes both of them pleasure”
Talk about heteronormativity….
My sex ed class in high school was called “health education”, it was taught by the basketball coach, and he refused to say a word about sex. It was a long boring semester in which he’d only talk about hygiene: YOU HAVE TO TAKE A SHOWER AFTER GYM. Sweat was the enemy. There was also a lot of talk about civics and how patriotism was important and America is the greatest country on earth.
There was a book that apparently covered this sex stuff, but he’d just tell us to read chapter X because it was required by the curriculum. There was no test on it (we were graded entirely on attendance, as near as I could tell), so nobody bothered to read it.
I didn’t read it either. I was reading biology books at the library, and I’d glanced at our health book and seen that it was pablum, so I skipped it.
[dating myself] I remember the “Sexual Revolution” promulgated the prevalence of condoms (for every man), and “the pill” for every woman (of the revolution). With the opponents of the Rev saying the prevalence of ‘safeties’ is something that would inevitably result in people having orgies 24/7, everywhere.
[aside]My sex-ed was entirely self-taught (using library-stored text books, NOT porn, and no self-experimentation) my schools brushed over sex-ed briefly during “personal hygiene” class. Quite inadequate was school sex-ed. (dare I say:) flaccid, even. ^_^
Another side-effect is that they’ll learn about sex from internet pornography, which is not meant to be educational at all.
My sex ed in high school was also taught by a coach. He told us sex feels better than cocaine.
All I recall about ‘health education’ was a series of progressively more grotesque images of diseased penises.
I’ve gotten the impression that lack of sex education tends to lead to people creating and perpetuating urban legends about how to “cheat the system” so that they don’t have to worry.
Example: They say condoms don’t work. So just wash her out with Coca-Cola, that’ll do it!
I live in Ohio (not, at my username indicates, my birth state of Kentucky) and to my dismay it is abstinence-only.
Thankfully, I’ve recently learned about a program called ‘Our Whole Lives‘, put together by the Unitarian Universalists. The program itself doesn’t seem to be spiritually based, which is a plus.
15 years ago, in Kentucky, I had a Health class for half a semester in middle school. One week of that class was given to sex ed. There was a permission slip that had to be signed by your parent if you were going to take part (I have no idea what the alternative assignments were). I don’t recall how long the class periods were, but there couldn’t have been more than 10 hours of education on the subject. That was barely enough time to cover the bare mechanics, the existence of STDs & birth control, and the basic anatomy.
OWL seems to be far better. Say what you want about churches, religion, et al (and I know I have), but the UU organization seems to be on the ball about sex ed. OWL purports to discuss the difficult parts of sex ed (like “How do I build a relationship?” instead of “How do I mash my genitals against someone else’s?”) and has several parts that deal with GBLTQ issues.
Sex-ed is a hot topic here in Ontario right now. A few years ago, the provincial government tried to update the curriculum but got so loud a backlash from religious parents and orgs that they dropped the whole idea. But now, under a new leader (whose background is in education), they’ve finally pushed it forward and have vowed not to cave in again. You can imagine the frothing at the mouth that is going on. That and ignorant parents (i.e. who’ve no idea what the curriculum contains despite the fact that the gov’t has gone to great lengths to produce parent resources and to make the thing transparent and accessible) being led by the mouth-frothers to protest. Wouldn’t want kids to be exposed to ideas like consent or gender identity.
I was thinking, if parents don’t want kids to make mistakes about sex, they need to strengthen their children’s self-esteem. With a good self-esteem, kids are better equiped to resist peer pressure and are better able to know what they want in terms of sex.
I’m grateful I was raised in New York where we got actual sex ed with a heavy dose of “wait until marriage/later” but at the least they explained what birth control was, the basics of how pregnancy happened and a LOT of emphasis on STDs – I assume the latter was because the AIDS epidemic was getting more news coverage at the time so there was an emphasis on risks of disease/infection. Not that I ended up needing most of the information but at least they didn’t lie to us about birth control.
The technical aspects of my sex education were handled in 1986 by a guidance counselor from middle school who stopped by my fifth grade class to give us the obligatory “talk” featuring a grainy film about puberty circa 1970-something. I recall that my initial reaction to the mechanics of sexual intercourse was something along the lines of “you do WHAT?!?!”
