I was chatting with my 18 year-old friend the other day, and she didn't greet me with a, "hey," or a "how are you," but a curt, "I think I'm pregnant." Now, being Miss Skeptic, I didn't freak out. I asked her about the circumstances, like if the sex was protected and more nitty gritty details of the actual sex act, to see if it was possible that she was pregnant. She was pretty much panicking, or at least that's what I gathered from the number of emoticons used in the chat.
Let's get to it:
My friend knew nothing about sex, nothing at all. It was her first time, and also her boyfriend's first time. Let's just say that with the very PG-13 sex story she told me, it is highly unlikely that she's pregnant. I told her that the pregnancy stick might be a false positive and she should take two more, just to be safe. But then it hit me, this girl is 18 and she knows fuck all about sex, and I thought to myself, how did this even happen?
"We didn't really have Sex Ed in my school," she told me when I asked about her naivety. Bam, that was it. Her school didn't have Sex Ed, and I realized that my own school's Sex Ed was extremely vague and the teachers beat around the bush so much that by the end of each lesson, I knew less about sex than when I walked in.
If my Christian high school was a person, it would be the crazy leader in the Westboro Baptist Church. I once had a one-on-one discussion with a teacher because she overheard me saying to my friend, "what the hell are you doing?" in the 8th grade. She called me in and said how that phrase was disrespectful to me, my parents, my peers, the teachers, and especially God. I just stood there in amazement. My Catholic sister was also a victim of the honk-if-you-love-Jesus teachers when a teacher attempted to proselytize her into a Protestant.
So in the sixth grade, us naive prepubescents were separated by gender into two classrooms and were taught lessons about sex...or were we? The girls were explained briefly about the textbook definition of sex and we saw diagrams, although they weren't specific enough for me to know which tool went in which hole. For all we know, the penis doesn't even enter the vagina to make a baby. Then we were taught about the moment of conception and how the sperm would attach itself to the egg and it would fertilize into a baby. Pregnancy ensues.
That was it.
Of course, they taught us about periods and how they came to be and how to trap it in a long pad of white goodness or how our boobs will grow into rounds of plump fat, but they didn't really teach us what we really needed to know as a young adult. Like how my male friend put it, "It wasn't really Sex Ed but Puberty Ed. Like what grows and what boys will go through and what girls will go through. Nothing to do with sexual intercourse."
My school and many other less liberal schools opt to teach kids the bare minimum of sex. They are adamant that if they keep the kids abstinent and in the dark about the dangers or pleasures of sex that they wouldn't dare step into the world of sexual immorality. So us kids grew up with a skewed mentality about sex. The girls were taught by cliche Hollywood films and the boys were taught by unrealistic pornos.
For years, I and most of my friends, thought that when you lose the Big V, it would result in litres of blood soaking through the mattress. It would be painful and that the hymen would break (common misconception; hymen doesn't break, it stretches. We all still have our hymens regardless of our sexual history). Or popping the cherry, as they call it. The boys were taught by huge men with foot-long penises that women like being slapped, strangled, and treated like animals in bed. We were kids growing up in an over-sexualized world and yet my school refused to address it and let the media teach us about the most sacred act the human race can do.
So it's no wonder that when my 18 year-old friend exclaimed that she's pregnant, I was the one who had to teach her about the Birds and the Bees. The Snake and the Cave. How To Get Pregnant And How Not To Get Pregnant. She listened intently as I told her information that I had gathered myself after years of discussing it with my girlfriends and perusing my parents' Cosmopolitan. Think about it. A 19 year-old had to teach an 18 year-old about sex and pregnancy, and let me tell you, I felt extremely inadequate to do so and I silently chastised incompetent schools for not properly educating their students.
We were not taught about contraception. Condoms weren't pulled down on bananas. Birth control pills might as well be a myth. Morning after pills were called The Devil's Tablets. My school skipped that altogether and promoted abstinence and only that. They pressed on the idea that No Sex equals to Good Person, and Premarital Sex equals to Satan's Spawn. Girls and boys who found their sexuality early on became the talk of the town.
Slut. Whore. Bitch. Worthless. Trash.
I remember discussing privately about our friend's sexcapades and my friend said, "she has no self-respect." That's what it came to. We started putting girls in boxes, 'Good' and 'Bad'. The good were the ones with their hymens intact, and the bad were the ones who had their cherries popped. We didn't bother asking these girls about why they chose to have sex, we just believed that they became worthless as a woman once the eel had entered their cave. For years I, and many of my friends, believed that the virgins held a higher position than their experienced counterparts.
But when my friends graduated high school, bright-eyed and innocent as a pup, they learned things that my school conveniently skipped during Sex Ed. I started hearing stories of who lost their V Cards and with whom. Their stories defied porn and the school's idea of what sex was. They berated themselves for falling into temptation and being one of the worthless girls they promised they would never be. They hated how they embraced their natural sexual instinct. How they said yes to the pressure of their boyfriends or their one-night stands. They didn't use protection because he said they didn't need to. They didn't bleed the first time, so they believed there was something wrong with them. They ran to me for advice and regaled me with stories that defied the idea of sex (or lack thereof) that was ingrained into their teenage heads.
They had to learn it the hard way.
When American public schools were giving out condoms and promoting safe sex, my school promoted abstinence and the castigation of the lustful. We were brought to the court of our shame and self-hate if we dared to defy the rules taught to us at a young age. Sex became taboo and existed only through the screens of our computers and steamy censored scenes in the cinema.
The boys weren't taught to respect a girl's adamant, "no" because they weren't taught about the idea of a girl saying no in the first place. The teachers didn't tell the boys to treat women with respect, so they turned to the derogatory acts of male porn stars to shed light regarding their own sexuality. The teachers taught girls how not to get pregnant, but not what they should do if they actually did.
Sex Ed shouldn't be called Sex Ed if they never even discussed the act of sex. Asian households won't mention sex, ever. My school should've understood that. They should've taught us the ins and outs so the students wouldn't have to experience the pain, panic and fears of growing up in a sex-oriented world. My high school was a bubble of naivety, and once we all went our separate ways to universities around the world, we all, simultaneously, had to learn a lot of things the hard way. The hardest was battling the world of sex when we knew absolutely nothing about it.
So to my high school, if any of you teachers are reading this, I don't appreciate how you did not teach me about sex and my sexuality. Or how you let the students grow up believing that the value of a woman is confined to the presence of her hymen. Sex should not, and is not, a taboo subject. It is part of human nature, and a huge part of us teenagers growing up. The more you beat around the bush, the more we learn about sex in the worst way possible. It's called Sex Ed, not How-To-Not-Have-Sex Ed.
It's like telling us, "wolves are bad, don't go near wolves," and pushing us out into the wild. Teach us how to fight, how wolves work, or how to defend ourselves against them. Because right now, we're all standing in the wild without a single clue on how to protect ourselves. The wolves are here. Give us a weapon.
“Because lying to your kids about sex helps nobody. Telling them that sex is “only between mommies and daddies” is a lie that leads to confused, hormone charged teenagers. Telling them that sex is “only something that happens when two people love each other very much” is a lie that causes hormone charged teenagers to confuse “love” with “lust,” or “obsession.” It leads to leaps of logic like, “If I have sex with them, we must be in love.” Or worse- “If I love them, I have to have sex with them.” And how many teenage tragedies are based on that misconception?” - Lea Glover
No comments :
Post a Comment