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Pornography shouldn't be a lesson plan.
By Michael Hollan — Written on Aug 11, 2015
How should sex education react to the modern world? More kids have access to the internet today than ever before — and the Internet has all of the porn.
According to a Belgian sexologist named Goedele Liekens, sex education should be more explicit. She's developed her own sex ed course and by clicking here, you can check out the test students have to take in order to pass the class.
Like most sex ed classes, it covers the biological aspects of sexual relationships, teaching students what everything is called and how everything works. She also includes homework assignments where students are told to shave their pubic hair, write about their sexual encounters, and examine their genitals in a mirror. This is supposed to counteract the effect that Internet pornography has on the students.
Now obviously, it's a bad idea to let teenagers learn about sex from pornography. Learning about sex from porn is like trying to train for the army by watching Rambo. Yes, today's kids have a much easier time accessing porn than any generation before and the way we talk to kids about sex has to change.
But Liekens wants to send teenage boys home and make them shave their pubic hair. That might not be the best method.
Plus, this woman comes across like she has a really unhealthy view of sex. It seems like she's taken her own insecurities and misconceptions and placed them on everyone else. Just because pornography makes her feel insecure doesn't mean everyone else has to.
As an example, she mentions that men often have nicknames for their genitalia. No, we don't. Maybe a few lunatics out there actually do but typically only fake people in bad movies are nicknaming their junk.
If Liekens is building her ideas of sex education on ideas like that, then she's basing it off of inaccurate information. While this she's worried that kids are learning about sex from pornography, she learned about sex from hacky comedies.
But the biggest issue with her method is that it assumes that every student is at the same point developmentally — and anyone that's lived through high school knows that that just isn’t true.
Imagine being being assigned to shave your pubic hair when you haven't started growing any yet. High school is full of embarrassing moments and this style of sex education wants to add even more embarrassment to being a late bloomer.
One of the assignments required the students to write out their ideal sexual encounter. She describes how the young boys' ideal sexual encounters always end up becoming extremely pornographic. Well, what did she expect?
Guess what? Teenage boys are kind of idiots, especially when it comes to sex. Just because they can't write good erotic fan fiction doesn't mean that there's anything wrong them.
Sex education is important. That doesn't mean it also has to become as pornographic as the Internet has. Seriously, most of the kids aren't going to listen to their teachers anyway.