The “moral” aspects were handled by my pare, particularly my right-wing Catholic father who made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that pre-maritable sex would mean the end of this life, followed by an eternity in Hell in the next. I believed him (and if you know him, you’d believe him too), and wanting to be a good boy who pleased him and God, and I did as I was told even going as far as to public condemn my classmates if I suspected them of “sinning.”
Now I’m 40 and, outside of heavy petting with the one and only girlfriend I ever had in college, I’m STILL a pathetic virgin.
Thanks Dad. Fuck you and die!
The
I had sex ed right through school, starting with age appropriate gender education in grade 3 or thereabouts. In high school years 7 – 10 it was part of the science curriculum, and years 8 & 9 also covered in phys ed. It covered mostly the biological aspects, especially pregnancy (girls only school), with the diagrams of genitals, but also included birth control, how to use a condom, etc. There was no moralising or guilt involved. I think the closest anyone got was one science teacher saying it was better to wait till we are old enough to really enjoy it.
The abstinence, guilt and misinformation you guys talk about sounds barbaric.
But I was educated in Australian state schools.
I was lucky. My sex education included almost everything. All the messy biology. Safe sex. Even relationships and respect. However, we had an actual sex educator. I don’t know how a rural-ish town in MN pulled that off. Maybe they figured the students didn’t have anything better to do than have sex with each other.
Generally speaking, sex ed in Germany is good. It often starts as early as preschool, teaching kids about their bodies. 3rd grade picks it up again and so on and so on so they should get age appropriate sex ed as they grow.
Many states now include LGBTQ in the curriculum*, having people from LGBTQ groups come into school. That’s still a big fight in some places, though, with evangelical christians and other conservatives frothing at their mouths that children will hear about *whisper* ghääääääjjjjjjs. One of them, Birgit Kelle, whom I can only characterize as Germany’s CHS, went on record telling a TV audience in a shocked voice that, would you believe it, Lesbians lick each other!
The big drawback is that parents can opt out their children of sex ed. As usually, those who get opted out are those who need shame free, factual sex ed the most.
*In more ways than just sex ed. Can you imagine the horrible indoctrination that grade schoolers will have to suffer if they encounter math problems about how many cakes Peter and John will need to buy for their wedding?
The exercise in the letter wasn’t intended to be exercise that was how you got around in London (Brompton is part of London) in the 1850s unless you were very well-off (no cars, no bikes, no underground). There were trains to get you from the outside to the outskirts of London and there were omnibuses (horse drawn, London General Omnibus Company) to move you around (though speed wise, walking was probably faster).
I had a substitute teacher in high school who pretended to be answering questions and told all the students we could ‘ask whatever we want” … eventually the questions came around to sex and he told us that if you let someone put your penis in their mouth, and they sucked on it, all the skin could come off and you’d need skin grafts and be horribly disfigured for life. I wish I’d asked him “is that what happened to you?” but I still had a few vestigial bits of respect for authority in those days.
It would be fun to start an organization devoted to sending free copies of “The Joy Of Sex” to kids, anonymously, from a safe website.
When I was in high school and started catching on to the idea that sex was going to be a Big Thing, I got my hands on a copy (1st ed. I still have it!) and my friend and I worked our way through it, one hot humid summer. I know a young lady now who’s home-schooled and heavily indoctrinated, who I gave a copy to following a conversation at a kink party (seriously: do not go to BDSM events to learn how sex works!) a few weeks later she came back with her copy underlined with dozens of questions. That was an interesting conversation.
@Akira
How terribly sad for you that your father was such a fear monger about sex. But the religious seem to have a lot of difficulty with anything to do with sex. It’s like it is some kind of “holiness test” to have one repress one of the most powerful drives in our lives. Just weird.
The little bit of sex ed we had in school (40 years ago) was taught by the high school biology teacher in 10th grade (eastern Canada). She (60ish female teacher in a class with 1 female student and about 35 boys) did the biology/anatomy bit, and the mechanics were skirted over, and there was a bit about STDs, but there was not much about birth control and absolutely nothing about relationships. LGBTQ issues weren’t even on the radar back then. It was middling at best.
