When I was 13, I encountered abstinence-only education. A course of sex ed that specialized in equating men to dogs, women to shoes and gum, and scaring the bejeezus out of anyone who wanted to have sex.
It was very productive.
The notion that our sex education system is a failure isn’t a new one. A 2004 investigation by the minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee found that Abstinence Only education contains falsehoods on the premises such as: A 43-day-old Fetus is a "thinking person," Condoms fail to protect against HIV 31 percent of the time, treats stereotypes about men and women as scientific fact, that half the gay populous is HIV positive, and my personal favorite...are you ready for this? Pregnancy can result from touching the other person's genitals. I'm honestly surprised that there isn't information about swallowing a watermelon seed in this report...
When topics are the subject of a "Last Week Tonight" episode, at this point we can consider it both a healthy mix of hilarious, and genuinely awful.
A system that equates young women to gum is horrible on principle alone. However, abstinence-only education is merely the tip of the iceberg. Our society is sexually repressed, that’s nothing new. A movie that contains high amounts of graphic sexual content is often cited as pornographic, or even slapped with an NC-17 rating. Yet, movies depicting violence, murder, and/or genocide will often wind up as PG-13.
More to the point, my last article dealt with that fact that we still don’t know that “sex without consent is rape.” Yet in middle school, we were pulled into health classrooms and ostensibly taught about sex. Apparently, we emerged from that classroom convinced that "non-consensual sex" is somehow not rape? This is evidenced by how UNC handled a recent rape case, where the victim was questioned as if they were a suspect in their own rape. How structurally flawed is our sex education system that we denigrate rape victims? We live in a world where not only is consent an unclear concept, but in a world where our expectations of sexual discourse are so mangled. That police officers, at least according to the above article, told a rapist "not to worry about it."
But that's symptomatic of a much larger problem.
