Janaye Henry looks back on what she was – and more importantly wasn’t – taught about sex in high school, and asks whether today’s teens are getting a better deal.
Sex education when I was at school felt… off book. It seemed as if a random PE teacher lost some bet in the staffroom and was being forced to teach us about condoms and virginity.
Let’s paint the picture. The year is 2011, the scent of Lynx Africa is thick in the air and TikTok was simply a song by Kesha. A supplementary sex education lesson is being taught at my very public school by two religious people. One is a white man with dreadlocks and no shoes. He asks us to self-sort into groups of “have had sex”, “will have sex soon”, “won’t have sex for a while”. This is a lose-lose social situation that didn’t change the lesson at all – we all heard the same stuff.
We got told about condoms, teen pregnancy, we watched a water birth (gorgeous) and I remember being told sex hurts and you will bleed. When I think back a lot of the teachings feel downright dangerous and they were being presented to us as cold hard truths. We didn’t talk about sexuality or gender, which seems like a huge chunk to miss. We did spend a week talking about wet dreams, and until recently I genuinely thought those with penises were plagued with wet dreams multiple times a week and lived in constant sheet-washing agony. Apparently that’s not the case, turns out my teacher just had a lot to say about wet dreams.
Recently I got to tour New Zealand with Sexwise and teach sex education through theatre for a few months. Sexwise is by no means a replacement for sex education, we are supplementary. We tour different high schools, locked facilities, teen pregnancy units, alternative education, YMCAs – basically if you want us, we’ll go. It’s a two-part programme, the first part a one-hour show with four actors who have various different conversations pertaining to sexual health. It’s the obvious ones like STIs, porn, condoms etc, but we also get into the other things that feed into sexual health too – identities, red flags, green flags, pleasure, gender, sexualities. The second part is a workshop where we hot-seat the characters to ask them questions, and learn more about the issues. We follow the students’ lead and answer the questions they have.
The biggest difference I noticed while doing this work compared to what I was taught is we teach about all kinds of sex, not just penis and vagina. When we cut rangatahi off from being able to ask the questions they want to ask, we risk putting students in vulnerable situations where they are relying on the internet to give them all the answers. While many answers do exist somewhere on the internet, it’s hard to know what sources are trustworthy (this is an over-explained version of me trying to say porn). When we leave students in the dark, often they turn to porn and are watching a version of sex which isn’t necessarily realistic.
Another side effect of only teaching penis and vagina sex is it mystifies what queer sex is, and that mystery can lead to a lot of homophobic comments in school. Alienating a type of sex people have and making it “inappropriate” to teach is actively harmful and places a weird value system on sex. We got to see first hand how educating often leads to a better understanding and acceptance of queerness.
Sex education can look like many different things – it depends what your primary goal is. Do we want a generation of teens who know what a healthy relationship looks like and have the tools to communicate freely? Or are we simply trying to stop teens getting each other pregnant? I’ve had a read of the current sex education curriculum and it’s genuinely good, all the right things are in there. If that information isn’t getting passed on to teens, I think it’s more a question about resources and equipping teachers with the right tools to be able to do their jobs.
Oh, and I think that same water birth video is still going strong.