My parents were silent on the issue. Never heard a word. They were privately religious to a point, but never vocal about it. The one thing that they did was quietly pass me a book called “Love and the Facts of Life”. It probably got handed around among the women in their church who had children going through puberty.
http://www.amazon.com/Love-Facts-Evelyn-Millis-Duvall/dp/B002CBAFCS
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nickandnessies/3419572567/
It was an ok book for the day, for sure. But I only remember one thing from it. But I never got imbued with the notion that sex was bad or dirty, so exploration was the order of the day. Certainly pre-marital sex was never struck me as wrong. Being old enough to be responsible for your actions and their consequences was the way I looked at it. And that involved acquiring some knowledge about sex issues, which weren’t as easy to research in the pre-internet days.
But that letter in the OP is just strange. What a shame that people were made so guilt ridden that they became dysfunctional.
My child’s school uses this curriculum to teach ‘comprehensive sexuality education’. The curriculum encourages students to have discussions on various topics with trusted adults (but also offers alternative activities for the students who don’t feel they can involve the adults in their lives in such conversations). I highly recommend it.
@22 Marcus
Holy shit! That’s some crazy lie the teacher told about oral sex. I think that in earlier generations it was considered “dirty” by most, but skin-peeling? Wow.
I feel sorry for people who don’t get to enjoy oral sex (giving or receiving), and especially feel sad for women who won’t let their partner’s pleasure them that way because they are troubled about the way their vulva looks (doesn’t match what they have seen in porn).
I might have actually gotten “lucky” in this regard. I grew up in a conservative suburb here in Utah, and they just didn’t bother with any type of sex education. It’s worse than getting good sex ed, but better than getting a bunch of misogynistic nonsense in the form of abstinence-only education (I still remember Elizabeth Smart talking about how the misogynistic sex ed she was given only helped to prolong her captivity in kidnapping, since she felt like a “used stick of gum” after being raped).
This seems about right to me:
Insecure religious parents trying to hypocritically force beliefs and practices on their children that they themselves didn’t follow is pretty common.
congenital cynic @ 24
You should have heard him when I was 13 and he and mother caught me “red handed,” sort of speak. I was grounded for a month then shouted at me for several hours afterward. My father demand to know if I was going to “start raping 10-year-old girls.”
And people wonder why I have “issues.”
I have to be one of the few people who looks back upon their youth and regrets NOT experimenting with sex and drugs.
Strewth @ 11;
Now that sounds very familiar indeed. My experience of sex ed (during the ’90s in the UK) was mostly a series of images of the many and varied forms of venereal diseases that have afflicted humanity down the ages (I think we got a few diseased vulvas to go with the diseased penises), from syphillis through clymidia to HIV, and their various gruesome symptoms in more extreme cases.
A particularly great amount of time and attention was lavished upon the skin lesions and other symptoms suffered by people with advanced stage full blown AIDS, and the high death rate the disease had at the time . This was still during the great AIDS panic, when AIDS was considered the great killer disease; destined to become the unstoppable plague of the modern age. A new Black Death for the late twentieth century, all before modern anti-retrovirals allowed for the management of the condition, and while it was still considered irresponsible to talk about how relatively simple it was to mitigate one’s risk of exposure, (we were told condoms offered a dangerous false sense of security, I kid you not) mostly thanks to various influential churches. The conservatives in society knew that they had a great scare tactic in that, and they played it to the hilt. I still remember how the final session ended, with a teacher saying that, while sex carried all kinds of heinous dangers, it could be fantastically intimate and pleasureable… if you were married. And all the while, the image of a half naked, emaciated, lesion covered man clearly not much longer for this mortal coil still hung on the projector screen.
Fortunately, i was already a fairly politically aware little chap even then (or perhaps a cocksure young fool altogether too enamoured of his own imagined cleverness, it could really be viewed either way), and I was sufficently suspicious that there might be an agenda at work here beyond education and public safety that I took the whole thing with a pinch of salt. That said, around the class you could see how it affected different people. Some were clearly unimpressed, and would continue whatever they were already doing irrespective of the class (and some of those were callous enough to find the images of imminent death and suffering funny – kids are still people, and all too many people are arseholes), but there were several others who were clearly terrified, having gone white as sheets, and some even looked like they were seconds away from vomiting all over the place. I don’t doubt for a second that serious damage was done to the social and sexual development of many of the pupils there. Indeed, while I flatter myself that it didn’t effect my personally all that much, the fact remains that I am still a virgin in my mid-thirties, and that may well not simply be a coincidence.
Fear based indoctrination still supplants anything approaching education in all too many classrooms when it comes to sex in particular, and not just in the US.
