October is Sex Ed Month of Action (hehe)

Hey, kids! Sex is natural, sex is good! Use condoms! Masturbate! Hooray!

Advocates for Youth provides some helpful links here for young people who’d like to learn about sex and safety.

Tamya Cox at ACLU-OK describes Sex Ed in Oklahoma,

The federal government spent 206 million dollars on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs during 2006. Oklahoma received $690,342 for fiscal year 2005. Yet, as many of us know and the statistics show, not all teenagers are abstaining. In 2005, 48% of Oklahoma female high school students and 50% of male high school students admitted to having sex. These numbers clearly show that our teens are having sex, and now is not the time to turn a blind eye. We must arm our children with the knowledge and tools needed to prevent those who do have sex from unwanted pregnancies as well as contracting Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs).

Oklahoma schools are not required to teach sex education but must teach HIV/AIDS prevention. Many school districts who decide to teach sex education do so by teaching an abstinence-only-until-marriage curriculum. This curriculum gives medically inaccurate and biased information about the benefits of abstinence; it gives little or no instruction to those who do have sex about birth control and STD prevention. Young adults under the age of 25 are contracting the HIV virus an alarming rate.

Nationally and locally, we have seen a decline in the number of teen pregnancies, yet Oklahoma still ranks in the top ten. If we are teaching any sex education at all, we are teaching our students to wait until marriage, yet almost half of our students have had sex. So the message on which are spending millions of dollars, is not as effective as it should be. We need to know what our children are learning about sex, and we need to insist that a comprehensive sexuality education curriculum be taught.

Would you like to know more about sex in Oklahoma? Sex, Etc., provides a rundown.

Oh, and this NOT-heteronormative, pro-masturbation, safe-sex promotin’, educational video (audio only) is fabulous. I wish all pre-teens could listen to it. Ladies, “[T]he space between your legs is a LOT more than just a big black hole, although that’s what it can feel like when you’ve been given no information about your reproductive and pleasure organs.” Anatomy lessons, tips for masturbating, ideas for safe heavy petting, explanations and normalizing statements about the different kinds of sex one can have with a partner, erotic zone locations, etc. There’s some goofy M alliteration at the beginning of the podcast, but the talk becomes little more sophisticated as it goes on… until you get to the part where they tell dudes how to be prepared for safe sex… in a drill seargent’s voice… Anyway…

Yay, orgasms! Yay, knowing your body! Yay, marital sex and non-marital sex! The speakers also discuss emotional consequences, STIs, and the problem(s) of teen pregnancy. They promote “hand-sex” or mutual masturbation in particular and describe how to do it effectively; also, they talk about oral sex and anal stimulation with a male or with a female, pointing out that oral sex and sex in general are not “bad” or “good” acts but are normal. The speakers talk about the issue of virginity and how the choice to have sex is YOURS, not your church’s, not your parents’, not your friends’. It’s all about preparation and smart decisions and PLEASURE, suggest the speakers. Last, the speakers talk to people with penises and then people with vulvas about how to be a responsible sexually active person, including how to masturbate with a condom on and how to make a visit to the gyno, respectively. I wish they’d included a little more about the connection of the abortion debate to the sex ed debate, but maybe that would’ve been a bit much for one video. Maybe.

I vaguely remember gaining some basic sex ed (no condom practice or anything like that) in junior high and high school biology classes. I pretty much wasn’t told anything in school, officially–no abstinence-only bullshit but also no safe sex training. Everything I learned, I learned from friends or from pornos. What was your sex ed experience like?

Spread the good news,
Beamish