Sex Education

Horrified. That's how I remember my first exposure to sex education. I was ten or thereabouts, and hugely embarrassed as only a little boy can be.

Not that the boring presentation about all that stuff in which I had no interest bugged me. I was horrified at having to sit next to Karen Goodier. For a full forty minutes I was boxed in, with my mother on one side, and Karen's next to her, with no escape other than to disappear under the rows of chairs in front or behind. Believe me, I considered doing a crawl and a runner, to head out to something I understood and loved - the playground!

Karen was okay I s'pose, but the ignominy of my mates seeing me thigh to thigh with her might have led to merciless ragging later, especially as I was SO CLOSE to the parts of her shown in glorious detail on the screen.

Wombat loves Ka-ren, Wombat loves Ka-ren.

It was bad enough seeing cutaway pictures of my own parts, surely she was cringing at her private architecture's public revealing?

What's more my penis didn't look like the one in the presentation. Mine wasn't nearly that big (why do they show men's dicks to boys?) and I am circumcised, so even the shape was different.

Sigh.

Like so much we take for granted, this stuff is misnamed. What Karen and I were subjected to here was Reproductive Education, not Sex Education. Why do we insist on conflating the biology - the organs and blood - with the abstract and emotional, which is all in the mind?

They are not the same thing. Even ten year-old boys understand that.




For one result of this kind of Sex-Ed. [link]