[HISTORICAL NOTE: And we’re back in Ozy Frantz’s blog reruns for some reason? IDK. Past Me is weird.]
[For Forward Thinking. See, this time I’m not writing it at the last minute so I can actually be in the blogaround thing!]
Giant-Ass Caveat: I am not a parent. The closest I’ve come to being a parent is teaching a girl scout troupe, occasional babysitting, and researching Montessori homeschooling. Actual parents should feel free to laugh at my idealism in the comments.
The prompt is “What would you tell teenagers about sex?” which I feel is already misguided. To me, sex education begins when children are very small.
Sex education begins with consent education and a fundamental respect for bodily autonomy. Obviously, for children, bodily autonomy cannot be inviolable (sorry, kid, you’re getting your vaccines no matter how much you protest) and if your child is very small then it’s difficult if not impossible to tell if they consent to be touched. But there are a lot of times in the average child’s life where they are forced to hug or talk to someone they’re scared of, or be tickled by their parents even when they’re screaming no, or otherwise have their consent violated for the amusement or convenience of their parents. How can we teach kids that no one should touch them without their consent if we touch them without their consent?
It’s also important, I think, to demystify sexual anatomy. It’s not “down there” or “your weewee,” it’s a “penis” or a “vulva.” Furthermore, while you’re explaining penises and vulvas, you can also take the opportunity to explain that some girls have penises, some boys have vulvas, and some people with penises or vulvas are neither girls nor boys.
I wouldn’t necessarily expect my children to come to me to talk about sex as they got older. Therefore, it would be important for my children to have access to adults who share my sexual values and whom they could ask questions of. (Those adults could also discreetly take my children shopping for a vibrator/dildo/Fleshlight/whatever, if my child wants one.) In return, I am happy to be the adult who answers questions for my friends’ children.
In addition, every child I have is getting a copy of What You Really, Really Want by Jaclyn Friedman around puberty, and a link to Scarleteen or whatever sex education websites are available at that time. Seriously. What You Really Really Want is fucking awesome, everyone should buy it for their teenagers and also for themselves, Jaclyn Friedman is my sex-positive feminist idol. [/plug]
If my children (or somebody else’s children) asked me about sex, this is what I would say. Not as a giant lecture though! Because dear God can you imagine getting from “what is sex?” to “condoms!” in one lecture? I imagine this would be spread out over multiple conversations, paced by the child’s interest and readiness.
For many people, touching their penis or vulva feels good. Because it feels good, sometimes people want to touch each other’s penis or vulva. There are lots of ways people can touch them. We call all the ways people can touch each others’ privates “sex.” Boys can have sex with boys, girls with girls, boys and girls with each other, and nonbinary people* with boys or girls or other nonbinary people. As long as everyone involved wants to have sex and likes each other, there is no wrong way to have sex.
One of the ways people can have sex can lead to having a baby. It’s when someone’s penis goes inside someone else’s vagina. When this happens, cells called sperm can come from the penis through the vagina and into the uterus, which is a space behind the vagina. Sperm cells combine with egg cells to form a fetus, which will grow into a baby.
When people have the kind of sex that leads to making a baby, they can use birth control medicine or put a condom over the penis to make sure they don’t have a baby. You shouldn’t have a baby unless you are ready to take care of it.
Some diseases called “STIs” are spread through having sex. Getting an STI doesn’t mean you’re dirty or bad, but you can still do things to make sure you don’t get sick. When you’re having sex, you should get tested regularly to make sure you don’t have STIs. If you use a condom or other barrier, the germs can’t spread.
You should absolutely not have sex unless you want to have sex. Remember how I said that people shouldn’t touch you unless you want them to? The same thing goes for sex. If someone is trying to get you to have sex you don’t want, tell me or another adult. Some adults are bad people who will try to get you to have sex you don’t want; if an adult is trying to get you to have sex with them, you should tell me or another adult.
