Rubber Gloves
Posted: Tuesday, February 17, 2009
by Sara O'Rourke
As the scrawny, red-faced teenage boy shook my hand, warmly, he giggled, 'I'm David, I'm protected.'
Oh what a great deal of interesting stuff we learned that day, and every day we had our Sex Ed class. Like Christmas, it was the one lesson a week that the class entire looked forward to. It wasn't just a break from the grind of academic work, but also an entire fifty minutes of wide-eyed laughter. As David* shook my sweaty hand with his, enrobed protectively in a white rubber glove, I pushed down the desire and managed to allow myself just a sneaky smirk.
What I wanted to write about today was inspired predominantly by a piece I read about today's Sex Ed 'Joy'. It triggered memories of my own experience afronted by the school nurse and her STI slideshow. Having worked closely with the United Kingdom Youth Parliament, Sex Education was always a ferverent priority amongst the House for both discussion and action - it was an area which needed serious and immediate improvement.
Little School
When I first moved to the UK, one of the first things I was taught was in fact all about sex. I must have been nearly eleven, and remember squatting by a fuzzy television screen on which a family walked around their house totally nude, and smiling! That informative and comic video was shortly followed by individual girl and boy sessions to discuss the functionings of our bodies in more detail. This experience was undoubtedly the best sex education I have ever received. Unfortunately, unlike a good wine, it did not improve with age.
Catholic Head = Limited Sex Ed
At Secondary school, our headmistress was a bit of a vampire.
Due to her religious beliefs, which, with all due respect, should not have been so consistently enforced onto a school which was not outwardly meant to be Catholic, each year graduated from her clutches without ever having touched a condom in the classroom. The boundaries were probably very closely studied, so that we could be taught extensively about everything associated with sex, without having to ever scrape the surface of the deed itself. We learned about relationships, about puberty, and about what nasty diseases can be transmitted, but never about the action, the physical sex, and its mechanics.
Now, I recognise all too well that she was a woman who could get away with something like that at a school like that one. We were all relatively clean-cut, well-raised teenagers, and nobody expected us to go around formicating with one another. Perhaps there was a fear that sex education would unlock sinful desires amongst the student body, perhaps that it would inspire initiation, but the bottom line was that we, as teenagers and individuals, held the right to learn about sex and we were being denied that right by one woman who did not believe in experimenting before marriage.
Trouble
It is my belief that encasing the act of sex in such a way only makes it more attractive, and increases, thereby, the likelihood that teenagers are going to follow their budding curiosities and, without having had the proper guidance, stumble across some unplanned pregancies along the way. It's like saying that you should never learn how to defend yourself, and just do your best to never get into a situation where you may need to.
In Europe, it is the Netherlands who triumph in having the lowest teen pregnancy rate. This is a remarkable and proud success. The key difference between the Netherlands and other European countries is the type, frequency and starting age of their sex education. They start very early - around the age of five, in fact, and are taught about it progressively throughout their education. They are also a lot more open and appear to approach the topic with discussion as a supplement to books and films. Alongside this, an extensive teaching programme about relationships also starts very early, so that the two are always very closely linked and never two worlds apart.
Of course, I do not think that giving five-year-olds the full-blown picture and description demonstrating sex is the way to go, for it is far too complicated for them to fully absorb. However, the amount of education should be relative to age and therefore at the age of five, kids will be perfectly ready to learn about their bodies and at the very basic level how children are produced, without the gory details. By the time these same five-year-olds have done their growing up, they should be well-informed and mature when it comes to talking about sex, and having sex, too. It removes this shock factor that we in the UK at least seem to have surrounding the issue - it's a 'hush hush' thing we cannot speak about openly without getting a few dirty looks cast in our direction.
I don't really remember the precise things we were taught in Sex Ed at Secondary school, albeit the gross images, although somehow I think they will forever be impossible to erase from my memory! I have done most of my learning with film, TV, even music and literature, popular culture and the social scene. It's done through word of mouth, not the textbook, and I'm warning you, it's dangerous.
This Article has been viewed 2,970 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.