Like my title? It got your attention didn’t it? It did that for two very opposite reasons that make no sense. For one, as I’m sure many of you have heard before “Sex Sells” and two, in our lovely country, openly talking about sex is unnatural and tends to make people uncomfortable. So for something so common that the majority of people either have or eventually will, why can’t we openly talk about sex? There is a long list of reasons such as America’s obsession with being perceived as pure and untouched, religion, double standards, and the way we are taught in high school about what sex is. Don’t get me wrong, being a virgin or abstaining from sex for religious reasons is perfectly fine, but it doesn’t work for everyone and we shouldn’t act as if it does. Now, I’m not here to address everything that’s wrong with our sex culture, but I am going to rant about my two biggest issues I have with it and how it helps no one. The way we teach teenagers about sex and the double standards between men and women about sex.
In high school, usually in 10th grade, every high school student has to take health class. What part of this class tried to explain to us the things that were occurring in our body and how normal changing at this time is? Sexual education! A topic that could probably use its own class in order to cover everything that young adults should know if they feel the urge to act on their raging hormones or find someone they think is “the one”. Instead of thoroughly going over a topic that is very normal and can have multiple lasting effects on you and your health, public schools usually cover this in depth topic in a week, barely brushing over the surface.
They somehow neglect the essentials about how it happens, what to expect, all the different forms of it, all the ways to properly protect yourself against pregnancy and STI’s, what actions to take if you believe you are pregnant or have an STI, the importance of consent. I could probably go on forever about what sex education in public schools doesn’t cover, but somehow they manage focus an entire week on 3 main concepts: don’t have sex, if you do have sex you will more than likely catch an STI and/or get pregnant, and your life as you know it will be over. It is a proven fact that abstinence is not going to be a solution for all teenagers, not even a majority or even half. I tried to find a percentage for you but my web browser was flooded by websites stating “How Abstinence Until Marriage is the Best Message for Teens” but if it were, would the United States rank first in teenage pregnancies among developed countries?
Now I’m not saying abstinence is wrong for everyone, but what I am saying is that for the students who choose not to, they should have some idea of what they are getting into. I went to a very progressive high school where the majority of the students were very open about their sexuality; we even had a cross dress day for spirit week. Even in my progressive high school, we only had abstinence-based sex-ed. Fortunately, we had a counselor who was well aware that we all deserved a more in depth sexual education and she took it upon herself to teach us everything she could to prepare us for the day we may decide to have sex. I had friends in my hometown who weren’t so lucky and not long after they graduated, they began a family. Can we all see how poor sex-ed harms the sex culture of teenagers yet? I sure hope so.
Now onto the other part of our sex culture that ticks me off more than anything else, the way men and women are taught to handle their sexuality. Every day in the media we are blasted with hyper sexualized images of both men and women, but most of the time it’s women. We are used as a sexual object to sell everything from clothes to cheeseburgers because women are seen as objects of sexual gratification where men just aren’t. You wouldn’t put a man in a bathing suit on a cheeseburger commercial to make people want to buy the food. You just wouldn’t. That’s because all sexual ads are aimed towards pleasing men and making women idealize the scantily clad women. Women should want to be sexy to attract men and men should want to be pleased. Those two different views about sexuality cause so many problems.
Women who are seen as sexy and are okay with it usually are judged and seen as a “slut” by the rest of society, but if a woman abstains from sex and turns a man down she’s seen as a “prude” by men but apparently that is better than a “slut”. Women just can't win. On the other hand if a man sleeps around and is open about it he should be proud, but if he abstains from sex he should also be proud for saving himself. Another huge problem is the way each gender considers their first time. Even in high school's sex-ed they tell women that giving away your virginity is something you can never get back and you lose a part of yourself, guys not so much.
These ways of viewing sex is what fuels rape culture. Women fear telling because they will no longer be viewed as pure and that makes it their fault, and men fear telling because if men are supposed to aim for sex how did she rape you since you probably wanted it in the first place. Both victims, regardless of gender, feel like it’s their fault because of their gender-based views on sexuality. It allows rapists to get away with rape and it makes it hard to tell what is considered rape. The internet has been flooded with videos on how to tell if someone is giving you their consent or not. Sometimes it says consent is sexy, trying to make it seem cooler for guys to ask for it. Even with it being a yes or no question, somehow the line still seems to get blurred and rapists get by with a slap on the wrist.
What bothers me even more than the fact that we lack a decent sex-ed in this country or the fact that men and women are taught to view sex differently, is that we all know this. Everyone has heard about how poor our sexual education is and once you have had sex even once, you begin to understand how bad it really is. As an adult, pretty much anyone can witness how men and women have different relationships with their sexuality. We are all aware of these glaring problems and we all know how they harm everyone later in life, but no one seems to want to change it. I will admit that I believe that millennials are a little more open about their sexuality, but even with that we still struggle to make being comfortable with your sexuality a norm. Only then can we begin to fix these problems in our uninformed country.
