timeimmortal

I think the first sex education class I had was in fourth grade, just for the record, and almost every year afterward until high school featured another iteration of the programme.

I’m sure most people my age have had a similar experience of sex-ed. And we know how well that’s worked out, don’t we? As in: not well.

Apparently the problem is that we started learning this stuff too late in life. And now, a British charity is calling for kids as young as four to be enrolled in sex-ed classes. Because apparently that will work better.

Brook chief executive Simon Blake said: “Many young people are having sex because they want to find out what it is, because they were drunk or because their mates were.

“That’s just not good enough for young people. We’ve got to have high expectations for them so they’ve got high expectations for themselves.”

He added: “All the evidence shows that if you start sex and relationships education early - before children start puberty, before they feel sexual attraction - they start having sex later.

“They are much more likely to use contraception and practise safe sex.”

If kids want to have sex to “find out what it is” firsthand, then no amount of sex-ed is going to stop them from doing so — not if you start it when they’re one or when they’re twenty. If they want the experience, they’re going to go out and get it. And if you have kids — especially underage teens — having sex as a consequence of getting drunk off their asses, then that’s your real problem, isn’t it? Maybe that’s the problem you should be solving first.

The thing is, in this age where casual attitudes and the “hookup culture” that we see displayed pretty much everywhere have made sex into a recreational activity on par with jogging, it’s almost meaningless to suggest that sex should be deferred, as meaningless as it is to suggest that jogging should be deferred. It’s both hypocritical and contradictory to suggest that sex is one more “no, nevermind” kind of activity, on one hand, and yet behave as though there is something special about it which should be waited for and deferred until one is suitably mature.

Good grief, we can’t even agree on what level of maturity is suitable in that regard!

Moreover, even if we did want to posit that there is something special and worth waiting for about sex, we’ve also done our level best to ensure that there will be no penalty for transgressing against any such social morés — there is no longer any real scandal attached to teenage pregnancy, and the governments of most Western nations will be only too anxious to throw money into the pockets of young mothers so as not to seem “cruel”. Even when people make sexual choices that we want to regard as “bad”, we do nothing to discourage them from making those choices.

And then there’s one other problem:

Sixteen-year-old Bethany, from Norwich told BBC News she had not understood the consequences of having sex early on.

“I didn’t know I could get pregnant,” she said. “I think if they started introducing sex education a bit earlier and teaching us a bit more about it so that we were more aware it would have helped me a lot.”

The first thing I learned in sex-ed, way back in fourth grade, was a functional definition of sexual intercourse. I still remember the exact phrase: “the penis must go into the vagina…”

The second thing I learned in sex-ed, way back in fourth grade, was that pregnancy was a possible result of sexual intercourse.

In. Fourth. Grade.

If a sixteen year old girl is still saying “I didn’t know I could get pregnant by having sex,” there are way bigger problems there than the age at which she was first exposed to a sex-ed programme.

~ by Kenneth on July 4, 2008.