The future of sex education: Academic environments

Sex in the future will improve as both primary and secondary schools become more robustly informative with respect to sex education, both for enjoyment and also for abuse prevention.

As a culture, we have somehow managed to create a public education system that ostensibly offers “sexual education” without ever mentioning that sex is supposed to feel good. We teach about the mechanics of pregnancy and STI transmission, but only to the extent of advising our children to abstain or use protection (and queer sex is right out!). Even at the college level, we teach sex by way of surveys and statistics. Any “study” of positions and techniques is largely relegated to the Curiosities drawer of the Literature department.

I want to see a college start teaching classes on how to have good sex, not just using sex as a lure to covertly teach microbiology. I say this as someone whose sex column largely takes the form of thinly-veiled leftism and trauma therapy, but even this is a symptom: I got this column by promising my editor I’d stick to “facts, not acts” when discussing the deed. However much I’d like to keep a lurid public diary of my wild life, if I’m not getting paid to do it then I’m just showing off. Nobody likes a show-off.

C&I4C&I: Curriculum & Instruction for Coitus & Intimacy

What would a college class on good sex look like? Most Kinesiology and Recreation departments have classes on specific sports, such as bowling and disc golf, and these classes largely involve simply playing the sport while being coached by the instructor. I imagine sex classes would look similar to these, including the wink-and-nod cultural regard that these aren’t “real” classes. So we have academic merit in the bag by the magic of precedent and the transitive property, and anyone who objects is just special pleading.

After merit is rigor. I can say firsthand that I took bowling and ditched it most days, but still got an A. Something tells me that chronic class-cutters wouldn’t ditch the good sex class, though. So if anybody has objections based on academic rigor, then just keep in mind we have college-level bowling classes as a basis for comparison, and I am aware of no national uproar over their academic laxity. And if you want to object that “bowling never got anyone pregnant,” then you’ve clearly never seen The Big Lebowski, and also you don’t know what college is like for lots of folks.

That established, I envision such a course starting with a brief lecture on the structure of the class, followed by icebreaker and trust-building activities. There would also be the obligatory decree you find in every syllabus, that text about honesty and extenuating circumstances that basically gives your professor arbitrary powers in the event of shenanigans. It might need to be worded more strongly for sex class, but it could still be short and sweet.

Consider: “This class does not entitle you to sex, it entitles you to sexual instruction. In order to receive this instruction, you must take it as given. Any verbal pushback to instruction during sexual demonstrations will result in dismissal for the day on first offense, and permanent expulsion for the second. Any physical pushback will result in immediate expulsion. To participate in this class, you must listen to everything you are told and do as you are told, or you cannot be here.”

The end of the first day would probably involve signing some carefully-worded waivers, followed by a demonstration by the TAs. Day two would then be the academic equivalent of a vibe-check over coffee, where students basically speed date to pair with buddies, and anyone who ends up stranded gets assigned to a TA (the TAs would be people like me), ending with some intimacy-escalation activities. Then on day three, the exercises per se would commence.

What exercises? That’s for actual professors to design. I’m not here to do in-depth C&I, but to sketch a possible future. And I think our future possibly holds classes where college students are taught in-person how to be good to each other in bed. And anyone who doesn’t want to fuck for a grade? Do the same thing as the folks who don’t want to bowl for a grade: take something different.

High schools and parents and teen sex, oh my!

One more challenging problem is that, if you take high-schoolers from a sex-negative culture and put them in college sex classes, they’ll probably freak out. That means we can’t start our “good sex ed” in college. We need to plant the seed earlier. High school brings a set of complications all its own, though: not only do we have boards of busybodies who are elected seemingly on any basis other than educational acumen, to which administrators are beholden, but we also must contend with parents who bring all their prejudices to the table and get offended whenever it’s suggested they can’t copy-paste their entire upbringing onto a new body.

No high school staff, however adamant, can openly defy their board and their parents and remain employed in the district, especially when it comes to sex. We can accept that reality and then say that it will have to be an iterative process, wherein we add a little more detail and a little more encouragement each year. This isn’t grooming—you groom an individual, while you acculturate a population.

I don’t envision high schoolers having live coached sex in class, because that’s ridiculous, even to me. And once you take out the sex coaching, I think the high school version would be broadly similar to the college version. Both would be about cultivating safe and sex-positive attitudes, both would instill the idea that we shouldn’t accept mediocre sex, both would illustrate that partnerships should be mutual efforts and not one person being the other’s doormat (especially in bed, but also generally).

Most importantly, both would teach the warning signs that someone is an abuser, and this brings us to the stickiest wicket of them all.

