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Sex Ed
Sex Ed At various points throughout my time in the Midwest my school tried to educate my fellow students and myself about sex. To this end they deployed various educational means and methods, including text books, videos and even guest speakers, and it would be fair to say that they went to a lot of effort in doing so. However, it would also be fair to say most of these lessons had two thing in common. The first being that they included very little about the actual physical act of sex, and the second being that they included no mention whatsoever of any method of contraception that didn't involve keeping your pants up or your skirt down.. Despite having some form of sex ed most every year - ranging from heath class to biology - there was pretty much nothing anywhere in the material that we were given that telling us that sex involved certain parts of the body that the law requires use to conceal when out in public, or what exactly it was that you needed to do with those body parts in order to actually have sex. Thinking back on it, this was probably the whole point. Seriously, we were taught everything with an air of complete detachment. Unless you had access to outside reading material (or the Internet and your father's credit card), it was probably possible to graduate from my school knowing everything about where babies come from except the all important detail of how they got there in the first place, and everything about sexual organs except how they related to a person's actual body. It was Sex ed without the mention of sex Scant Detail When the time came for us to learn about the parts of the body involved in sex, we were presented with diagrams of the various parts involved in sex, but they were basic line drawn pictures that were kept totally out of context. Our text books showed the parts of the penis, but not drawn inside an actual penis, and they told us what a vagina was and what purpose it served (in a very generic kind of way), but utterly failed to show us how it related to the rest of the woman. In fact, the diagrams were so basic that they didn't even tell us that one end opens out between a woman's legs. We were even taught about pregnancy without being told that it sex was required beforehand. We were simply presented with a video that started with the sperm already in place and swimming their merry towards the egg, and which cut out before it came time to explain the birthing process of birth. The closest thing that we had a lesson on the physical aspects of sex was a class taught from a cassette that was presented to us when I was in the 11th grade, which described sex from a purely biological perspective using the most formal language possible. We were told that “the penis is inserted into the vagina”, but that was as detailed as it got. Contraception While out lessons were very sparse when it came to actually mentioning sex, they were completely barren when it came to contraception. We had classes on pregnancy that didn't tell us how to prevent it. Classes on the family without being told how to delay having one, and even classes on abortion (very very disturbing classes, I may add.) without being told that there was any means to preemptively prevent an unwanted pregnancy arising in the first place . As far as my school was concerned, there was one way to prevent pregnancy, and one way alone, and this was not to get married on the grounds that sex didn't happen before it, and children were an unavoidable result of it. Any suggestion of there being “another way” was strictly taboo. Detention earning taboo in fact. It's no joke. As part of the silliness that generally surrounds teenage boys and sex ed class, one of my classmates put out a general dare to ask our teacher a question about condoms during the relevant class. This dare was promptly taken up by a boy who raised his hand during a lesson about hygiene and infectious diseases and asked, with a perfectly straight face, what were the most common STD, and which could be prevented by using a condom. The teacher looked panicked for a moment, then went stony faced. He slammed his hand down on the desk and told the boy “not to be so stupid” because “the only way of stopping an STD is to keep your fly closed”. With that, he ordered the boy out of his classroom and put him on detention for disrupting the lesson. Contraception was even a forbidden topic when it was utterly relevant and wasn't being forwarded for the purposes of mischief. During my senior year in which we had series of social studies classes on feminism and female equality in America. During the very first one, the teacher asked us for examples of milestones in female equality in America. We had all the normal offerings, Susan B Anthony, the 19th amendment, female factory workers and ferry pilots during the war, and so on. Then one girl at the back raised her hand and suggested that oral contraceptives had advanced women's equality by giving women the ability to actively choose between having a career and having a family, and by allowing them to break their dependence on male compliance over contraception. Perfectly accurate and perfectly reasonable you might think. Not in the eyes of the teacher. She went ballistic, and I mean totally 100% ballistic. She completely lost her temper, called the girl “an amoral left wing tramp” and launched into a speech about how the pill was nothing more than an excuse for promiscuity, and how it had contributed to the decline of social values in the US. She then dared anybody in the class to agree with the girl. I agreed, and I almost raised my hand to say so, but I proved to be too much of a coward in the end and I just sat there in passive silence, just like the rest of the class *. As a “punishment” the girl was told that she could either write an essay on “moral decay masquerading as social freedom”, or she could accept detention for a week. She chose the later. At the time, and in my youthful naivety (I was extremely naive in those days) I largely concluded that my school's weird attitude was largely due to a mixture of ignorance and embarrassment; That the town's comparative social and geographic isolation meant that meant that my teachers were unaware of modern progressions in contraception and that they were too embarrassed to get into the physical aspects of sex in front of a class full of teenagers. Imagine my shock when it eventually dawned on me that they were neither shy nor ignorant, but that they knew all of the fact yet chose to tell us otherwise. * Ironically, the pill was actually illegal in Japan at the time because the JMA feared that it might cause a fall in the use of barrier contraception. Meaning that I had grown up almost completely unaware of it's existence, and that I didn't in actual fact find out exactly what it was until I came to the US. |
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Paula Reed / Website (21.4.07 03:29) My son went through a thorough, comprehensive sex ed class at our church in 7th grade. It included fine art drawings like those seen in The Joy of Sex. He was taught about homosexuals and transgendered people and every form of contraceptive out there. My daughter goes through it next year. The boy says the strategy was to delay teen sex by grossing them out. I say, "Whatever works." I think information is crucial for teens. |
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Akito / Website (21.4.07 08:26) I think that my school's strategy was to give students enough information to pass exams, but not so much that they would actually be able to successfully have sex. |