violet, please please please consider interviewing the other side of this issue, especially on your blog, where you’re mostly preaching to the choir. i live in NORTH CAROLINA, for goddamn’s sake, and most of the young kids i know are getting a healthy dose of useful and non-xtian and very human sex education.

know thine enema :).

To put it more plainly, teaching Christian, Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, or other moral concepts in such a deracinated fashion outside of the ethical systems of which they are a part virtually guarantees they will fail if they weren’t already destined to.

The only kind of sex education that can possibly succeed in a (properly) value-free public educational environment is biological, mechanistic, practical instruction.

I’m a new reader, but I love the blog!

Well mom & dad… if someone told you to stop having sex – would you do it?

I can’t say that a very small part of that affected who I am now. School and my parents didn’t teach me shit about sex. While my peers turned to experimentation, I turned to the public library, and taught myself some shit. I read more books on human sexuality between the ages of 12-17 than I do now.

I knew what fisting was when I was 16. I knew what sounding was when I was 15. I could explain the male and female reproductive organs, what they did, and where they were by rote.

Thankfully, for me being told I couldn’t or wasn’t supposed to know about something made me run out and go bloody well learn about it. I also was lucky enough to have an awesome aunt who was a nurse to talk to about the technical things. (My parents discomfort extended to ignorance as well – my mother told me a tampon could get lost inside my body, and told me that I didn’t need to see a gynecologist until I got married. (Which, by the way, led me to three or four years of menstrual discomfort while I was dealing with an undiagnosed ovarian disorder. At 12 even *I* knew that I wasn’t supposed to have my first period for FOUR WEEKS. But no, I didn’t need a doctor…) )

As you can see, abstinence education along with parental idiocy has led me to be a little bitter towards the authority and parental figures who I had trusted to help educate me.

And, it didn’t work. Compare the case study of me and one of my sisters. She’s 21, I’m 24, and we both were offered the same sex education growing up.

She lost her virginity uncomfortably and probably not all that willingly at 14.
I lost my virginity at 19, and while the experience wasn’t pleasant, it was because the guy was a douche, not because I wasn’t physically or emotionally prepared, as I was.

I also masturbated in the time I wasn’t having sex so that I got to know my body and what I liked pretty well, and had orgasms.
My sister didn’t even know what an orgasm felt like, had to ask me to explain, and then, finally, I bought her a vibrator. (I also bought ‘em for my female cousins.)

She thought blue balls was real, and was talked in to giving quite a bit of unnecessary head. This went on until she was about 18, when a boyfriend clued her in.
I didn’t give any head that I didn’t want to give. When I blew someone, it was because I felt like it, I offered (or they asked) and we both were in on it.

When I became sexually active, I started going to the obgyn for a full STD panel and pap every six months, until I fell into monogamy and bad habits, and went just the once.
I don’t know her obgyn habits, but I’m pretty sure that until recently, they were not as good as they could be for a sexually active girl.

Just sayin’.

End rant.