I’m not going to lob a bunch of statistics at you. How many lives do we have to save, how many pregnancies do we have to prevent, anyway, to convince people that kids actually have the right to know about their own bodies?Yes, sex education does save lives (hell, I have a water bottle with that slogan on it). Sex education, though, is also an issue of human rights. The question is, do we believe that human being have a right to pleasure? Do we believe that they have a right to bodily autonomy? Do we believe that they have the right to love and understand their bodies? I do.
We live in a society that is both terrified of and obsessed by sex, and it is a society refusing to make things different for its children. Sex is dirty. Sex is forbidden. Sex is illicit. Sex is something that can’t really be respected, so why respect yourself and your partner in the process?
I volunteer with Planned Parenthood, so obviously this issue is one that’s close to my heart. The woman I work under in the Education and Outreach department has told me a story about the time that she tried running a seminar on how to talk to your children about sexuality. She started with a video about how children are sexual beings, that they will explore their bodies and touch their sexual organs, and this is completely natural. By the time the video was over, more than half of the parents had gotten up and left.
Parents don’t want their children to be sexual. But hell, children don’t want their parents to be sexual either. There’s nothing you can do in that regard but face it. And the longer we keep denying it, the worse our society and our society’s views towards what constitutes healthy sexuality are going to get.
Proper sex education not only includes instructions about how to use a condom, where to get birth control pills and what the symptoms of STDs are. It also includes lengthy discussions about sexual readiness and consent. I strongly believe that our society’s shameful views towards sex assist the patriarchy in perpetuating rape culture. If we don’t ever talk about sex, we don’t ever talk about consent. And if we don’t talk about consent, no one really “knows” what rape is, and that means it can just keep happening.
We need to talk to kids about the importance of sexuality in their lives, about the importance of knowing and enjoying their bodies, about the importance of masturbation, about the importance of reciprocal pleasure. We need to do that in a queer-friendly way. And yes, if we ever want women to truly control their own bodies, we need to talk to kids about affirmative consent and respectful, healthy sexual relationships. And then, and only then, can we talk about safer sex in a meaningful way. Only then can we say that we’re really providing “sex education” to our nation’s children.
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This is a well written post. As a mother of a 22 month old girl, I want to avoid all the mistakes my parents made while I was growing up. They left my sex education to the school system and I went to an all girl’s highschool . . . enough said.
Am visiting through the Blogroll game on Dewey’s site.
Thanks Christine!
It’s not an easy thing, I’m sure. In teaching anyone else about healthy sexuality, you really need to take a hard look at your OWN views on sexuality. I think that the desire to do it right, though, is a necessary and great beginning.
Thank you for a very well-written post. I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think it’s the most infuriating thing that we aren’t teaching our children to be completely safe sexually.
I attended a school in Texas that had about 250 students. It was a high school. 16 of those students were pregnant. There was no sexual education in that school, or even the entire district, other than an abstinence-only policy.
I attended a high school in California, where sexual education was stressed in every grade level. There were approximately 3500 students at this school, and there were 20 students pregnant.
Major difference, I’d say.
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