Some people want to save sex until they get married or are in love; other people don’t. Some people never want to have sex at all. Whatever you do is fine, as long as it makes you and anyone you have sex with happy.
You shouldn’t have sex until you are ready to have sex. You shouldn’t have sex if you feel doubtful or about wanting sex, or if you’re uncomfortable or scared in any way, or if you’re trying to hold a relationship together or get something out of sex besides sex. You shouldn’t have sex if you’re not able to talk to your partner about what you like or don’t like. A lot of times people feel big emotions after sex– anything from disappointment to suddenly falling in love with their partner– and you should be prepared for those feelings when you have sex. If you feel like you want to have sex, you can talk to me or [Trusted Adult X] about birth control and STI prevention.
*They’re my kids, they’re going to know what a nonbinary is.
Thing of Things 
I really wish books like “What You Really Really Want” could be gender neutral. There’s nothing like that for boys. I (as a boy) wouldn’t have found such book helpful in my teens because I wasn’t the target audience.
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This post made me remember a discussion with my mother about Tristan and Iseult when I was 7 or 8 (I had found a non-cut-for-young-children version of the tale in a library). About consent, and my questions of how the love potion affected their decisions. It is surprising in retrospect how close the discussion was to the points you are making in your outline.
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This post slightly makes me wish I had kids, simply because of the level of sex ed I could give them. They’d’ve left behind the dull old human stuff by 5th grade, and be able to regale their classmates with tales of the true sexual weirdos: the invertebrates.
Personal favorite: Schizogamy, a practice of some polychaete worms in which part of their body buds off into a free-swimming sexual “epitoke” worm. The epitokes then release their eggs and sperm in mass spawning events and subsequently die, while the original worm never has to bother leaving home.
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“The prompt is “What would you tell teenagers about sex?” which I feel is already misguided. To me, sex education begins when children are very small.”
First off, you last point is dead on. That’s when it starts and it has nothing to do with telling them anything, it has to do with modeling the right behavior to them, and yes that includes a lot of snuggling. (The rumpy-humpy stuff can wait.)
Second, I’ve taught at the high school level and the very first rule is you don’t try to teach anything, the passe compose for instance, until you have engineered an adequate level of curiosity, usually by handing them a task they cannot o and have to depend on you to show them how. W=That means when it comes to sex you respectfully hear their questions and answer them as economically as possible so as not to waster their time with editorializing and trivia. It is hugely helpful if you treat romance with wry disdain, not because it deserves to be derided but because they need the breathing room, since it is breathing down their necks daily.
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There is also the problem of parental interference. At my middle and high schools, the sex ed classes were given by the biology professor and not given in a single block to limit avoidance. On the other hand, at my sister’s highschool, the biology teachers or the administration, I don’t know which of those, decided to say in advance when the sex ed part of the program was going to take place. As a result, a third of the students were “ill” that day. Very depressing, especially since the program is rather comprehensive in my country.
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Quote: “Getting an STI doesn’t mean you’re dirty or bad, but you can still do things to make sure you don’t get sick. ”
Humble suggestion – if you tell a kid, “it doesn’t mean your dirty or bad”, the thing they infer is “the fact that mom/dad is *saying* it’s not dirty or bad means someone else assumes it’s dirty or bad.” Kids are surprisingly savvy about this sort of thing and grasp subtext easily. The best way to prevent the kid from associating dirtiness or badness, is just not to mention dirtiness or badness.
A better way to approach this (IMO) is to relate it to something they already know that’s emotionally neutral – ie. an STI is like getting the flu, and just like you wash your hands to avoid spreading the flu germs, there are things you can do, etc.
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I think that’s pretty good, but one concern:
The tone sounds like you’re talking to quite a young (imaginary) child, and there’s nothing in it to prevent what I think would be the response of a normal curious child to it: “Cool! I want to try it!”
