after-words.org

via Susie Bright's Journal:

This is just so damned sad.

When I was in elementary, middle school and high school in Albuquerque, they had, for the time a reasonably comprehensive sex education program in the public schools. They taught about the physiological changes your body was going through, and it started in the fourth grade. The idea was to prepare kids for the changes they were going through before anything happened. In high school, the health class went into more detail about the sorts of things you could expect, taught about birth control and its pros and cons and even some of the social issues and pressures surrounding sex. For example, the person who taught my last health class, during the section on birth control, hauled out an actual dildo easily several times the size of the largest human penis anyone could expect to see; he then rolled a condom down it and specifically addressing the girls, he said something like, "Now, girls, you're going to meet guys that tell you that they don't want to wear a condom, that they're just too damn big for the thing. All I have to say is, if he's bigger than this, you probably don't want him inside you. A guy may also whine and say that he doesn't like condoms, because it cuts down on his sensitivity and he can't feel as much. And this is entirely true. You should just tell him that he's got two choices: he can put the condom on and feel less, or he can refuse to wear it, and feel nothing but his own hand, because you're not going to have anything to do with him. Plus, the advantage of cutting down the sensitivity is that it lets him go longer, so you could use that as a selling point. Take responsibility for yourself, respect yourself enough to make the guy take responsibility for himself." And this was shocking to our little teenaged sensibilities ... but it wasn't particularly unusual for the time.

The one lack in the program -- and it was lacking in pretty much every program at the time -- was that they never discussed sexuality per se. Nobody ever really said that you'd want to do this because it felt good, or because it made you feel closer to someone. All they said was that it happened, so during the beginning classes in fourth and fifth grade, while it was understood that the penis went into the vagina and ejaculated and then babies could result ... nobody explained why you would do such a damnfool thing as putting your penis in a vagina (we were just barely getting out of the "girls are icky!" stage, remember) or what precisely you were supposed to do to make it ejaculate. The general impression left was that it was sort of a magical thing, that the man and woman decided to have a baby, and he put his penis in the mother's vagina, and ejaculation happened and it made a baby. Immediately. In the later classes, the ones for high school students, it was pretty much simply assumed that you knew that sex felt good and why you'd go about things and how to make a penis ejaculate, and so again, it wasn't covered. And they didn't really cover homosexuality, aside from kind of generally noting that such people existed -- after all, we're talking late 70s here, and pretty much NOBODY covered that. But still, those were the only really serious lack in the program.

And now the abstinence-only people have gotten their hooks into the school system, and turned what was once really a fairly good education program into utter and absolute crap. And of course this is happening nationwide, in no small part thanks to our Glorious Shrub and his backward-thinking administratin, but also to similarly thinking peoples everywhere. The idea behind this curriculum is to stigmatize sex in general, and of course, it works ... if not quite the way people think. First, any survey about whether or not kids have sex is going to be subject to a savage social desirability bias -- few sensible kids are going to tell someone that they're having sex when they're having it hammered at them that no, they're really not supposed to be doing that. And it doesn't matter if it's collected by peers, it doesn't matter if you guarantee anonymity; kids know what you really expect of them, and they're going to lie. On top of that, there's evidence that abstinence education and the associated virginity pledges fail quite spectacularly; kids simply don't remember making the pledges in the first place (or say that they don't). So all this type of education is producing are people who are thoroughly and profoundly uninformed about sex and sexuality, and who are terrified that, for example, heavy petting produces babies and AIDS. But it's not stopping them from having sex.

In any event, it's a very interesting documentary. Note that the version at Google doesn't contain the discussion with experts noted in the product description; however, you can get the complete documentary free from the producers themselves.

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