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Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- @ 6;
Again, that brings back memories. Our sex ed was also wholly heteronormative. The existence of other sexualities and gender identities was not mentioned at all, and when some of the pupils tried to raise the issue they were cut off very quickly indeed by the teachers. This was before the repeal of the heinous Section 28, that at the time prevented local authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality in schools, and so put teachers in a very dicfficult and confusing position of not knowing what they could safely say, and so most – even those who weren’t already homophobes, as all too many were – played it safe and simply pretended that the LGBTQ community didn’t exist at all.
All in all, the entire process was a horror show that failed to actually protect anyone from anything, and served only to cause some of the kids there to lose all trust in authority figures, and probably scarred others for life.
One of the most troubling things about the entire sex ed programme in my old school was the absence of one vitally important concept – the phrase ‘consent’ was never used, not even once. Its impotance was not discussed. How to be sure you have secured meaningful consent was not covered at all.
It should surely have had top billing, but the class was clearly aimed more at frightening kids with venereal diseases than it was about introducing the single most important concept involved in sexual relationls.
The more I think of it, the more this seems like the product of active malice rather than mere incompetence, though there was certainly plenty of the latter to go around
My sex ed experience was more fear-mongering about STDs/pregnancy. And of course all the biology stuff (which I think is interesting because it’s biology). So they told us about birth control and stuff and basically said that if we don’t use it then we’re taking a huge risk. If you’re going to do it, use protection.
So I guess that’s fear-mongering done right?
@31 Gregory Greenwood
Honestly, I don’t think so. The priorities of sex ed is much more about preventing the spread of STDs and teenage pregnancy. That’s why we have it in the first place. It’s not a “Relationship Class.” Sex Ed doesn’t teach you about domestic abuse or manipulative behavior.
Don’t get me wrong, teaching consent is a great idea, but that idea is mission creep of sex ed. I would not consider it malice nor incompetence.
I was in junior high and high school in the late 60s and early 70s and had no sex education classes whatsoever. This was in small-town Missouri. My father never told my brother and me anything so it was up to my mom to educate us and all she could think to do was buy us copies of Playboy and hope for the best. I’ll never forget the first time I came while looking at one of the magazines. I had no idea what was happening but when nothing bloody appeared, I figured it couldn’t be too dangerous and it certainly did feel good! The rest I had to figure out from locker-room jokes and, eventually, porn.
doublereed @ 33
Driver’s ed teaches about the basic mechanics of driving, as well as the laws relating to driving, what’s dangerous to yourself and others to do on the road, and basic road courtesy. I don’t think sex ed attempting to prepare young people for responsible sex lives–which absolutely involves respecting the safety and rights of others and knowing what constitutes sexual assault–is mission creep at all.
Mellow Monkey @35:
I completely agree.
****
My memory is failing me somewhat, but I don’t recall learning anything about sex ed in high school (and certainly not in middle school). I attended HS in Alabama, so maybe that had something to do with it. Of course, even if they had a sex ed curriculum, it most certainly wouldn’t have included information for LGBT people.
Nor did I get any sex education at home. Come to think of it, neither of my parents ever gave me so much as “the talk”.
I had to learn about sex on my own. Which is NOT the ideal way for a young person to learn about sex.
Sex ed around here in the Nordics is pretty decent, though very cisheteronormative. Had it three or four times in my education, the first one being when I was younger than 10 years old if I remember correctly. That one included a kid asking the teacher why condoms came with flavour, and the teacher explaining what a blowjob is, so it was decidedly less anti-sex than it seems high school sex ed is in the USA. High school sex ed here mostly was about how condoms worked (and offering free ones), how reproductive organs worked, how things may vary between genitals (titbits I recall were about differences in hymens and in how low a person’s testicles would hang compared to one another), and a single mention of gay sex existing.
I don’t recall if they ever discussed consent or anything about the actual people involved, but I think that may be because it was treated as just a subject we needed to learn about, just like geography or biology.
[I was ‘triggered’ by someone, above, mentioning theocratic sex ed]
A few weeks ago, on The Daily Show, the subject was some news item about sex-ed. They interviewed someone, on the opposition side, who said, “Sex ed is fine, for parents to teach their own children about (mustn’t have teachers going all pornographic), AND if the parents are squeamish, the kids can ask their priest about it.”
