Sex Education

This story is from a while ago (I drafted this post and forgot to publish it - oops). But it’s still relevant. The UK Government is currently debating whether or not to provide sex education to primary school children. The plan has met with criticism from so-called ‘family campaigners’, who think that educating children about sex will lead to all manner of relentless fornication. I must say, that kind of talk pisses me off. For one thing, it’s never been clear to me that being in favour of the traditional family unit, and thinking it’s a good thing to teach young people where babies come from, and how to avoid making them, are mutually exclusive. For another, have people not yet realised that no matter how carefully they closet their children, they will pick up ideas about sex from the world around them - TV, magazines, books, the internet, other children are all a source of information. Some of it better than others, which brings me to my next point. As Dr. Trevor Stammers (a GP and lecturer in healthcare ethics) has pointed out, learning the mechanics of reproduction won’t do much to combat the number of unplanned teenage pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases unless it is accompanied with education about sexual behaviour, sexual relationships, and so forth. Some friends of mine run a group that provides sex education of the latter sort in schools, and from what they tell me, it is sorely needed. I suspect many adults know very little about the things children (in some areas) pick up about sex and sexual relationships. In the schools where my friends work, sex is still something that boys do to girls, who let them - reluctantly enough to avoid being labelled ‘a slag’, but willingly enough to avoid being called ‘frigid’. There is still a sense that boys are entitled to girls’ bodies - which, I hasten to point out, is a double-edged sword: girlfriends are under pressure to let boyfriends ‘give it to them’; boyfriends are under pressure to ‘give it to’ girlfriends, and laughed at by their peers if they don’t. What people expect to do or have done to them - or at least what they think others expect to do or have done to them - is the stuff of pornos: oral, anal, the ‘facial’, etc. When asked to name five things that you can do with someone to show them that you love them apart from have sex, one eleven year old suggested ‘fisting’. Another child named ‘dildo’ as a form of contraception.