Kayla Burr

UWRT 1102
Instructor: Fran Voltz
29 April 2016
Need for Accurate Sex Ed. < Need for Geometry

During August 2015, I saw a video on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on YouTube
about the lack of sex education in our country. It made me reflect on my own sex education in
school. I came to the understanding that not only did I receive uninformative sexual education,
but I got a crushing amount of guilt to go with it. This is typically what students take away from
abstinence-only education. That is why the country as a whole must create a mandatory safe sex
curriculum, because unlike geometry, safe sex information is something that will be useful in our
adult lives.
I had Catholic schooling from the first day of preschool to my high school graduation.
This does not mean that I know nothing at all about contraceptives and sex or that kissing leads
to babies. Our health classes are required to teach us about certain things however I did not know
the correct way to put on a condom until this video. I saw a picture of a diseased penis before I
saw what a condom looked like in person. If you are to ask teenagers about the forms of birth
control available they would tell you about condoms and the birth control pill. They may say
something about the morning after pill but that is not technically contraception. Many do not
know what an IUD looks like or what a diaphragm is and how use it. Most teens do not know
how to properly use contraception either or that even at its best contraception still has a fifteen
percent fail rate.

What I really learned from my sex education in school is all the guilt and stigma
surrounding it, especially for girls. Dont get me wrong it was an all-girls high school but in
everything it seems that girls are the ones who get a bad rap when it comes to sex. One of the
informational videos John Oliver showed had a married couple using a pair of ripped up sneakers
as a metaphor for the brides virginity. The husband makes nasty comments about the entire
football team wearing the sneakers and how she should have kept them in nice condition for him.
(Oliver)
The sex education talk I remember most from high school was in my sophomore year
religion class. My teacher had three cups: a Styrofoam cup, a ceramic mug, and an antique china
tea cup. Girls that have a lot of careless sex were the Styrofoam cup, good for a cup of coffee but
ultimately thrown out. Girls that have sex and then decide to be born again virgins or girls that do
not have random sex were the ceramic mug, liked and well used. Virgins until marriage were the
tea cup, special, cherished, and only used on special occasions. Once you had premarital sex, you
could no longer be the teacup. At the time this upset me and a lot of the girls in my class,
especially those that had already lost their virginity. She basically told a bunch of fifteen and
sixteen year old girls that if they were no longer virgins, then they were no longer special. Now it
just makes me angry and makes me wish that I had spoken up in class and said something about
it no matter what the consequences would have been. We were not the first class who was given
this comparison and we were not the last. I know that three years later my sisters class received
the same lecture.
Why do we have such terrible sex education in America? It is actually not regulated by
the government, but the state. It actually varies from school to school for the most part. Only
twenty-two states mandate that sex education be taught, and only thirteen of these states require

that it be medically accurate. (Oliver) What is the point of sex education if it is not even
medically accurate? Does this mean that the government should set a standard for sex education
in schools? This is a two-faced question because there is seventy-five million dollars set aside to
encourage schools with funding for abstinence only curriculums. (Oliver) Mississippi has a
mandatory abstinence-only curriculum state wide. They also have the largest amount of teen
pregnancies in the entire country. This not the only state with this kind of data. Places that do not
teach about contraception or safe sex, usually have a higher number of teen pregnancies and
children born out of wedlock. While that does not determine causation it shows a correlation
between young parents and no information on birth control being taught.
I can tell you from an abstinence only education background, this does not work. I knew
plenty of girls in my high school who had sex and had pregnancy scares. There were two girls in
the grade below me that were not allowed to go to graduation because they were pregnant. I also
have heard stories from my grade school that a good amount of the girls in the two classes above
me have had children out of wedlock. While I do not know the surrounding circumstances, I do
know a family that had two of their daughters pregnant out of wedlock and I know that there was
no form of birth control talk in their home or school.
In the video, Oliver shows notes children wrote for a sex education talk. One of the notes
asked if it was okay to be gay. This made me think that any sex education curriculum there is
only refers to heterosexual sex. We do not explain that it is okay to be attracted to the same sex.
That this is who they are and they are not alone. If we did this, perhaps kids would come out
sooner and there would be less homosexual suicides due to their discomfort with themselves.
Another problem with disregarding homosexual sex is that no one thinks to tell homosexual
teens that they should use condoms because they cannot get pregnant. It does not occur to

anyone that AIDS was passed on generally by homosexual males. Gay or straight you can still
get a venereal disease.
Another topic that should be a part of the sex education is how to prevent sexual assault.
When I say this I dont mean handing out rape whistles and saying good luck ladies. I mean
teaching boys that just because you physically can take a girl doesnt mean you should. If she
does not consent or have the ability to consent to sex then then it is rape. People may argue that
we cannot condemn boys for something they would never do and there are many guys that would
never do that. With that in mind, John Oliver showed a clip where frat guys at Yale were saying
No means yes and yes means anal. (Oliver) I find that terrifying. There is no such thing as
nonconsensual sex: there is consensual sex or rape.
There is one thing from my religious sex education that I think we should teach students.
My junior year of high school I was introduced to the term natural family planning. It is a way to
track a womans cycle in order to either keep yourself from getting pregnant or become pregnant.
I believe that couple this with other forms of birth control it would reduce teenage pregnancies.
If sexually active teenagers know roughly the times they could get pregnant, they would
probably refrain from sex until they were in the clear.
The American education system uses guilt and scare tactics into keeping teens on the
right side of their clothes. I believe that I have thoroughly explained all of the guilt that can be
associated with premarital sex. So that means it is time to scare teenagers into not having sex.
This is done by using medical statistics to back up the problems with contraception without the
background. An example of this is teaching that condoms have a thirty percent failure rate. While
this is true, what is not mentioned is that this is usually do to the couples inconsistency on using
condoms or failing to use them correctly. (Chamberlain) This creates a cycle. By not teaching

children about proper condom usage they are causing the statistic they use to justify abstinenceonly education. I am not saying that we should not talk about the risks, that is the whole point of
sex education. We should inform teenagers of the possible failures in birth control so that they
can make the decision on what is best for them as sexual safe adults.
We believe that by scaring and guilting teens, they will refrain from sex. This does one of
two things. Either teenagers want to have sex even more, since it is forbidden and taboo or even
when they are married they feel guilty and wrong for having sex. They then pass on the same
notion that sex is dirty and should be kept a secret to their children. If we change the image of
sex to something that can be healthy and normal, we destroy the stigma surrounding it and
without the stigma, teaching about safe sex rather than abstinence is more likely to be expected.
Another belief is that if we taught about sex and contraception, then we might as well
rent the after-prom hotel suite too. What lawmakers fail to realize, is that whether or not you
inform teenagers about safe sex and contraception, they are still going to end up in room 213
actually they are more than likely. In a study conducted it was shown that students that were
given all of the facts regarding the decision to become sexually active are more likely to put off
having sex. (Kohler)
Whether we like it or not, humans are sexual creatures and we have a choice. We could
either bury our heads in the sand and allow teenagers to ruin their life over knowledge that is
being withheld from them or we could teach them what they need to know in order to be healthy
sexual beings. Oliver makes a point that I believe is a good place to end on: We would not teach
false information in other subjects. We do not tell children that they can fly, we tell them that
gravity will pull them down. So why are we doing this with hormonal teenagers?