Stories from the Sex-ed Frontier

I recently took a look through the discussion board on Facebook's Abolish Abstinence-only Education, and found a long thread of people describing their experiences with sex-ed. Following are an assortments of some of the more interesting (or appalling) ones. Note that I make no promises to their veracity...

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At my school for sex ed we had the "gum deminstration" where a visitor came into our class and then the teacher picked two girls (the visitor was male) the visitor took a piece of gum and after talking to the first girl gave her the gum and she was instructed to chew it. The visitor then when to the next girl and started talking to her, then went back to the first girl, took the gum that she had been chewing and gave it to the second girl. The point of this deminstration was that you don't want to give the person you marry a chewed piece of gum (ie used merchindise) so thus you should wait till marrige. the teacher also told us that homosexual sex was evil. I should tell you all that I went to a PUBLIC school and that this class was funded by public tax dollars.

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And in my senior year of highschool, some girls did a project on it for one of the two teachers that didn't deny [sex's] existence. Also, we swapped webpages about sex ed. To prove it, they said it was magic when two of the teachers were pregnant. They wrapped up a statue of the greek fates, and if one of the VPs had her way, there wouldn't be "Male" and "Female" restrooms. There would be "Teacher" and "Student" restrooms with no gender distinction.

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A little off topic but I know about a christian school (i didn't go to) that made the students write a letter to president clinton about how abortion was murder and should be outlawed. After reading what you wrote about the sex ed thing they taught you...I've come to the conclusion that christian schools should be outlawed. :-)

"A little off topic" yes, but still pretty creepy.

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We had about a quarter of our religion classes in 5th-7th grade dedicated to sex ed. We started out talking about puberty and anatomy, then pregnancy. We talked a lot about the development of the fetus and how abortion is murder. Every topic and test was begun with "3 reasons why the human body is sacred." We didn't talk about contraception much except that it was against God's will and that there was a failure rate. We had like one leason a year about STDs, very little about STIs. The only time homosexuality was mentioned was in 7th grade in a lesson called "Sins Against Sexuality" where it was lumped together with pornography, rape, molestation, polygamy, and beastiality.

In high school, sex ed was the second half of our freshman religion class. The first day covered the anatomy stuff most everyone had already had. Then for several weeks, we went into how pre-marital sex is not only immoral, but also jeoprodizes the happiness of future relationships and that once your relationship incorporates sex, it stops growing. The second half of the class was about pregnancy and all the responsibilities that come with having a baby and the best way not to have a baby is to not have sex. Even if you're married.

Then one quarter of junior year religion was about morality. There was a lot about how having premarital sex means you're making the choice to turn your back on God. For our teacher, morality was black and white, there was no circumstance in which contraception, abortion, homosexuality, or premarital sex was okay.

For me the problem with this approach is that it assumed that the student would always hold the same moral beliefs. If you ever stopped believing that God hates gays or that you'll go to hell for premarital sex, you're not left with much information on how to have a healthy, satisfying sexual relationship.

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[W]e watched a couple Lifetime movies about girls getting pregnant and/or the man in the relationship learning to be more respectful to his girlfriend because it was clearly all his fault she was pregnant, at least that's what the shows implied. They were really conservative movies.

Like... the girl in one of the movies couldn't keep the baby because she wanted to go to college, so she left it with the guy to take care of it, then after a few months she started angsting about wanting to have her baby back with her. So then she drops out of school and runs back home and tells the guy "I want my baby back with me!" and he's all like "psh, fuck that, bitch. You abandon that kid, you're not his mother anymore." Then she starts crying and runs off again, then he feels bad about it but moves on and finds another girl and everything is happy again.

And that's why you shouldn't have sex, ladies. Because it's his fault you're pregnant, and you can't take it so you abandon your baby so you can go earn your Liberal Arts degree so you can get a day job at Target easier after you graduate. But that won't work out because you dropped out only to be told off by your exboyfriend, calling you a bad mother, and you know that as soon as you leave his house again he's gonna be dongin' with his new girl, and she's hotter than you.

Society's views of sexuality are horribly sexist. Men are expected to be a ribald bunch, whose urges must be satisfied, but if a women screws up, she is unclean. If a teenage couple gets pregnant, the girl is a slut, but the guy's just another guy. It's her problem, afterall.

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Vagina = Blossoming Flower and my teacher (a middle aged female hippy) was afraid to say the word Penis.

I could expect that from a kid, but...

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my school heavily focused on stds and unwanted pregnancy.. we watched lots of movies about stds and looked at so many pictures of genitalia infected with stds.. they even handed out condoms and flavored lube!

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My cousin's Catholic school seemed to go out of its way to be useless and offensive. Included in the "sex ed" package was "how to treat women." That might sound nice, but it wasn't. It was stuff like, "Never leave her alone at a dance. If you have to go to the bathroom, get someone to watch her." One, I have no idea what that had to do with sex ed, and two, it's ridiculously sexist. :P

They were also taught that men can't control themselves, so it's the woman's job to remain "chaste." Women shouldn't even make jokes about sex with men, because it would show the woman has no respect for herself. Pretty much, it was the woman's job to keep men from having sex with her. If anything happened, it was her fault and she was a slut. I wish we Catholics would join the 21st century with everyone else.

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We watched a very painful birth on video and looked at a lot of different STDs. Birth controll was never mentioned, statistics were never given, information on the specifics of transmission were never given. The conclusion of 3 weeks of this was: "If you have sex you will get pregnant and die" Sure enough, after highschool started I saw quite a few pregnancies, even of super conservative religous teens whose parents I'm sure supported abstinance only education.... I wonder if they do now.

