The Internet Monk
"Read.Think.React.Write.Live."
A Webjournal edited by Michael Spencer
A Sex Education Lesson
A plea to return to our former ignorance
by Michael Spencer
I
was fortunate to grow up in a time and place when sex education still
hadn't made it into the public school system. Not a word was spoken
about the subject in my journey through Lincoln Elementary School. A
teacher reading "Heather Has Two Mommies" to us would have
been looking for work within the hour.
Though my years at Estes Junior High were filled with the personal interest in sex that goes along with being dateless and unpopular in grades 7-9, there were no classes or curriculum to curb or titillate our curiosity. Best I recall, there was one "boys only" mandatory assembly for a thoroughly horrifying "VD" movie, followed by a question and answer session featuring one question I will never forget as long as I live. ("Yes young man, you can get it from an animal." I never thought of that kid the same way again.)
When it came to sex, my generation was gloriously self-taught. Older boys educated younger boys with a mixture of facts, lies and nonsense culled from a variety of imaginary experiences, stolen Playboys and other unreliable sources. The songs on the radio were increasingly about sex in the late sixties and early seventies, and we acted as if we knew what they were talking about, but the truth was more mundane. Our ignorance was vast, and made all the more complete by the fact that we thought we knew what we were talking about.
We had several advantages. The brutal sexual honesty of today's media was nowhere in sight, so our ignorance was not disturbed by bedding roommates on reality shows, detailed advice from "Love Line" or the leering lectures of Howard Stern. Girls didn't talk about sex as they do today, at least not to us, so we were left in a kind of perpetually ad libbing "Man Show." Most of our parents didn't tell us anything about sex, either. My parents took more interest in the mapping of the human genome than in my sex education, leaving me to fend for myself on what "rubbers" were all about, the entirety of the female cycle and, most painfully, to deal with the many horrific surprises of puberty by long afternoons at the public library. My father put in considerable time to teach me how to shoot, mow, fish, and change oil, but he told me more about translating cuneiform than about sex.
Poured on top of this cake of ignorance was the icing of religious fundamentalism. At my church, the horrors of teen sex were regularly rehearsed in lurid detail, and when one of the fine young ladies of the church turned up preggers, we were all reminded that the lusts of the flesh could overcome even a David or a Samson. So losers like us were toast if we even thought about it. I don't recall any frequent preaching against the sexual sins of adults, but the message that sex before marriage was the devil's quicksand got through loud and clear at every youth revival. I credit whatever abstinence I managed through those years to fear, pure and simple. The results, in retrospect, were both pathetic and hilarious, and, no, you will not be hearing them here. (Sorry, BHT gang.)
If there was any sex education in my high school, I don't recall it, and I am sure it would have contained nothing more exciting than the rudiments of basic biology. No condoms on bananas in 1972. Of course, sex was going on everywhere, and those of us who weren't having it listened to everyone who claimed to be involved with total credulity. Who knows how long it took to discover that we were being educated by liars, braggarts and idiots? I'm not sure my generation has quite figured it out yet, though "The Osbournes" has been an eye-opener.
In college, everything changed. After a year at a conservative Baptist college, I found myself back home attending a typical liberal arts college distantly affiliated with that bastion of orthodox professors and clergy, the United Methodist Church. One of my majors was psychology--I know, I know--and so I was forced to take a variety of sex education courses in the Psychology and Sociology departments. These ran the gamut from the helpful to the pornographic, and I enjoyed them all. (Though I am not sure that my professors enjoyed the questions I managed to ask out of the warehouse of ignorance I had accumulated.) Finally, I knew what all the fuss was about.
For example, on one occasion we were placed in a circle and told that the teacher would name a body part or sexual behavior, after which we would go around the circle sharing as many slang terms as possible for the original term. The class was a mixture of the profane and the modest, so some were sharing terms that only sailors in the Sea of Madagascar had ever heard, while others were uttering the word "breast" for the first time in public. I never saw girls giggle so much in my life. Now that day I learned something: you can make up words when you want to, and people will think you are really knowledgeable.
Another time we spent the day watching gay porno movies, produced under the guise of sex education. We were expected to demonstrate all that remarkable tolerance and openness that goes along with being a college student. Instead, we laughed and, speaking for myself, found several reasons to get a drink of water. I decided that my almost complete ignorance of homosexual behaviors had been a tremendous blessing. As my son likes to say, "too much information." Indeed.
I share all this rather unexciting narrative with you in order to contrast my experience with that of my high school students. The difference is remarkable, and at the same time, similar in many ways.
