Teaching Sex
Jan. 27th, 2010 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleYou may have read the flap about dictionaries being pulled from schools for containing a definition of "oral sex".
Seriously, if you had a kid of your own, what would you want his playground experience of "sex ed" to be? Would you want him/her to be ignorant, clueless and gullible? Or would you want your kid to be totally unflappable, absolutely unsurprised, and be able to speak with confidence and authority about sex, wowing his peers with his big forbidden Latin vocabulary and basically pwning the whole conversation? Aside from the personal value of knowing this stuff, it would give any child a huge social advantage in school.
I cannot understand why parents would want to send children into the world so totally unprepared for the most consequential choices they will ever make. It just Makes No Sense. The rugrats should be told exactly what sex is, in all its forms, as soon as they are able to understand it. If not earlier. Which I reckon is about two years old.
Could you even show a toddler an anatomy textbook and not be sent to jail for it? It's not entirely clear what the answer is these days.
[Actually, withholding information about sex makes perfect sense when you realize that pregnancy is a key mechanism of social control. Everything in the xtian fundamentalist take on sex is directed towards encouraging "accidental" pregnancy followed by a shotgun wedding. So of course, abortion must be forbidden. If there is one thing I could tell kids about sex, it's that their parents' apparent "cluelessness" about their sexual activity is very often a deliberate effort to subvert their independence and freedom. This is why so many arch-conservative cultures, like the Puritans, basically let teenagers run wild. It's the biggest bait and switch in the world.]
Seriously, if you had a kid of your own, what would you want his playground experience of "sex ed" to be? Would you want him/her to be ignorant, clueless and gullible? Or would you want your kid to be totally unflappable, absolutely unsurprised, and be able to speak with confidence and authority about sex, wowing his peers with his big forbidden Latin vocabulary and basically pwning the whole conversation? Aside from the personal value of knowing this stuff, it would give any child a huge social advantage in school.
I cannot understand why parents would want to send children into the world so totally unprepared for the most consequential choices they will ever make. It just Makes No Sense. The rugrats should be told exactly what sex is, in all its forms, as soon as they are able to understand it. If not earlier. Which I reckon is about two years old.
Could you even show a toddler an anatomy textbook and not be sent to jail for it? It's not entirely clear what the answer is these days.
[Actually, withholding information about sex makes perfect sense when you realize that pregnancy is a key mechanism of social control. Everything in the xtian fundamentalist take on sex is directed towards encouraging "accidental" pregnancy followed by a shotgun wedding. So of course, abortion must be forbidden. If there is one thing I could tell kids about sex, it's that their parents' apparent "cluelessness" about their sexual activity is very often a deliberate effort to subvert their independence and freedom. This is why so many arch-conservative cultures, like the Puritans, basically let teenagers run wild. It's the biggest bait and switch in the world.]
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-28 04:27 pm (UTC)