My catholic upbringing was gobsmacked by that nonadvice. “As if a priest knows anything about sex (since they are pledged to chastity)”, then recent revelations caught up, “oh, sure, ask a rapist of altar boys about sex. that’ll work well.”
~~ head*desk ~~
Couldn’t disagree more. There can be no “sex” for sex ed to teach about without consent. Clearly, it’s sorely needed. I don’t see how it would be mission creep at all.
My sex education class in Utah was surprisingly good.
In 1971 I was fourteen. My school in Calgary, Alberta had NO sex ed whatsoever. My father was a minister, and I was an autistic-spectrum, physically undeveloped, socially isolated teen. During that time my sex-ed consisted of two things:
1) Sex is a terrifying, horrible thing which will get you thrown out onto the street and ruin your life. I watched my parents fight with and throw my older brother out of the home when he became a hippie and (gasp) had sex. He left after grade 11, and despite being a smart fellow, let that interrupt his education; he finally graduated from University at the age of 53. My older sister, ignorant about such things, got pregnant the first time she had sex. My father called her a whore and she was sent 3000 miles away (that’s accurate) to have the baby in shame.
Worse yet, the parents thought I didn’t know what was going on, so my sister suddenly decided to leave school in Grade 10 and move 3,000 miles away. Once she was out of the house, she declared she was keeping the baby. She never got past grade 10.
Two lives and educations fucked up from a lack of sex ed and a cruel, ignorant, and vicious attitude towards sex.
2) Sex is a complete mystery, impossible to get accurate information about, information which authorities will hide from you in many ways. Remember, being utterly socially isolated the only way I could learn things was through books. Sex I learned from a little book about puberty my parents left lying around for me to pick up. That’s right, they didn’t even come to me and say, “Read this book.” They left it out for me to come across “accidentally.”
As well as a few basic drawings, there was a chapter on the mysterious activity called “masturbation”. “Masturbation” was never described or defined except by two uses of the phrase “playing with yourself”. As in: “Playing with yourself isn’t a bad thing, but wouldn’t you rather be outside with your friends playing baseball?”
As the computer from Lost in Space would say: “DOES NOT COMPUTE!: I could not understand this. What did that phrase mean? Being a socially isolated, physically uncoordinated, fearful, bullied, sexually undeveloped shrimp I was “playing with myself” all the time — reading, solitaire, riding my bike — and what, I asked, did that have to do with *sex*? Looking back on it, it seems ridiculous, but I had NO friends whatsoever, my older brother and sister had been kicked out of the home, so I really, really didn’t know what “playing with yourself” meant. That book was frustrating; it was also dangerous because it turned me off from investigating sex through other publications; my thought was that if a book ABOUT sex still managed to lie by omission, what use would it be to look at any other books.
Did it screw me up?
Fuck, yeah!
And as a wholly-repressed, unself-aware bisexual my entry into adult social and sexual intercourse took decades and contained a LOT of completely unnecessary trauma.
2)
Must clarify my remarks about my older sister. The parents found out about her pregnancy by snooping through her mail. There was a confrontation late at when I was theoretically in bed, but it was easy to hear my Dad yelling and my sister crying. the next morning my father announced that my sister was leaving, going back East. No explanation was given; and I knew enough not to ask.
Sure enough, 6 months later, my father suddenly announced at dinnertime: “Your sister Laura has just had a baby.” My two younger brothers squealed with surprise and delight. I kept quiet. Nothing to see here.
Move along.
@ Hairhead
You and I are just a year apart in age, so from the same era, though different parts of the country. I knew a few PKs (preacher’s kids) growing up, and I think they had it tougher than us run-of-the-mill types. Even kids who came from the more religious families had strict rules that I never faced (two kids we grew up with were forbidden from playing cards, going to dances, or going to the movies, among other odd prohibitions). There were girls in my high school who got pregnant and had babies in 11th and 12th grade (some from “good” families), but I don’t think I know of anyone who got sent away for being pregnant. That’s a pretty strong reaction. Sounds like your father was more concerned about his sense of shame than about supporting your sister in a difficult time.
Sex is such a complex and important human endeavour that it deserves as much honest education as it can get. Avoiding addressing it, or presenting it as bad and dangerous is a recipe for bad outcomes. People need to be armed with the right information. I used to be on the board of the local Planned Parenthood, and the office was a great place for non-judgemental information about sex. We were often accused of promoting premarital sex, but that was far from the truth. And the teens who came in were far less likely to end up with a bad consequence, whether they became active or not.
