Hi everyone!
Today I was wondering around The Hoffington Post and I came across an article by Rebecca Klein that covered the topic of what kind of sex education teens are getting and where they are getting it in the United States. I have to say this article was, although informative, very unnerving and ultimately very upsetting. It is no wonder we have the worst teen-pregnancy rate of all the developed countries.
When I was in high school, “Sex” education was provided via a video of the “medically correct” format which pregnancy is naturally started and summed up to the birth of a child. In other words the class was basically told this equation: Sperm + Egg + 9 or so months of hell = Baby. Literally that was the summation of my sex education in high school. You can probably find more information about sex in a Cosmo magazine, which I do not recommend any teen to read! After that informative video the class carried around a “flour baby” (Sack of flour with a smiley face) for a entire week… I don’t even know what to say to that?… Lack of school funding I guess? Anyway, the maps below provides where my country currently is on providing sex education to teens.
Life As I Know It 
That’s insane! I can’t believe that many states don’t require it! Considering how much of our thoughts & energies throughout childhood, adolescence & even early adulthood are directed solely toward the development of our sexual & gender identities, you’d think sexuality & gender studies would dominate, like, a third of the curriculum through those years! Well, they might if we weren’t so superstitious and actually cared about making school about producing intelligent, understanding & compassionate individuals. And American adults wonder about high teen pregnancy rates, poor gender relations & an unsustainable society? Oh yeah, they were “taught” by that same ingenious system…
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I know!!! It’s so crazy to me!! And the states that do offer any kind of sexual education whatsoever are completely insufficient to what teens actually need. It’s almost as if the people who write out the curriculum were never teenagers themselves?!! It’s ridiculous and I kind of touched on this subject in an earlier post about breast feeding, but our culture is very male dominated and very porn focused. So anything sexual, anything about sex in the general sense is just simply inappropriate to discuss and talk about. When I was in college I took a lot of classes where we talked about sex all the time in the sense of general, medical, legal, and social. It’s very freeing to KNOW and if that kind of education was provided to teens, they may actually make good decisions regarding sex. So frustrating!!!
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Yeah I don’t remember a whole lot of it. In 5th grade they split up the boy & girls for sex ed and all I remember from ours was them saying penises are all different shapes & sizes, presumably to tell us not to be ashamed or something. It was only one or two class periods worth, possibly split up over a couple days. (I may have missed one of them. It’s really hazy.) It’s so stupid, now that I think about it, that they felt the need to split up the sexes. Hey! Let’s start teaching them early on not to communicate with the opposite sex about sex in any way until they’re in the bedroom! [Preferably, if not mandatorily with rings on their fingers.] I don’t know how these attitudes can persist when MOST people have premarital sex. Are we really that hypocritical & repressed as a culture?
Other than that, my high school had us take Personal Growth one semester of freshman year (and some history class the other half of the year). We had to do the robot baby thing. I really don’t know how effective that is considering I had a friend that got pregnant when she was a sophomore. Other than that it was actually a pretty cool class. Our teacher, toward the beginning of the class when we were probably just going over the most basic anatomy, would have us yell the words ‘penis’ & ‘vagina’, sometimes outside, across the campus quad. (She ended up getting pregnant with triplets a couple years later, which I always found slighty ironic.) I had heard that the other Personal Growth teacher was pretty prudish though and would even struggle when having to read those words aloud. (That teacher was also male.)
Also, I saw some of those breast feeding pics when I scrolled down. I’ve seen that campaign before. Those images are really powerful. I think public breast feeding is becoming a no-brainer for most people, but the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so all you need is one prudish motherfucking patron to ruin am establishment for any and all breast feeding mothers.
I’ve also tried to engage people in a conversation about female toplessness and breast fetishism [SO MANY TIMES], and it’s really frustrating how often I get weird responses like I’m some kind of perv. Or girls will kind of retract at the idea. It’s not like I’m saying you should spearhead the movement yourself and take your top off just because I’m discussing this with you! Shit!
People can be so hopeless. I’m moving to a nudist colony….. No I’m not.
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Yeah, separate the sexes at a young age so they have no idea about the other until it’s too late. Yes, our society is so incredibly hypercritical and judgmental! You can see if it all over the media enforcing those very notions.
In the end our school system needs to provide students with some sort of sex education that’s reinforces what they are already feeling and promote personal growth by giving teens opportunities to learn and become comfortable with the topic of sex, but also to be comfortable in their own skin. They need to know what happens, how, and what the consequences can be if they choose to have sex. It’s really not that difficult if people stop associating “sex” with porn!
I believe breast feeding is so important for early development, it just really bums me out that there is so much negative stigmas about it because of, again, our porn culture. Sex, child birth, breast feeding are all natural and should not be shamed. It’s so stupid to think that people who have sex (so basically everyone) judge others for having sex… wtf is that?
Well I can’t say I would ever go topless in public, lol. But relatively, males can go shirtless out doors and that’s not considered offensive? If a woman did it though (Holy shit that would be on the news!) As if no one has ever seen a woman breast before. In out culture? Really?
Bah! Anyway, 😆
Happy New Year! Thanks for commenting!
Michelle
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