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My school, Landover University for the Saved (although I am currently on a mission trip to the LIEberal northeast) teaches on the GODLY "Sex Education". NEVER have sex. If you are a man and cannot control yourself, however, you are to find yourself a suitable woman/servant and have sex with her (as the natural use of a woman, of course, is to satisfy men's sexual urges). If you need Biblical citations, I will be happy to give them (from the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, just the way God wrote it)!

www.LandoverBaptist.com -- Unsaved? Unwelcome!

This obvious piece of satire might have been funny, but the it sparked a minor war between gullible readers who actually believed it and the original poster, who kept making more outrageous statements, until some people told him to stuff it.

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mine was pretty weird. the teacher walked in, inflated condoms with her breath, passed the, spermicide and all, around the room for everyone to handle, along with diaphragms (sp?) and female condoms. she vividly described the various forms of sex and protection, intentionally making filthy jokes and doing nothing but trivializing safe sex.

Here we have the opposite problem...

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5th grade (public) - sex is like legos...u stick it in, girls have vaginas and guys have penises

6th grade (private) - sex is a sin ... u do it before marriage, and your going to hell.

8th grade (publice) - we did a fill in the blank worksheet word for word out of the book which taught us condems were evil and sex was the devil, oh and our teacher didnt even mentionit

Sex is like Legos, it's a sin and the Devil. Therefore (∴) we can conclude (using the Transitive property) that Legos are sinful and the work of the Devil. Guess I'll have to throw my old collection away.

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My "Home Ec" teacher told us that baby aspirin was the best form of birth control: "place it between your knees and hold it there." I wish I was kidding about this. If we brought up birth control she got all uncomfortable. Oh yeah and guess how many girls in my graduating class ended up having babies? That baby aspirin worked great I guess...

Apparently, some teachers are not just ignorant, they're completely stupid.

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In 5th grade, at the end of elementary school, they separated the boys from the girls and that's when we learned about puberty. But, we didn't actually discuss what made the opposite sex opposite so if I hadn't had a brother, I might not have known (at least not until later) that boys have penises and girls have vaginas.

In 6th grade, the church I was forced to attend again separated the boys from the girls. The sunday school teacher kept saying over and over again that we needed to remain "pure", that Jesus only approved of girls who remained "pure" until marriage, and that our husbands (because, of course, *all* of us were 'straight') would better "enjoy you if you are pure on your wedding night." I had no clue as to what she was talking about and since we had finished a big DARE campaign in school the year before, I thought she was talking about drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. After she was done talking, we *all* had to sign a "contract" with god that basically read that we were committing ourselves to "him" until we were married. Then, we received a small silver ring and my ring wouldn't fit.

In the 8th grade, a coach sat the volleyball team down and told us all how disastorous pregnancy was to our volleyball careers and higher education aspirations. She said this without telling us how one actually became pregnant.

In the 9th grade, I took health and the teacher spent an entire week (monday through friday) talking about abstinence. She even said that if you have sex and didn't want to, that you can reclaim a "secondary virginity" which sounded like a bunch of hooey to me. After all of the abstinence crap (which was what it was), she finally let us watch a video that described (but didn't show) the sex act ("the penis enters the vagina..."). The video, though, made sex seem sterile and frankly disgusting as it did show, from inside the vagina, an ejaculation and my teacher said, "that's right girls, we are the recepticles for all of that. And, if he has a disease, you just caught it and sucked it right up into your body." Honestly, she made us sound like toilets. We did discuss, over only one class period, condoms and birth control pills but she mainly just kept saying how ineffective they really were.

"14 girls out of 100 will become pregnant using a condom. But if you can't control yourself and have sex, it's better than nothing."

There was a lot of shame, a lot of guilt, and a *lot* of misinformation.

In 10th grade, when I decided to start having sex, I took myself to the closest Planned Parenthood and sat down with someone and just asked a ton of questions. I left that day with a bunch of information, pamplets, condoms, and a prescription for birth control. It was refreshing to *finally* have someone tell me the truth in a heathy, positive, and supportive way. I started having sex with my boyfriend (who is now my husband) that year confident that I knew how to protect myself from disease and pregnancy.

But, if I hadn't taken the initiative to educate myself, I shudder to think of what might have happened to us.

You rock, Amanda! If only everyone else was this smart.

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I went to an extremely small Christian school (like 20 people in the whole high school.) Of course we were taught abstinence only...if they had taught anything else besides that, I'm positive parents would have been in there ranting and raving. So, anyway, the lady teaching it for us girls brought in a red rose and passed it around instructing everyone to pluck a pedal off. Once all the pedals were gone, she said..."If you have sex before marriage, this is what you'll have left to give your future husband...an ugly stem." So then we all took purity rings and vowed not to have sex before marriage. Yeah, didn't work for too many people. 2 girls got pregnant not too long after that. I also vowed not to have sex before marriage, but once I met my fiance, it just happened. Oh well.

Getting back to my earlier point...

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12th grade was the Sex Class when it came to religion. We got to watch the videos about why sex is just for marriage, and when you have sex before marriage, you're giving that gift to someone who can't appreciate it. You should be new, beautiful, and have never been touched or used. If you're not a virgin, you're trash! (As a rape victim, this bothered me to no small extent.) The book also told the truth about disease and such, and also about different methods of birth control, and how the Church sees it. The only mistake was that the author confused PlanB with RU-486, and I brought literature to the teacher to prove that they were not, in fact, the same thing.

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And finally, my contribution:

I got lucky. I go to probably the most liberal school in Oregon, and we started puberty in sixth grade, getting a bit steamier in seventh grade. Nothing happened in eighth grade for some reason, but in ninth grade we talked about rape, STDs, and all sorts of contraceptives. We put condoms on bananas, too.

The only bad thing was that I had already read a lot about it anyway, so much of it was repeat information. But the class was awesome because we were all freshmen so every other statement made us giggle. It was a fun class.