By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: March 6, 2013
I learned about sex when I was 12.
I was at a sleepover. It was one of those conversations that pre-teen girls whisper to each other when the lights are out, pretending to be asleep so the chaperoning parents don’t hear.
The conversation turned to boys, who had kissed who, who would kiss who if they had the chance. Of six or seven girls, I think only one of us had ever had a boyfriend. About half of us knew the down and dirty reproductive truth, and I was not one of them. We all listened as the eldest explained it in the most biological terms she could muster.
It was gross.
Looking back, it was also not entirely correct.
That was a decade ago, and however cliché it sounds, the world has changed a lot since then. When I was 12, my internet time was strictly regulated and supervised. There was no chance to take a peek at Wikipedia and get my facts straight, no shady webpages triggering pop-ups offering Russian brides that might give me a better idea of the in-and-outs, so to speak. What my generation learned about sex, we learned from each other. Secret, gleefully-whispered conversations. Notes passed from desk to desk depicting diagrams, crude in more ways than one.
Even in a world where pre-teens have internet access nearly 24/7, I suspect that there is still a great deal of misinformation being passed surreptitiously from desk to desk. That’s how kids work – anything gross is also fascinating, and what’s grosser than sex to a 12-year-old?
My first official sexual education class wasn’t until three years later, and I was still foggy on a lot of points. Condoms? Birth control pills? Even the logistics of the act itself didn’t quite make sense. A lot of kids my age knew far more than I did, but even the most knowledgeably of us didn’t have all the details right. We sat in our desks, pretending to be bored or asleep, secretly absorbing every detail. Sex was still pretty gross, so we were still pretty fascinated – but we definitely didn’t want to seem fascinated.
This past month, in the generally quiet island town of Nanaimo, school kids were given flip-books demonstrating how to put on a condom. No words, just a step-by-step pictorial guide that began at the flaccid stage, showed a penis becoming erect, a woman rolling a condom onto the member, and then the sexual act itself.
This, obviously, pulled some outraged parents out of the woodwork. One mother complained that her son was only 13, and that the flip-book both confused and frightened him.
Well, mom, I think that might be the problem right there.
Educating your child about sex is not encouraging them to have sex, and that’s a crucial difference that seems to get brushed over. Whether you like it or not, one day your kids are going to grow up and do it. Wouldn’t you rather them know how to protect themselves?
Teenage pregnancy is a terrifying and worrisome trend. How are parents supposed to raise children when they’re just children themselves?
You might want to protect your kids from the gross idea of sex as long as possible, but the truth is they’ll find out about sex one way or another – be it Wikipedia or the schoolyard. Facts and myths about the act are circulated regularly and indiscriminately as kids tease and gross each other out.
But one crucial element is missing from these impromptu sex-ed lessons, and that’s protection. I knew what sex was long before I was introduced to the idea of a condom. It took even longer for me to learn about the pill, and to this day I’m not entirely sure how an IUD works.
Teaching kids about sexual protection has to be a pre-emptive strike, and whether you sit your kids down to talk about it or hand them a flip-book doesn’t matter. Sooner or later kids turn into teenagers and teenagers turn into adults – and somewhere along that path they’re going to start doing it. No matter when it is, they should know how to take precautions. It might be sooner, it might be later, it might be on their wedding night – but sex is inevitable.
STIs and teen pregnancy, on the other hand, is not inevitable – and these are the things we should be teaching kids. Sex they can figure out for themselves, but it’s our job to teach them to be safe.