K-5: No more jokes

Here we get to bedrock and I don’t have the patience to build this case so I’m just going to state it outright: lots of people don’t want children to know what sexual abuse is, because they sexually abuse children and they don’t want the kids to stand up to it. Ignorance empowers abusers, and only abusers. It never protects victims.

We have lately been privy to a veritable flood of abuser arrests, almost exclusively white conservative men loudly and publicly spouting queerphobic rhetoric in public while allegedly participating in child abuse circles and sex trafficking rings. A social media presence called Reich Wing Watch documents and popularizes these arrests, memeifying them to juxtapose a mugshot with a representative sample of the accused’s public speech. So when we ask to teach kids about sex so they know how to report abuse, and a crowd shouts to “let kids be kids,” there are people in that crowd who are only there to maintain cover for their abusive activities.

Frankly, what makes this difficult is that we all want to “let kids be kids.” We do think that people deserve a carefree youth where they’re safe and happy. But not everybody gets to have that, and sometimes people who look like they’re safe and happy definitely aren’t. We’d all love to let our children blossom naturally and unimpeded. We also dearly wish that this natural and unimpeded blossoming would kindly wait until we as parents are comfortable with it—which it never will.

In my undergrad studies, I was privileged to serve as president of our college’s Secular Student Alliance chapter, during which time I got to attend Skepticon IV. I saw Greta Christina in person and nearly fangirled myself directly to the hospital (that’s not a joke, I almost fatally tripped down the hotel stairs), and I also saw Darrel Ray give his Sex and Secularism talk. You should watch that video because it’s fascinating, and I’m just bottom-lining it: studies show that abstinence-only education only delays a person’s first sexual activity by about 3.5 months. This holds across ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, geographical region, urban or rural environment, strict parents or lax. As he puts it: “Biology happens.”

“Biology happens,” and so does abuse

To put a finer point on it: teenagers will sometimes have sex with each other, and they cannot be meaningfully stopped from doing this. The good news is that you can’t mess that up, it’ll happen anyway; the bad news is that you can’t delay that, it’ll happen anyway. This is a hard pill to swallow for lots of folks.

Parents don’t want their kids learning about sex too early, because parents know how good it feels and don’t want their kids ruining their lives by having kids of their own before they’re ready. The problem is, if parents don’t teach their kids about sex, then their peers will, and they might not do as good of a job. My father tried his damnedest to prevent any sexy opportunities from arising in my teenage years—a literally impossible task, because he was trying to preserve my virginity for years, whereas I only had to give it away once. You can timetable a date as strictly as you like, but if nobody else is watching the last screening of an obscure film, then two minors can have an entire theater all to themselves for hours in the dark.

It doesn’t even take a movie theater. I once knew a woman who had grown up a teacher’s daughter, and she’d often retrieve her boyfriend from class “for help” doing something for her dad. They always did the thing, but also used his keys to access secluded spaces and thereby have all the private time they wanted on school grounds. Nobody knew she was doing this, except her boyfriend, because she was a good girl who didn’t do those kinds of things.

I raise these points of childhood intimacy not to squick anyone out, but to underline Darrel Ray’s statistical point with anecdotal experience: biology happens and can never be stopped. Parents are simply not vigilant enough, and children have too much time on their hands for plotting and scheming purposes. (“We’re seeing the late screening of the obscure movie because she heard about it and is interested, it’s very psychological, I read a fascinating article about the cinematography in Flix magazine at the dentist the other day…”)

But there is one other kind of person who has plenty of time for plotting and scheming, who is just as interested in opportunities for childhood private time, and who thinks children are ready for adult experiences. We call those people predators. And so to keep children safe from predation, they need to know what sex is and what sexual abuse is, and they need the vocabulary and conceptual framework to clearly and plainly state what is happening to them if they are being abused. Because sometimes “Daddy hurt me touching my no-no spot last night” only means he helped wipe a little too firmly, and sometimes it means something much worse. Keeping this information from children will not help them, and will not delay their age of first sexual activity, we know that with statistical certainty; it will only help abusers take advantage of children’s ignorance, because the kids are satisfying their own curiosity with each other anyway.

So to anyone who’s still squeamish, I will close by saying one last time: keeping sex information from children never helps children, it only helps abusers, and it does nothing to delay the age of first sexual activity. This is why we need clear, comprehensive, and joyful sex ed for everyone of all ages: so children know why their privacy matters, and what to do if someone abuses them. If that doesn’t convince you, then I guess you’re free to be wrong, but please be advised also that you stand in very poor company. Your squeamishness is not worth making common cause with pedophiles, I promise.