The United States has a uniquely backwards relationship with sexuality that can be traced back to the Puritans, and it’s something that most other developed countries aren’t plagued by. Anything relating to sexuality is shamed and considered taboo. There’s a willful ignorance when it comes to the sexuality of teenagers and young adults. Harmless, natural expressions of sexuality are actively repressed, especially in kids and teenagers. Anyone whose attractions fall outside of the “normal” heterosexual variety are shamed and compelled to hide their sexuality. Some preach abstinence for these groups, even though mountains of data exist proving that abstinence-only sex education leads to increases in STIs and unwanted pregnancies. Still, many states have abstinence-only sex education, or sex education that’s so inhibited by what the instructors are allowed to tell the students that it’s effectively useless.
Because we’re trained to see any topic relating to sexuality as impolite and shameful, the problems we face with regards to sex education naturally aren’t something that we talk about very often. I think it’s an important conversation to have for a plethora of reasons, so I wanted to offer my personal experience with public school sex ed as an example of how inadequate it is and why things need to change.
The school system I attended (shout out to Gaston County, whose interstate welcome signs aptly read “Welcome to Gaston County, Please Don’t Litter”), offered two opportunities for students to receive a watered down version of sex education, which, in both cases, required a signed permission slip from a parent for the student to attend.
Fifth Grade
The first course, offered in the final weeks of fifth grade, was a single, sex-segregated, two hour presentation called “family life” (a name that none of the kids in the class really understood before or after the course). Even though it was specifically tailored for a room full of of boys, the class spent almost the entire two hours teaching us about the female reproductive system. One of the two hours was devoting to watching videos of how a babies grow in the womb. And periods! My god, did they tell us about periods. They probably spent thirty minutes telling us about periods and thirty seconds telling us about ejaculation, but hey, why would we need to know about the fluids that would eventually be produced by our own genitals?
I came away from it having learned very little new information about my own body, and nearly nothing I hadn’t already guessed. It was all very hypothetical and entirely divorced from any degree of specificity. A lot of it didn’t make sense, but the atmosphere was so tense that nobody asked questions for fear of getting in trouble. They devoted about ten minutes to covering the male body. The extent of the knowledge presented about what changes we should expect was:
Soon enough, you’ll get taller and your voice will change.
Some hair is gonna grow in new places: in your pants, on your legs, your armpits, maybe even your chest in a few years, if you’re lucky.
You may need to start shaving soon.
Your penis won’t necessarily look like all your buddies’ because a lot of you had the tips chopped off when you were born but some didn’t. It’s called “circumcision” but it doesn’t matter or make a difference either way.
For roughly the next decade, it’ll be normal for your dick to get hard at random times throughout the day and no you can’t control it but you should be embarrassed by it and do everything you can to hide it. (Why does it get hard, you may wonder: so did we, but they never told us why erections happen.)
At some point, your balls will start to make sperm, the ingredient that combines with a female’s egg to make a baby start to grow. (You may wonder how it combines with an egg: again, so did we.)
Deodorant is EXTREMELY important. The teacher probably mentioned a dozen times how essential it was to start wearing deodorant.
And that was pretty much it. They did curtly ask if we had any questions, and I presume everyone had so many questions that we didn’t have a clue what to ask. One brave soul did raise his hand to mumble a question about condoms, which the instructor refused to answer. I had no clue what “condom” meant; the instructor hadn’t mentioned anything about them (the boy who asked the question must’ve heard about them from an older brother or something). No further questions were taken.
I did walk away with a goody bag, though, after being sworn to secrecy and threatened with a trip to the principal’s office if we discussed any of what we had just learned after the class had ended. What was in the goody bag, you ask? A tiny stick of deodorant, some paperwork, and a signed card promising I would wait (though they never explained what it was I was waiting for). Certainly no condoms or anything useful, but rumor had it that the girls’ bags had pads in them.
Naturally, my parents asked what I’d learned, and I told them it was mostly about girls and deodorant. Some of my male friends’ parents had apparently received similar responses from their sons, because I specially remember overhearing several phone conversations between my parents and my male friends’ parents about the course, wondering why they’d chosen to exhaust the two hours focusing primarily on the changes girls could expect rather than boys.
Seventh Grade
The second course was actually a series of three, hour-long classes worked into the health class curriculum and taught by the PE coach, so it was also segregated by sex. It was certainly more informative and frank than the first course, but it was still very inadequate. This time, the class focused on puberty and maturation a bit more broadly, with the first day being dedicated to how our bodies would develop, from height and musculature to our nutritional needs and safe ways to exercise. There were only brief mentions of deepening voices, growth of body hair, and genital development.
The second day focused on the science of reproduction, explaining in great detail how a fertilized egg becomes an embryo, a fetus, and eventually a baby. Of course it’s important for prospective parents to understand that process in detail, but is it necessary for 12 and 13 year olds who don’t even know how the process starts? Most of us were quite bored and uninterested that day.
The last day was only half the length as a result of our regular class schedule, so it was primarily used to answer questions. Middle schoolers are certainly less innocent than elementary school kids, so there were a couple questions fielded by the health teacher that didn’t come up in the fifth grade class. The funniest and most memorable question was when someone asked if the penis was a muscle, to which the coach emphatically informed us that it is NOT a muscle and, as if he could read minds, urged us not to try to stretch it or otherwise exercise it with the goal make it bigger (he offered us a consolation prize though, promising us that they’d get bigger with time and that no partner worth having would care how big it is anyway). We were all ready to leave the class after that. Nobody was brave enough to ask the biggest question we all had.
___ Ed.
You may have noticed that none of my sex education addressed anything to do with sex, the verb. Never any mention of what happens during sex, what consent means, how to put on a condom, how to avoid sexually transmitted infections, etc. There was certainly no mention of oral sex or what options may be available to the boys in the class who were attracted to the same sex.
There was absolutely no reference to sexual intercourse at all, much less as something that people would ever do for fun or for emotional benefit. The closest we came to an acknowledgment that sex is not exclusively for reproductive purposes was when the PE coach told us (in response to a rather blunt question about the definitions of “ejaculation” and “orgasm”) that ejaculation and orgasm sort of the same thing, and that that’s what it’s called when semen comes out of your penis and that it feels really good. The coach was kind of a bro.
You may be thinking, “well, by middle school, some kids are going to know what sex is”, and that’s true. Some of my classmates did know what sex was by that point, but the problem lies in that the coach wasn’t allowed to define it for the majority of us who didn’t know what it was, and that resulted in most of us feeling like we were on the wrong side of an inside joke most of the time.
Call me a late bloomer, but I was in ninth grade before I realized what sex actually was, and that a penis had to go inside a vagina for the sperm and egg cells to come together, and I only learned that when I discovered porn (I guess up until that point I thought naked cuddling was sex). The sex education I received was so inadequate that for four years after my first sex ed class and two years after my seventh grade sex ed class, I honestly thought sperm crawled out of a man’s penis, across the bedsheets, and into a female’s vagina like sticky, microscopic inchworms. Laughable. But not actually that funny when you consider the theoretical consequences.
The sex education my classmates and I received was woefully incomplete. As a matter of fact, though, the consequences weren’t all that theoretical. One of my classmates missed a few weeks of class in eighth grade following the birth of her daughter, and now, there’s a little girl running around somewhere named after a “twilight” character because she was born amidst a teenybopper, pop culture phenomenon and her mother was a thirteen year old girl. Talk about consequences.
