In the school where I work, I teach a lot of very factual sex education
to teenage boys. In an ideal world, I’d have time to get to know each
class and we’d be able to talk honestly about our hopes and fears and
feelings. But there isn’t an exam in sex education, so the subject gets
squeezed to the edges of the curriculum and, in some schools, squeezed
out altogether. In the brief time I have with each class, I talk a bit
about the importance of relationships and love but the teenagers
sitting there are far more interested in hard information about sex
because, without that information, they’re vulnerable. Like
Shakespeare’s Romeo and his friends, they joke and tease each other
about sex because they’re anxious about sex. The more they know,
therefore, the more confident and relaxed they feel and the less
inclined they are to take their anxieties out on other people.
Reducing unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections
are important governmental aims but the more important reason for
providing good, factual sex education is to reduce anxieties about sex
which cause unhappiness. Without information, young people mock the
ignorance of others to hide their own ignorance; they project their own
anxieties about sexual experience and performance onto others and attack
it.
Sitting there, waiting for me to begin, the boys don’t laugh
and don’t snigger. For me to suggest that they don’t already know
everything there is to know about sex would be a mistake, so I begin by
saying that I’m quite sure they know most of this stuff already but that
there may be the odd bit of information that’s new and that it’ll
therefore be worth paying attention. Reassured, they listen, not because
I’m a famous disciplinarian or a particular authority on sex but
because they’re desperate to pick up anything they don’t already know.
I’m frank which surprises them but is also, evidently, a relief.
Sometimes they ask questions but more often are too embarrassed to ask
and it’s my job to anticipate the questions they would ask if only it
wasn’t so embarrassing. Sometimes I get them to write down questions in
private. “Does the foreskin have to be pulled back before sex?” they
ask. “Do girls pee out of their vaginas? Does sex hurt? What if the
penis is too small? In anal sex, what happens to the shit? How do you
know if someone wants to have sex? What’s the point of ribbed condoms?”
We
talk about the difference between pornographic bodies and real bodies,
pornographic sex and real sex. Most of them have watched porn
in secret and I find myself wondering…. Of course, one of their
purposes in watching will be for arousal – that never changes - but I
suspect that they also watch porn for information. Internet pornography
begins where sex education for young people ends. When there are
questions about sex that adults daren’t or won’t answer, young people
search the internet. The trouble is that the answers they get back from
pornography may be grossly distorted. It stands to reason, therefore,
that with better, earlier and more explicit sex education, with
questions answered rather than fudged and with opportunities for
educators to describe sex in the context of love, young people might
need to watch porn rather less urgently.
Nick Luxmoore is a counselor at King Alfred's College, in the UK.
Love,
Abby