My (girl’s school) sex ed was on-going and not super “Diseases!”. I’m pretty sure we covered consent indirectly int he lectures on abusive relationships (or maybe that was in the official sex ed class after I left in 10th grade.
I assumed everyone knew the super basics (this is how you get pregnant) until I was in college, and one of my roommates comes out of her room where she and her boyfriend were doing some heavy petting and asks “uh, how do you get pregnant?” I’ve never seen my other roommates run away so fast, and here I was, stuck explaining the facts of life to a girl who’s Catholic school had left her staggeringly ignorant. (Everything ended up OK, sperm can’t swim through jeans and then fly through the air, then swim through more jeans and underwear.)
Yea, maybe “mission creep” isn’t the best way for me to phrase it. All I’m saying is that that is not why we developed sex ed originally.
I went to Catholic school. The only semi-useful sex ed I got was when the projector broke down during the “girls lesson” and I was sent in to fix it, past the displays of pads and tampons.
THAT would’ve been useful for the boys to sit in on, I suspect. As it was, once I fixed the projector, they sent me back out of the room.
My sole parental guidance was my mother asking if I knew what “VD” stood for. That, and the fact that my dad didn’t hide his porn all that well.
@Saad #10
How did he know?
I’ve used cocaine lots of times. I’ve had sex lots of times…in company and solo.
The two experiences are so different that I can’t say one is better than the other.
However the only time I had cocaine and accompanied sex together was great
for my partner. But for me, not so much (lots of thrusting and grinding but no
ejaculation whatsoever…just a raging boner for 4 hours).
I guess too much detail, huh?
*raises hand* I didn’t know those things weren’t a straight ticket to misery and hell until I was much too old to do them.
doublereed @ 33;
Consent is foundational to sex. It is what separates consensual sex from rape afterall. A functional system of sex education most emphatically should also be a sexual relationship class as well, if only to dispel dangerous but widespread myths about how women are supposedly innately coquettish, and that ‘their mouths might say no, but their eyes say yes’ and other similar rape-enabling tropes.
Rape and sexual assault is a scourge on our society that at the very least rises to a comparable level of seriousness as venereal disease transmission abnd unwanted pregnancy, and is both directly related to those two issues and simultaneously more commonplace than either. It cannot simply be ignored in the name of convenience, still less tradition.
As you say @ 45, this is a poor choice of words. Several other commenters have already expressed why consent should be a part of sex ed, and doesn’t amount to mission creep at all.
@ 45;
The fact that the original formulation of sex ed classes was clearly inadequate to the task is not an argument against expanding them to include vital information today.
Reading all of the horror stories of wrong or no sex ed in this comment thread just makes me think, yet again, that Hitchens’ book title was spot on. Religion spoils everything. And sex is NOT something you want to have spoiled. It is – or maybe I should say “can be” – such a fantastic communion with another human being. And the religious managed to turn it into a perversion. Oy.
re 48:
good for you, seriously. I was just the opposite. the scare stories were, to my arrogant side, enticements. I had to verify that I was too strong to be caught in the mire of addiction/doom. My more rational side moderated my behavior, to totally avoid “bad” drugs, like ~horse~. But my irrational side nudge me into pothead status. Thankfully I finally pushed that “status” aside and been totally “straight” for many years.
what were we talking about? Dave’s not here. o_O
Akira MacKenzie – I’m with you on regretting not experimenting, although no regrets about drug use, as that never interested me. My parents were Catholic but we didn’t get any heavy duty lectures on sex that I recall. It was sort of assumed you “did that” with someone when you got married and since it was obvious myself and two of my siblings were never going to be the marrying types and never dated, it didn’t come up much. Of course now I look at my 40-something, falling-apart body and think I missed my opportunity to at least have regretful stories. Sigh.
Just a reminder that a person can be right on one topic and completely fucked up on an other topic.
Count me among those who think that consent and relationship issues need to be a part of sex ed. As I said earlier, sex is such a complex human endeavour that involves the whole person. It’s the physical squelchy bits and the mechanics, it’s the emotional side, and it’s tied to a lot of social expectations, and peer group issues. And stuff I haven’t thought to include here, due to fatigue and intoxication at the moment. It involves bonding, including the chemical (oxytocin) kind, and caring about the needs and desires of the person you are with (communication and clarity are necessary). It collides sometimes with junk put in our heads by adults or the prevailing culture (bad ideas from religion are as bad as bad ideas from porn). It’s just hugely complex.
