Sex education is a joke in the United States, especially here in Texas. Why is it so hard to talk about sex? We have so many songs about it, it is so ingrained into pop-culture, why can’t we talk about it in school?
Texan schools have adopted an “abstinence only” policy with its sex education, and legally Texan sex education is only required to talk about HIV and AIDS. Which means you get programs like this:
A state required to teach about HIV and AIDS doesn’t even have to mention the existence of homosexuals, who are more likely to be affected by these diseases. According to the CDC, gay men make up 67 percent of new HIV cases. You would think that a state preaching celibacy would be excited to teach about asexuality and aromanticism, but that is not the case. Matter of fact, several students have reported not being told about condoms, they were just told about the dangers of sex, but the teacher conveniently left out the part about how easy it is to protect one’s self from these diseases.
Degradation is how the message of abstinence is preached. Many sex ed teachers in Texas explain to the impressionable youth that the number of partners they have negatively correlates with their self worth. Students who have had to go through sexual education in Texas have reported having to spit into a glass of water (with the rest of the class), to have a teacher explain that the spit is representative of each person one may choose to sleep with, and the water would be that person. The more people that spit in the water (sleep with you), the less other people want to drink the water (or have sex with you). Other students remember being compared to a piece of gum; once someone chews it up, no one will want it. How can we justify having someone tell our students that if they have sex, they are worthless and used? Our students aren’t gum, they aren’t water, they are people!
(This is an actual lesson plan from a Texan state approved health textbook)
It should be no surprise that with such poor techniques, Texas is a national leader in teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases as reported by the CDC. These scare tactics are not working. Since we cannot expect it to work, students should be made more aware of what options exist for them. Contraception should be talked about accurately.
