Sex education 101: The effects of abstinence-minded schooling

Call this bona fide nutty, but my friend from Germany practiced contraceptive use with a wooden penis.

The hands-on experience was a part of his high school level sexual education, not a mahogany fetish. The approach was blunt, but comprehensive sex education sticks with the students. 

And maybe it works. The U.S. teen pregnancy rate is almost three times higher than Germany’s, according to Advocates for Youth, and the percentage of the U.S. adult population diagnosed with HIV or AIDS is six times greater than in Germany.

As of this month, 27 states currently require an emphasis on abstinence in high school education and don’t require teaching information on preventing sexually transmitted infections, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Additionally, only 13 states require teachers to share medically accurate information, so your high school physical education teacher could have told you gum wrappers can spread HIV, if they thought that would scare you straight.

Pennsylvania is one of the states that needs to clean up its sex act. Our dirty record includes: no requirement to discuss STIs, the go-ahead to tell students lunch trays spread HIV; and (like 24 other states) no “life skills” for avoiding sexual coercion.  This education disparity stems from Title V abstinence-only federal funding. The funding comes with the stipulation that schools will teach what the state deems proper if they want funding for their sex-ed programs. 

These same teens go to college with this threadbare education. 

By the time you enter your second year at Pitt, 71 percent of the people in your class have already made a love boat out of their twin XL beds. Although 15- to 25-year-olds represent only one-quarter of the sexually active population, we account for nearly half of the 18.9 million new cases of STIs each year and one-fifth of all new HIV diagnoses in the United States in 2011, according to the Guttmacher Institute. 

We are the generation with all the answers at the end of our Google search, but the sex talk doesn’t work that way.

“Always be safe,” was the nitty gritty of my safe-sex talk. I didn’t know what healthy sex looked like outside the realm of Seventeen and Teen Vogue. Although, really, I was reading these magazines to decide what clothes to put on, not when to take them off. 

I also didn’t fully grasp the concept of sexual assault outside media tropes and the limited “good touch, bad touch” school lesson. I didn’t fully know until it happened to me at age 18 when I let my no’s grow quiet, and I became someone who experienced a personal, fracturing loss. 

I never went to the police. I never will. Yet, I have approached my rapist about it. He wasn’t malicious. He was an idiot, and his ignorance only surfaced after my “I think that was rape. I told you to stop” accusation, to which he agreed, yes, it was. Yes, you did. 

That was my real sex talk.

We didn’t die when we had sex in high school like Coach Carr from our generation’s pop culture bible, “Mean Girls,” said we would. Yet, 42 percent of sexual violence happens before the age of 18, and most victims knew their attacker beforehand. So, no, we didn’t die, but a lot of us didn’t walk as healthy, whole classmates on high school graduation day. 

Sexual violence is a sociocultural problem, yes, but educating teens on rape doesn’t hurt like this violence does.

As we are so inundated with media-approved sex-evanescent candles, rose petals or matching lingerie, many American teenagers couldn’t identify real sex and can’t properly react when confronted with sexual desire or aggression. 

The problem doesn’t lie at home. It festers in our schools. Parents are not objective enough to properly discuss sexual assault. The dialogue should start in the grade schools and must continue in college, when we are still most vulnerable. 

Why do we not have a general education requirement on sexuality? On gender rights? If my University demands that I know about a culture outside of the Western Hemisphere, I demand that they make us learn about gender and sexuality.

Schools such as Arizona State University, California State University and Stanford University do. Where is ours? They require students to take a class on gender or sexuality, or they present students gen-ed options in a way to make it more likely they will study gender or sexuality.  

Pitt’s Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program courses — from which I have benefitted — span a number of departments, according to University spokesman John Fedele. However, “ … the basic [general education] requirements were worked out by the faculty of Arts & Sciences some time ago, and we do not add new requirements even though we do add new courses.” 

In our changing society, requirements should be just as malleable as our mindsets. 

There are so many questions that a talk from your mom and dad could never answer: What would justice look like for sexual violence if we were better educated? Why don’t we learn about aromanticism and asexuality in health class? Why do only 12 states require discussion of sexual orientation when same-sex marriage is legal in 37 states? 

And, lastly, why the stigma behind sex? Religious reasons? According to researchers from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., 32 percent of the surveyed students are spiritual but not religious, while another 28 percent consider themselves secular. 

As the stigma’s base leaves the pews, we must discard our social hangup on confronting real sex. We cannot make progress on sexual education if shame shields judgment. 

Because, really, there are plenty of things that are fun and harm the environment or are just plain bad, but they aren’t shameful to do. For example, according to National Public Radio, if I eat a quarter-pound hamburger, it wastes 6.7 pounds of grains, 52.8 gallons of drinking water, 74.5 square feet of land and 1,035 British thermal units (BTU) of fossil fuel energy — enough to power a typical microwave for 18 minutes.

That’s a waste, all right, but I don’t see anyone calling the police when you wrap your lips around that kind of meat in public. 

So, moving forward, let’s begin identifying and accepting real and safe sex — whether it comes with candles or happens in the campus bathroom. We know experience is not the best educator in this case, and the numbers of rapes, assaults, STIs and pregnancies is proof that this teaching needs to be in the classroom.

Bring on the wooden penises.

Email Danielle at Foxddanielle@gmail.com.