Put the Sex Back in Sex Ed

From Camille Paglia, at Time:

When public schools refuse to acknowledge gender differences, we betray boys and girls alike.

Fertility is the missing chapter in sex education. Sobering facts about women’s declining fertility after their 20s are being withheld from ambitious young women, who are propelled along a career track devised for men.

The refusal by public schools’ sex-education programs to acknowledge gender differences is betraying both boys and girls. The genders should be separated for sex counseling. It is absurd to avoid the harsh reality that boys have less to lose from casual serial sex than do girls, who risk pregnancy and whose future fertility can be compromised by disease. Boys need lessons in basic ethics and moral reasoning about sex (for example, not taking advantage of intoxicated dates), while girls must learn to distinguish sexual compliance from popularity.

Above all, girls need life-planning advice. Too often, sex education defines pregnancy as a pathology, for which the cure is abortion. Adolescent girls must think deeply about their ultimate aims and desires. If they want both children and a career, they should decide whether to have children early or late. There are pros, cons and trade-offs for each choice.

Unfortunately, sex education in the U.S. is a crazy quilt of haphazard programs. A national conversation is urgently needed for curricular standardization and public transparency. The present system is too vulnerable to political pressures from both the left and the right–and students are trapped in the middle....

Sex education has triggered recurrent controversy, partly because it is seen by religious conservatives as an instrument of secular cultural imperialism, undermining moral values. It’s time for liberals to admit that there is some truth to this and that public schools should not promulgate any ideology. The liberal response to conservatives’ demand for abstinence-only sex education has been to condemn the imposition of “fear and shame” on young people. But perhaps a bit more self-preserving fear and shame might be helpful in today’s hedonistic, media-saturated environment...

More.

The best sex educators are parents. I took my youngest son to his school's "guy's night out" when he was in fifth grade last year. They had one of the parents, who I think works with law enforcement, present a brief lecture on male puberty, with just a little about male reproductive organs. My kid had the part about erections on the brain for days. My wife and I were thinking our son could have easily held off on that lecture or another year or two. We of course talk about that stuff at home, but every child is different and consideration of your child's emotional and developmental maturity is important when considering having these discussions. My older son seemed to handle the "guy's night out" quite differently, and the school's presentation that year was much less explicit on male anatomy, and so forth. (And my wife and I don't have girls, so that's a whole 'nother bundle of issues to deal with.)