An Okay Sex Education

Scarleteen’s blog carnival about sex education has been a fascinating read for me. So many women have horror stories of sex miseducation, of being taught paranoia and fear, of coming away from sex ed with no idea how their bodies worked, let alone how men’s bodies worked. This is what “abstinence-only” propaganda has wrought. Sex education at my school was far from perfect, but it was actual education, and I have used what I learned in it throughout my life.

I graduated high school in 1994. I had sex ed my freshman year, for a mere semester. I was lucky enough to get sex ed before the obscene “abstinence-only” groups took hold. I also was in that window of time when if you got HIV, you died quickly and horribly; society was, for a brief moment, more concerned about how to keep kids alive than how to make them feel guilty. So I learned about condoms (including demonstrations with a banana — they should have used a dildo instead), about STDs, about pregnancy. In great and, to my 14-year old self, annoying depth. We had multiple choice tests about which STD could cause which condition, how they could be treated, how you could and could not get pregnant, and how to use condoms and other methods of birth control properly. (If you said the rhythm method was effective, you got the question wrong.) Those multiple choice tests also included the stages of orgasm for both males and females. I also learned how to take care of my reproductive system. My teacher taught us how to recognize and avoid yeast infections (she was passionate about how horrible douches were) and urinary tract infections.

We watched many movies; there was one silly one from the 70s about the “blooming of womanhood” that our teacher (who was also the female gym teacher) was rather apologetic about. There was a movie with a cute little sperm traveling toward a big egg. I remember one good movie, from PBS, that included a camera inside a woman’s vagina while she had sex with a man. It showed the woosh of his semen from orgasm, and her vaginal contractions from orgasming at the same time. I was turned on for days by that one — not that, at 14, I needed help to be turned on.

And yet, I didn’t want sex. I knew I wasn’t ready for it. Amidst all the education, there was propaganda in my sex ed class, but it wasn’t bad propaganda. I think the people who taught the program — the male and female gym teacher — developed it. And the thing they were most concerned about, besides teaching us how our bodies worked, was that we not do anything until we were sure we were ready. This was the message beaten into our heads: wait until you know you are ready. Don’t decide in the heat of the moment. Be prepared, talk about it beforehand with your partner. If you can’t talk about sex with the person you’re going to be having sex with, you’re not ready to have sex. Oh, and by the way, mutual masturbation can’t get you pregnant and won’t get you a deadly disease.

We got other good messages too. Consent isn’t just the lack of “no”, consent is “yes”. The lack of “yes” means “no”. The girls were taught some rudimentary self-defense, and the boys were taught that if they went ahead without “yes”, they were rapists. I feel like about half the semester was given to talking about consent and rape prevention. The way it was done was problematic, as it set up the girls as sexual gatekeepers, and assumed the boys would always be the ones pushing for more. It could have been better.

But we also talked about the double standard. We were told never to use the word “slut”, and asked how we looked at men and women differently for the same behaviors. This didn’t mean there wasn’t slut-shaming at the school. However, I can’t remember anyone attempting to slut-shame without being called out for double standards immediately. Boys who spread rumors were threatened with beatings by other boys. Idyllic? Not at all — I was sexually harassed by one boy for years, and the teachers ignored it. But without a sex education that told me what sexual harassment was, and that it was not my fault, I would have felt much worse about it.

I think we had one or two days on “alternative sexuality”, and were told about 10% of us were most likely gay, lesbian or bisexual. We were told making fun of someone for their sexuality was as bad as making fun of someone for their race. Also, that transgendered people existed. Then we moved on. Quickly. That could have been much better.

The worst part of sex ed, for me, was the diagram of the male reproductive system. I could never get the vas deferens right.

A charismatic woman with a silly hat did come to the school our junior year to lecture us about how we should wait until marriage to have sex, but she was actually fun, funny, and, contradictory as it seems, pretty sex-positive. I remember that she told us her entire wedding day, she and her soon-to-be husband were shooting each other burning glances, thinking about what they were going to do that night. She talked about how great and amazing sex was when you completely trusted your partner. She tried to make us believe that you could only trust your partner if you were married to him or her, which, even at 16, I knew was bollocks. A lot of people signed abstinence pledges that day. I didn’t. None of my friends who signed the abstinence pledges kept to them, and they all had sex before I did.

So the sex ed I got in the early 1990s in a small mid-Michigan town was pretty okay. I learned a lot about my body, about the male body, and about sex, talking about sex, and consent. The boys learned where the clitoris was, and what its function is, which I’m sure has served most of them well throughout life. I wasn’t taught that sex was dirty or disgusting, or that there was anything wrong with my body, or with me for having sexual feelings. It could have been better; but, as I’ve learned recently, it could have been much worse.

Happily, the people at Scarleteen are better. Scarleteen fills a vital function, especially in a country where horrific “abstinence-only” programs have so much traction. Please consider donating to them, and helping kids get a real sex education.