why americans need to grow up when it comes to sex ed
Since John Oliver’s weekly deep dives tend to explode across the web, you may have seen this scathing expose of the sorry state of sex education in America which shows that how prepared you are for becoming sexually active and how safe you will be depends largely on where you’re living at the time. Or perhaps more accurately, what a bunch of middle aged men and women in windowless rooms think your sex life should be like. Just in case you haven’t, take a look…
What we’ve been effectively shown is that in America, when it comes time to sit down with their teenagers and talk to them about sex, all too many parents just say “um… well… err, don’t they teach you this stuff at school?” Now, saddled with the major responsibility of teaching kids how to become sexually mature responsibly, schools do one of three things and the following two of them are alarmingly far more common than the third. This first of them is to sit teenagers down in a class and say “um… well… err, don’t they teach you this at home?” because the teacher is poorly trained and doesn’t know much about the topic, uncomfortable talking about it, afraid of an immediate backlash by fundamentalist parents, or all of the above. The second of the most frequent responses is an abstinence only class where the “educators” are one step away from some sort of teenager exorcism, visibly holding themselves back from starting an assembly or a class with “we gather here today so the Lord can purify thee of your filthy carnal urges…”
Far too few teenagers actually receive comprehensive sexual education that is legally required to be medically accurate. That’s horrible because despite the asinine threats and rhetoric from abstinence-only dogmatists, comprehensive sex ed has been proven to accomplish every goal they claim to be pursuing. California refused federal funds for abstinence-only education so the state can teach what it wanted and found that open and accurate sex ed delayed the average age of first sexual encounter and sent the rates of STDs and unwanted pregnancies to record lows.
In the meantime, studies of how well abstinence-only education fares found the opposite results. Instead of being scared out of sex as intended, teenagers indoctrinated with it had sex younger, were less likely to use protection, and were more likely to get infected or pregnant, or both. Remember virginity pledges, which 82% of those who made them denied making them in the first place after a few years and had sex anyway? Every shred of evidence shows that this form of sex ed is an abject failure which makes things worse for those who must endure it and comprehensive sex ed is an empowering force for long term personal and social good.
It’s at this point that rational people would stop, look at the all of the available stats, and defund abstinence-only education instead of giving it even more money because funding public health hazards is a really stupid thing to do. But we’re not dealing with rational people. We’re dealing with the kind of people who want to be able to tell how many times you had sex by the number of kids you have. These are people with a pathological obsession with everyone’s genitals and whose internal cultural dynamics are best described as abusive. In fact, those abstinence-only educators in the video look overdue for a psychiatric evaluation.
They give unsolicited, woefully uneducated advice, then defend themselves by basically slut-shaming those of us who are fine with actually having a sex life beyond the bi-monthly missionary with the intent to conceive. Like the sneering polyamorists of over-sexed New Age woo-friendly havens who assume that if you are monogamous, there’s something wrong with you, the abstinence zealots declare that there is nothing to be gained by more than one sexually active relationship but misery and woe, and the most devoted and irrational few even want premarital sex to be punishable by law.
But perhaps even worse than the hysterical moralists who refuse to accept that their way failed consistently for the last 60 years, that they cannot reshape society to their personal whims, and that despite what they’re told on talk radio and in the news, people are actually having sex with fewer and fewer partners each generation, are the politicians who pander to them. Allowing the irrational and dogmatic to rule over sex ed in their school districts with an iron fist simply for the sake of votes is a massive disservice to both the kids and the community.
In their quest for the title and the paycheck, the politicians who could change things keep on allowing their cities and towns to shoulder the fallout of the terrible education kids will receive. No one is holding any of them accountable for the single teenage moms, the rise of STDs, the extra taxpayer cash that will need to help with the damage, or the toxic culture that excuses and perpetuates extremely dysfunctional relationships. And for as long as only the aggrieved senior citizen told by tabloids and sleazy pundits about imaginary crises goes out to vote in local elections, on one will…
