After writing the “Let’s Talk About Sex” post, and a few Girl Scout Cookies, I imagined a brief scenario…
The setting: 30 minutes into an 8th Grade Health Class at a remedial school
The teacher: A filter free version of myself, which is kinda scary because my filter is pretty loose as is.
The Class: Filled with barely literate kids.
If you decide to read further past this image, that’s on you. 🙂
Let’s go
Mr. Pipes – Alright enough free study, today we’re supposed to discuss prophylactics and STD’s (writes these words on the board)
Jimmie – STD’s, you mean studs?
Mr. Pipes – No, those are girls with goatees and 1990’s sized basketball shorts. STD’s are diseases you get from making love.
Rachel – You can get a disease from making love?
Ramone – Hell yeah you can, my dad said he used to get amnesia every time he made love.
Carl – Wait, how do you even make love?
Mr. Pipes – (two hand points at his own crotch) You take your genitals and combine them with someone else’s genitals and bam, you’ve made love.
Rachel – No way! I love my grandma and that’s not how we love each other.
Mr. Pipes – I sure as hell hope not Rachel, make love is just a stupid term for sex.
Carl – So why call it make love?
Mr. Pipes – Because that’s how songs covered it up back in the day to get radio play. It wasn’t like today where it’s ok for female rappers to brag about their vaginal viscosity. Listen to some old music, every time you hear love, replace it with sex and it’ll make more sense.
Mike – So what are pro-fi-lack-tiss?
Mr. Pipes – corrects his pronunciation Pro-fa-lack-ticks…and they’re items or drugs to prevent certain diseases and pregnancy.
Rachel – Like what?
Mr. Pipes – Like Rubbers and birth control, things your parents couldn’t afford apparently.
Ramone – So how many diseases you got Mr. Pipes?
Mr. Pipes – None at the moment, I’ll let you know after parent teacher conference day if it stays that way.
(The class fills with Ooohs and Aaaahs)
Mr. Pipes – Look just open your books to page 68 so we can actually make progress today.
(kids see graphic picture of genital herpes)
Jimmie – Aw hell naw! I can’t rock with this.
Mr. Pipes – Jimmie, you aren’t the type of kid that needs to worry about any of this yet. If you were cooler, maybe, but you’re you, so you’re good.
(Bell rings, kids get up immediately while laughing at Jimmie)
End Scenario
Clearly kids are exposed to sexual content more now than ever, so it’s unlikely that any modern kid above the age of 6 outside of the Amish community would be this clueless. Thinking back to my 8th grade health class, I don’t believe there was much useful information given to us. We got the disease highlights, rubbers, and abstinence. I guess they figured that was necessary to balance out all of the 1990’s R&B songs we had. Hopefully things are better these days. Guess I’ll find out when my daughter gets to 8th grade.
If nothing else, the main takeaway from this post that I hope gets across is, let’s call ‘Sex’ what it is. Kids are naturally curious about sex so avoiding the talk or calling sex different things is counterproductive. Renaming it hasn’t slowed teen pregnancy or prevented kids from doing it. If anything, it probably caused a lot of confusion about what love is, primarily for girls that listened to love songs. Which probably led to more of them having sex just to keep their boyfriends interested and “in love” with them.
I don’t know, maybe I’m over thinking it, or the Girl Scout cookies have just gotten to me. Probably both. Either way, I think we’d benefit as a society from more open, mature conversations about sex.