Sex-Education - Awkward or Awkwardly Flawed?

My memories of sex education when I was around 13/14, is being shown a cartoon where a naked man is chasing a naked woman with a feather, they go behind a screen and hearts come up.
And then a video of a woman given birth, shown from the business end. Horrifying.

Sex education, at least in my experience, tends to lack the information and non-bias that it needs. Young people have so many misconceptions about sex.

I thought only boys had anuses until I was 15. I know.

And so, because of the nature of how this teaching panned out - involving all the classics; talks on contraception, teenage pregnancy - you name it, I came to be really afraid of the idea of sex. I thought it was just too risky. I thought it was pretty much impossible to have sex without becoming a parent for life.

But it's not just that - to be honest I had some really great education on sex from my Year 9 devil-may-care, cut-the-bullshit, Essex as can be, PE teacher. But even so, these stupid ideas about sex were just not cleared up. A lot of teachers are too embarrassed to be candid about these kinds of things. In Year 10, all the music teacher (that had somehow got put in charge) said was 'AIDs originates from monkeys' and put on Hairspray.

There's also another layer - about what is assumed and what is ignored about sex in sex education. Sex education often exclusively represents heterosexual relationships, meaning that LGBTQ+ children aren't gaining valuable knowledge for their potential future sex lives. Sex education isn't purely about the prevention of pregnancy - it's about puberty, it's about rationalising a scary and daunting part of adult existence. Most importantly, it's making sure that everyone is going to be safe in future relationships and well-informed for future decisions.

Sex education should cater (accurately and blatantly - despite awkwardness) for everyone; addressing heterosexual relationships amongst an exploration of sexuality itself, alongside asexuality and all that amazing funky jazz that lives in our world.

But, don't @ me. I don't want to be drawing penis diagrams on school whiteboards anytime soon.






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