Why, sex ed, of course. Otherwise I wouldn't be me.
This year I am teaching Pinkie Pie at home. It is a difficult transition for us, but we are slowly getting geared up. Since sex ed was the first thing on the agenda I decided I should split it into two parts: Sex for making babies, and sex for fun. You have to have both things, I think, and the school system currently swings way too far towards sex ed as being reproductive biology and attempts to scare kids into never having sex.
I talked about all the basic biology stuff in day 1, covering menstruation and puberty and how babies grow from conception to birth. Pinkie Pie was fascinated and *horrified* at the videos of sperm I showed her on Youtube. The idea that she might someday have such tiny creatures thrashing and swarming inside her was nothing short of terrifying.
Which honestly is a pretty reasonable response. I mean, if I wasn't completely used to the idea by now it strikes me as the sort of thing that would give me shudders.
Sex for fun was actually harder for her though, I think. She gets the idea of needing to know about biology and reproduction, but she isn't the least bit interested in sex or love or relationships. It surely made her twitch to see her dear ole dad talking about masturbation and sex as a way to bond and express love and even *ewww* talking about the various ways that people have sex.
Parents are supposed to be sexless, passionless automatons, who somehow received children through a sterile, scientific process! This whole mess of emotions and bodily fluids, yuck.
It went well, I think.
One thing I read recently on the topic of sex ed really depressed me. It was talking about how people study sex ed and what sorts of science we have done on the topic. The takeaway is this: People want to understand what sex ed is good and bad and how we should approach it, but the only thing we have studied is how effective various sex ed types are at preventing STIs, babies, and sexual frequency. The entire thing we are doing with science presupposes that our only goal is to keep teenagers from bangin' each other.
That shouldn't be the only goal! Preventing STI transmission and teenage pregnancy are fine goals, sure, but the real thing we should be aiming for is how to promote healthy relationships and satisfying sex lives. We should try to make sure kids grow up with the tools they need to have the sex the want, and avoid the sex they don't want. Big picture, we want them to be happy, not celibate.
But it is hard to measure happiness like that. It is easy to measure number of sex partners or STI treatments or abortions, so we go and measure that. Unfortunately people then try to pretend that this stuff we are measuring is a perfect representation of the success of sex ed, when they should instead acknowledge that a big part of what we are trying to do can't be easily measured.
Using what we can measure as a metric for success is a problem all over, but I think it is acute in the case of sex ed. Unfortunately I don't have much in the way of easy solutions.
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