feminist friday question: sex ed

[spacefem]

Plan for community revival: each week we'll be trying to post a question up on the topic of feminism. Answer in comments or post in your journal and leave a link. Suggest topics here.

Comments

[slfcllednowhere]

I read the live-tweet thing (and broke all the things) so I was thinking about this earlier tonight. I think I've mentally blocked out a lot of my high school experience because it was miserable for me, but as far as I can remember, it was basically the same sort of stuff. I asked my high school friends on Facebook and one of them said that they basically just told us if you had sex before marriage you would get some horrible disease and die

[spacefem]

oh yes, the evidence has been out for a while: Teen Pregnancies Highest In States With Abstinence-Only Policies

I think my most cringing moment reading her tweets was the one about how "good girls" don't have sex. really, that's how we define "good"? I just picture this conversation...

teen girl: I want to be good. How should I do that... help the homeless? Write a novel that gives hope to millions of people? Invent 98% efficient solar power cells?

teacher: Huh? No you're getting it all wrong, it's more about your vagina...

[maynardsong]

Plus if kids were taught that sex is supposed to make them feel good, the natural corollary to that is "don't have sex that doesn't make you feel good". Currently some kids are sexually active because they want to be. Others are sexually active because they think they OUGHT to be, or that it's their duty or that their own pleasure doesn't matter. That latter would be more inclined to delay sex, not have it earlier, with proper comprehensive sex ed. The religious right doesn't give a fuck even about having kids wait longer to become sexually active though. The shame around sex IS their endgame.

[maynardsong]

I wish they'd have addressed shit that goes out of whack during your period, like pooping more often. Even the comprehensive sex ed crowd doesn't GAF about that. I guess because girls pooping isn't sexy? But when I learned how the reproductive system's shenanigans have effects on the digestive system, it was really eye opening and vindicating for me...I should not have been TWENTY TWO when I learned that though!

[lsmsrbls]

That's a great point I've never considered. It took me 10 or 15 years to link certain things my body was doing with my period. That's absurd when these are common, sometimes well-understood effects.

[lsmsrbls]

I am infuriated by abstinence only education. We should be teaching science-based health, not fantasy.

[haggis]

I live in the UK so we didn't have abstinence-only but it was pretty dire. There was a very biology focused section on pregnancy but nothing on STDs or contraception (AFAICR) til after 16. My main memory of those lessons was discussing how many of people in our year had *already* got pregnant. Nothing about emotions, nothing about LGBT stuff although that was before Section 28 was repealed so it was difficult for schools to address LGBT issues.

There are moves in the UK to encourage more discussions about consent and abuse in relationships in school sex ed which could be great but I don't know how that will go.

[patrickwonders]

I went to Catholic school from Kindergarten through Eighth grade. Our sex-ed classes were taught by a priest. Despite all of that, I feel like our class was pretty useful. It wasn't completely comprehensive, but it was accurate and informative and definitely not abstinence-only.