Let's Talk About Sex (ed) Baby
Sexual education is important, not only for our physical health and safety, such as the prevention of STIs and unwanted pregnancies, but also for our overall mental health and wellbeing. Sex education in Australian schools just isn’t cutting it. Words by The Rainbow Club | Illustration by Maria Dizazzo
Sure, maybe if you’re lucky and your school has the funding you get taught the basics. Almost everyone has nervously giggled their way through sliding a condom on a banana or filling out word searches naming all the different STIs. For the most part, you learnt that sex would lead to pregnancy, and depending on your school you might even have been taught – to quote Mean Girls – “don’t have sex, or
appalling. Consider how boring and mostly irrelevant your own sex ed classes were in high school. Maybe you didn’t have a partner, or had no interest in sex, or maybe your school just didn’t teach anything your parents already hadn’t told you about. You just kind of tuned it all out and sat through it with a glassy-eyed stare. Now, imagine that you were same-sex attracted,
you will get pregnant and die.”
or somewhere on the queer spectrum and couldn’t imagine any of this applying to you in any way because you knew you’d never be interested or engaging in ‘traditional’, aka penis-in-vagina, sex.
But did you learn anything you really wanted to know? Did you know that internal female condoms and dental dams exist? Or that virginity doesn’t physically exist, and that it does not in any way matter how many partners you’ve slept with? Or, most important of all, were you taught anything to do with negotiating consent and establishing healthy relationships and sexual boundaries? We could create an endless list of the things we’ve had to find out on our own, mostly through stumbling across educators such as Doctor Lindsay Doe, who presents videos on the YouTube channel Sexplanations, a channel which we highly recommend watching. The main point here isn’t about the negligent state of sexual education, although it is
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Edition 24 2018
It might be fair enough to assume that same-sex students can figure out the basics, but simply being left to figure out the basics isn’t good enough when it comes to our physical and mental health. Nor is it enough to expect us to do all the research for ourselves, especially for things they might be embarrassed or ashamed about. Leaving queer perspectives out of sex ed encourages the thought that there’s only one ‘right’ way to have sex, which isn’t remotely true and is not only harmful for the normalisation and acceptance of queer relationships, it is also harmful to anyone having a healthy attitude towards sex and sexuality in general.