In the 2004 film Mean Girls, Lindsay Lohan's character Cady misses her health class on the first day of school. As one shot of the classroom shows, all Cady missed that day was the gym coach yelling about how sex will lead to pregnancy, venereal diseases, and death. After his rant, he halfheartedly offers some condoms to the class. End of lesson.

Although the scene is meant to be humorous, it is not too far off from the abstinence-only sex education programs that so many states still have. In fact, Coach Carr's offer of condoms to his students may actually go one step further than the education students receive nation-wide.

In addition to the lack of comprehensive sex education, or education that includes information often left out of sex ed like birth control methods, only 24 states require that schools teach any type of sex ed curriculum. Of those, only 20 states require that information presented in sex ed classes be medically accurate.

Many school systems take the abstinence-only curriculum to the extreme by using scare tactics to try and scare teens away from having sex. In fact, abstinence-only curriculum is centered around the idea that a person's decision to have sex outside of a monogamous, heterosexual marriage will have repercussions for not only the individual, but their family and community as well. In order to reinforce this idea, classrooms emphasize STI's and unwanted pregnancies as a result of sex outside of marriage. So basically, "if you have sex, you will get pregnant, and die." Sound familiar?

The flip side of this narrow sex ed curriculum is that it makes those who choose not to be abstinent feel less valuable. Not to mention survivors of sexual assault, who may feel guilty because they have been taught that any sexual activity before marriage is wrong. Harmful demonstrations, such as comparing a woman to a piece of tape who loses her "stickiness" after being stuck to many different surfaces, devalue people, and especially women, who have sex outside of marriage.

Sexual assault is a glaring issue in our country, in part due to the lack of comprehensive education including topics such as consent. In my personal experience, consent was not a facet of sex that I was formally taught until college. Since over half of sexual assaults occur in the 18-34 age range, waiting so late to discuss consent is incredibly irresponsible.

Sure, some children will receive the information they need to have a healthy sexuality from their parents or other trusted adults, but many do not have that conversation at all, and rely on their peers and the school system for information. The information teens receive from schools focuses solely on negative aspects of sexuality, without educating students about the many existing options to prevent possible consequences. When this information coincides with the constant flow of sexualized images in the media, you can see how teens can become incredibly confused, and make ill-informed decisions.

The United States' sex education curriculum requires massive reform. With the state of disarray that the United State's schools' sexual education programs are in, Cady was probably better off missing that one day of health class than her classmates who were present, and that doesn't look great for the up-and-coming generation who so desperately need this education.