You warn against bad adults seeking to have sex with them, but don’t mention why they themselves might want to avoid seeking sex with other children or with adults.
I intend to emphasise to my kids that sex is something for grown-ups to do with other grown-ups, and even though it sounds fun, they’ll just have to wait.
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That sounds likely to backfire — telling kids something is for grown-ups is an excellent way to make it sound appealing — and it’s also untrue, because in practice most people don’t wait until adulthood to start having sex. Why not just explain why it’s a good idea to wait?
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I’m not talking about teenagers, I’m talking about little kids. I pictured the intended audience for Ozy’s speech being about 5 or 6. Kids that age, IME, seem able to grasp that things like driving cars and drinking alcohol are for grown-ups (and, from their POV, there’s little difference between whether “grown-up” means 14, 16, 18, or whatever).
“Why not just explain why it’s a good idea to wait?”
That was meant to be the thrust of my comment (especially my second paragraph). That was what I felt was missing from Ozy’s post.
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I think you are looking at this from the perspective that there is sex, and then mentioning that one kind of sex makes babies. This leaves out a major element of what is covered in sex ed for pre teens – where did I come from within this family (or other caring situation). So sex ex would usually explain IVF, adoption artificial insemination, surrogacy, different kinds of family and so on.
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My daughters are as yet too young to be curious about sex, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about the topic. I don’t really have a plan as such; I just kind of intend to be as honest as I can when the topic comes up. In the meantime, one thing I *have* done is to make it a rule in our house that when someone says stop, we stop, period. Tickling is no exception; in fact it’s one of the main ways we introduced and reinforced the rule: just keep tickling until they say stop, and then *immediately stop*. If two kids are playing and one of them tells the other to stop and the other does not stop, the other gets in trouble because when someone says stop, we stop.
I might not be able to protect my girls from all the dangerous situations they’ll encounter sexually (and to some extent it’s not my job to try), but I hope at the very least to make it so that 1) if they say stop and whatever it doesn’t stop, they will know right away that something is deeply wrong and they should get the hell away from that situation, and 2) if someone won’t stop and they ask for help, authority figures will (or at least should) have their back.
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I like this rule.
Now, let me tell you about my cousins-but-effectively-brothers.
They are both boys who like to play rough.
One of them will scream “STOP!”. For a while, stopping actually happened. And by “for a while”, I mean “for several years”, sometimes by parental intervention, sometimes because the other would take it at face value.
Every single time, to this day, “STOP!” has been revealed to mean not “OMG THAT HURTS I DON’T WANNA PLEEEEASE”, so much as “I like to scream, especially when I’m losing. Also I hate losing; stop so I can start again literally within 5 seconds, and/or get you in trouble and/or get more attention, because I love all of these.”
Eventually–and by eventually, I mean after a good decade or so–everyone gave up and just ignored him unless the screams interrupted a movie or conversation or something. This has yet to prove a mistake.
I’m kinda terrified that the other one will fall back on this conditioning if he gets involved with someone who actually means it. I really don’t want to have to be the one to tell him that anyone who pulls that crap with regards to intimacy should be avoided. But knowing my parents, I probably will.
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As much as I appreciate the idea of living in a world where this type of sex ed can be widespread, I think there is an equally urgent problem of educating children you have not been able to raise your entire life and educating multiple children at once. The biggest problem that I have seen in sex ed ‘classrooms’ is that adults try to make sex sound exceedingly boring so that kids will not be interested in trying it when children already know enough from cultural exposure to know that is a lie. The audience is lost immediately when they think you have an agenda.
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“It’s also important, I think, to demystify sexual anatomy. It’s not “down there” or “your weewee,” it’s a “penis” or a “vulva.” ”
Yes, but please also teach common slang terms? I recall a couple of very embarrassing incidents from childhood that happened because I didn’t know that a “dick” was the same thing as a “penis”, or that “horny” meant something different then “crazy and hyperactive”
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