My students talk about sex endlessly. The girls especially. They seem determined to make up for centuries of modesty in a few years. They volunteer their sexual histories to rooms full of strangers. They talk about sexual acts in malls, in the classroom and in restrooms. A remarkable number of girls have no problem in providing "Clinton sex" to young men on demand. I have found hundreds of notes in my classrooms over the last decade, and 95% of them are crudely sexual. They take enormous pleasure in assuming they are more sexually sophisticated than adults.
One must be a Bible teacher in a school that requires its students to take Bible in order to appreciate what the subject of circumcision can bring about in a classroom today. Recently, as I attempted to get past the subject quickly, several young ladies began a loud debate on the cosmetic advantages of circumcision from the standpoint of their various sexual experiences. No, I did not give extra credit.
Yet, all this crass familiarity is combined with a remarkable level of ignorance. For example, I asked a class of twelve juniors and seniors from all over America what was the most common STD in America? They answered "AIDS," almost in unison. Of course, AIDS is a relatively rare STD among teenage heterosexuals. Their other answers were just as inaccurate. And, of course, my readers all know the correct answer--right?
Many of the old sexual myths that we believed in junior high are alive and well today. Despite being inundated with sexual information in media, despite learning more about sex than about physics or Shakespeare, despite having unprecedented access to sex information and images through the internet, these young people seem to be in worse shape than my ignorant and unenlightened generation. Along with information and openness and exposure to every kind of sexual behavior has come remarkable confusion and cynicism. As far as I can tell, there is as much ignorance about many subjects as when I was in school, and considerable misinformation and mythology about subjects that they do know about.
For instance, I am amazed at the contempt for femininity among my young people. It is not at all unusual for them to loudly and proudly say "I don't want to be feminine." Can you imagine a young man saying, "I don't want to be masculine!"? Young women want the affirmation and acceptance that come from male-female relationships, but they are pursuing those relationships through aggressive sexual behavior, and trying to "out-guy the guys" in profanity and crudeness. At the same time, they frequently voice their anger and outrage at boys responding to whatever female does the best job of being sexually provocative. "Why are boys like that?" In all the information they've been given, in all the rap videos they've watched, in all the internet sites they've seen, they still don't know why "boys are like that."
And all that tolerance towards gays? Not the kids I work with, and they are the most diverse group in America. They use the word "gay" as a pejorative, and while they are more accepting of homosexuals on a personal level than we would have been in my generation, they seem only slightly less emotionally revolted by the accompanying behaviors.
It appears to me that my generation had a lack of information, but not a lack of a kind of simple clarity on sexual matters. It may have been given to us in silence or couched in sermons and bad films, and it may have been motivated by fear, but it didn't confuse us like my students are confused. Parents and teachers may have said little or nothing, but that doesn't seem to be nearly as bad a situation as we've been told. This generation is drowning in information, but also in contradictory messages and images. The result is that they are less capable of navigating the turbulent waters of adolescence and young adulthood than my generation.
A few years ago, a young man asked to have a private conversation with me. His eventual question was whether, in my opinion, a typical young woman would be offended if he asked her to provide him with oral sex rather than sexual intercourse, and whether such behavior circumnavigated the Christian moral prohibitions on "real sex." The young man was from a larger public school, was intelligent and more mature than most of his peers. Yet here was this amazing question, a question revealing an astonishing ignorance of the place of sex in relationships and the basics of sexual morality. He showed he had been exposed to the sexual information, but was ignorant of the human dimension.
Of course, answering such questions from the young is what I do for a living, and I am glad to do so. I commend him for having the courage to ask rather than remain silent and make assumptions. But I cannot help but think what I would have been doing at his age. Would I have been contemplating how to negotiate sexual favors from my dates? Would I have been asking a teacher about such things? Is it really such a terrible thing that, in my life at the same age, such a conversation was unthinkable? Is it really barbaric and backward that I had to learn the human and the sexual dimension at a much slower pace, with much less assurance and far fewer pressures and choices?
Many Christians and conservatives are beginning to rejoice over the "Abstinence Movement." It is becoming clear that many of America's teenagers are postponing sexual activity (at least certain kinds) and coming to see virginity in a more positive way. Credit the movement, which has worked hard, no doubt, to influence the culture. Credit the media and educational focus on AIDS. Credit lots of caring adults in schools and churches and sports programs and arts programs and community groups who encourage kids to postpone sex until marriage.
Or, credit some of our teenagers with just being plain sick of it all. Sick of the public service ads, the condom commercials, the adult living classes, the constant focus in music and media, the commercialization and the vulgarization. Credit some of our kids with saying, "too much, too soon, so no thanks." Like kids who have watched others eat ice cream and candy until they were sick, these young people have been turned off by the excesses of those who are endlessly turned on.
It may not be sophisticated, but it works. And in this venture, pragmatism counts for something. Here's to a return to more silence, sermons on hell, and scary movies about VD.