The Blowfish Blog

[Caught in the Net] Summer School

Perhaps this is a strange time to be thinking about education, since school’s out for the summer, but I believe learning is a lifelong endeavor, so prepare to receive some knowledge:

Shockingly, it turns out that abstinence-only sex education doesn’t stop teenagers from having sex. At all. They have just as much sex as their better-educated classmates. The study also says that students who only learn about abstinence in school — and not, say, condoms — don’t necessarily engage in riskier behaviors than their better-informed counterparts, which is surprising and heartening. Then again, it’s not like teenagers these days can only learn about sex from their teachers and their ill-informed peers and those magazines dad hides in the back of the closet — with the internet, you can learn all sorts of useful things about sex, and as long as you know how to delete your history and clear your cache, mom and dad need never know. The internet can also help you find many useless, but titillating, things. But I’ll get to that later.

While we’re on the subject of sex ed, there’s an interesting comment thread at the Midwest Teen Sex Show (not as prurient as it sounds), where various students chime in to answer the questions “Does your school offer sex education? What sort of topics are they covering? Are you learning?” The answers vary pretty wildly — from just being told “Don’t have sex! Ever! Sex bad!” to frank demonstrations of how to use condoms and explanations of various STDs — and include answers from assorted countries. It’s a nice random sampling that might give you some idea of what a confused mess sex ed is.

Things get a little better once you get to college. Why, at Columbia University, there’s even the occasional lecture on using sex toys to improve your sex life, where a representative from a sex toy company comes under the auspices of the school’s Health Promotion Program to teach kids about the joys of things that vibrate and rotate and inflate. Learning is fun!

Hmm. I appear to have devoted this entire column to links that provide you only with pages of words. I’ll rectify that. First, an illustrated math problem from a Korean textbook (which you can see at the top of the column above), translated and explained — it does indeed recommend the use of trigonometry to determine whether or not it’s safe to sneak a look up the skirt of the girl sitting across from you on the train. Who says you never use that kind of math in real life?

And, finally, simply and without attribution, courtesy of the Sexoteric blog: A photo of a row of Asian schoolgirls standing up with their panties down around their knees. Sex education is so much more sophisticated in other countries . . .

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 30 July 2008 at 10:40 am and is filed under Caught in the Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.