We need to talk about sex

When I think of sex education, I think of a woefully ill-equipped PE teacher beating me and my temporarily segregated female peers around the head with a key presiding fact: pre-ejaculation WILL get us pregnant. That’s all of us, by the way, every single one, and if we were audacious enough to think perhaps it might not, this burly, cargo-trousered long jump enthusiast was here to tell us something: we were wrong.

Shock and horror pervades the room. I used Jacob’s sharpener the other day. What if he, like, pre-ejaculated on it? Am I… ​pregnant?

When I think of sex education, I think fear-mongering. This is how you’ll end up with a baby at twelve! Herpes is for life!

But did I know what consent meant? No. Did I understand that heterosexuality wasn’t the ‘norm’, and homosexuality not a subversion of that norm? No. I knew plenty about the morbid dangers of male pre-ejaculation, sure, but did I realise that women could ejaculate at all, ever? Nope. I could go on — about girls growing up devoid of the knowledge that sex doesn’t have to play out like porn, that your genitals don’t define your gender, that not every vulva is neatly tucked in, and that actually, contrary to popular belief, having infant children exit one’s body is ​not the sole purpose of a woman’s sexual existence. But it gets too depressing.

It may be worthy of note, too, that I was one of a select few female students at my school who benefitted from extra sex education. Sextraducation, if you will (which I truly hope you won’t). I can only assume they weeded out the ones they suspected were most likely to become sexually active first – my skirt was the length of half a toothpick, to be fair – and between us we congregated one lunchtime per week, every other week, to put condoms on cucumbers and chant sinisterly in a circle around a Microgynon centrepiece.

The point being, in spite of all of that, here I was still clueless to my core. And yet I suppose I’m lucky, in a way, that I got a sex education at all. Only in 2020 is sex education becoming compulsory in schools; worse ​still,​ there are people who are not happy about that. When the news broke, tabloid headlines had a field day; heated debate erupted across social media and parenting forums, considerable numbers of people apparently outraged by the idea that a child as young as four​ ​should be spoken to about, you know, ​that.​

Possibly scared of a backlash, the Conservatives are already falling short of their initial promises, and the curriculum is not even in place. Online porn was posited as a primary reason for the change — a very welcome one, at that — and yet now, it’s referenced only in the middle of a vast list of topics that schools might, potentially, ‘for example’, wish to teach. But don’t panic! Not all is lost! Because in a press release from the Department of Education, we’re told that the curriculum now includes ‘LGBT issues’. Okay, so it may not validate the LGBT community’s existence as a standard part of society from the get-go — but it will, at some random, isolated stage on a Tuesday afternoon, acknowledge their ​issues​. Hallelujah.

I know that I didn’t get the sex education I really needed — that all young people need — until I went to a decidedly liberal and predominantly middle-class Russell Group university. A university where the Feminist Society thrived, and where my women’s literature modules required me to deconstruct how sexuality functions in society. But what about all those that don’t benefit from such glaring privilege? Where will they learn?

Granted, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, these conversations are becoming more prolific every day. But it’s not enough. Hindsight is not enough. Only when we educate children properly, from the outset, with everything we’ve collectively realised post-Weinstein, can we achieve a world where fewer women are abused and fewer men abuse.

Likewise, only when we teach children that the LGBT community does not orbit around heterosexuality — that transgenderism does not orbit around cisgenderism — can we achieve a world where different people exist together, no one more valid than the other.