But when all of the right pieces are in place (which won’t always or often happen in the experimental phase) it’s out of this world. I avoided long term commitment to a GF of 7 years because the right components weren’t there. She was more like a friend/sister than a lover – we had a good personal connection, but the disparity in libido was agony. We are still good friends. But when I met my wife (after a lot of the experimental phase) we hadn’t even got past the foreplay before I knew I was ready to sign on for the long haul. Strange how that felt so obvious at the time. Closest thing to an epiphany I’ve ever experienced. And while the intense sexual connection was part of it, it was just one of the three pillars that made the relationship. Creeping up on 25 years and it’s all intact, and if anything, better. Hope that wasn’t TMI.
Upshot is that I think the relationship stuff and the consent is an obvious and necessary part of the whole sexual connection enterprise. But consent on its own wasn’t enough. I could never go to a bar and pick up a girl I just met and bring her home for sex, even if she consented. Not that they weren’t attractive, or desirable, or good people, but it needed more. There needed to be some kind of connection to the person. So it ended up that I slept with a lot of women who were friends of mine, who I liked and respected. And it was never weird. We valued our friendships, or our two or three month “flings”, and just heaped some great sex onto our relationship. It was “friends with benefits” before the term was coined. I still look back on those times with fondness. It wasn’t just fucking for fucking’s sake. We loved each other as people, even though we weren’t looking to be a couple. All part of the great complexity of sex. But vital to having it healthy and fulfilling.
I’ve already gone overboard here (had a few drinks in the last hour), but if I were writing the sex ed program it would be way out there compared to what is done now. Religious conservatives would faint. But kids going through it would be well prepared. If anyone as read Aldous Huxley’s novel “Island”, you can get an idea of what I think is appropriate. But I’d add even more of the “relationship” side to what was done in that book.
The one thing that is blindingly, stunningly clear is that the religious right is doing such a gross disservice to sex ed that it’s obscene. It’s no wonder that the red states have the higher pregnancy rates and higher divorce rates. It’s a natural consequence of ignorance.
Ok, a big sigh of pity for the children of conservatives who were done such a disservice, and I need to pour another drink.
If I had to go back and do life all over again (well, starting at university), I’d do things differently, but they would all be changed in a way that took even better care of the needs and desires of the partner. Young men pretty much suck at communicating things that involve feelings, and I’d change that with the benefit of being older. Youth really is wasted on the young. We were feeling our way along with blinders on, got some of it right, some of it wrong, but it could be so much better with the right education.
Sorry for the length of this.
Sex ed started for real in 5th grade for us. It was pretty basic, then: it was really a section on human reproduction in science class. In grade 7, 8, and 9, it was part of gym class, with a couple of weeks set aside for “Health” which was mostly about drugs and sex. I don’t remember any problems. Sex ed specifically was mostly on STIs and pregnancy prevention. We got honest stats on how well various types of birth control worked, how to use them, how to get them, when we would be able to see a doctor without our parents knowledge (in hindsight, that was excellent knowledge to share).
The only “eccentricity” I can recall was a demonstration/analogy my teacher had us do in 9th grade. The entire class got together to shake hands with each other. After everybody had shaken about 3 or 4 peoples hands, she had us all inspect our hands. Turns out she had put glitter on her hand that wasn’t immediately noticeable, but transferred by hand shaking: the lesson being that STIs aren’t immediately or easily visible, but they can still transfer so check ups and precautions are always a good idea.
My daughter said her sexual education at school consisted of telling the kids about but not how to prevent STIs or what to do if you have one. They spent alot of time telling the teens that abortion is murder and slut shaming. Also, all sex was straight sex. No mention of consent either.
Let’s hope their parents informed them or they find what they need to know from Google.
Fuck, I wasn’t even born yet and I feel quite cheated. >.>
doublereed
Most STDs are treatable and indeed curable. STDs are not extra special mysterious thingies that are different from catching cold or Scarlet Fever. Let’s stop the fearmongering.
Avoiding pregnancies is the best brith control, but it’s not the end. Pregnancies can be aborted, children can be adopted out. Teen parents can get support and be great parents who manage their own lives and those of their children.
You cannot un-rape a person.