Sex Sells Everywhere But the Classroom

We have all seen health classes in movies; those stereotypical classrooms with a chalkboard with "SEX ED" written in bold white letters and diagrams of the male and female sexual reproduction organs. Going into high school, I was fully mentally prepared to have to enter a classroom like this and awkwardly learn how put a condom on a banana. However, this was not my reality. My biology teacher briefly covered the main sexually transmitted diseases, some types of protection and then we carried on with our lessons about evolution.

In today’s fast paced society, where we can access an incredible amount of information with the click of a button, education has been changing, developing, and modifying itself to keep up. Specifically in the United States, the government is looking for ways to better the education of its civilians. However, little has been done since the late 20th century to improve sexual education for high school students. The government continues to fund abstinence education which is causing students to utilize their other source of information: the internet.

The Problem

Government Funding for Abstinence

In 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act was enacted to provide federal funding for abstinence-only sexual education ($50 million annually when it was first enacted). This type of education teaches students that “abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage [is] the expected standard” and “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects,” In 2007, the administration under Republican George W. Bush, requested $204 million to fund a new, but still, abstinence-only education. However, this time, they would preach that “’that the best life outcomes are more likely obtained if an individual abstains until marriage’ and prohibits them from ‘promoting or encouraging the use of any type of contraceptives outside of marriage.’” When democrat Barack Obama was elected, this number decreased and funding for “evidence-based adolescent pregnancy–prevention initiatives was expanded.” Our current president, Donald Trump, has once again shifted this number back to a staggering $277 million in favor of abstinence education. Hopefully, the repeating pattern is evident—abstinence-only sexual education versus strictly sexual education is more of Conservative ideal and vice versa for Liberal.

The education of our youth in being thrown around and should not be left to political parties with little concern about what works best. Sexual education has been evidentially supported and yet the government is still funding abstinence. According to Funding for Abstinence-Only Education and Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention: Does State Ideology Affect Outcomes, after studying states through a database between 1998 and 2016, the group of researchers determined that teenage birthrates increased in Conservative States. They also found that “adolescent pregnancy-prevention and sexuality education” (sexual education) reduced these rates in the same states . How can the government be providing us with abstinence-only education, when the cold hard facts prove that it is not necessarily the most effective means of arming us for the real world?

Pregnancies in the US 1999-2016

The fact that sexual education is better than abstinence education is not what is most aggravating about this topic; it is the fact that the United States remains having the highest teen pregnancy rates and nothing is being changed about our education. According to Adolescent Pregnancy, Birth, and Abortion Rates Across Countries: Levels and Recent Trends, although the teenage birth rates have been declining since 2007, we still have the highest rates out of 21 countries. Taking a step back and looking at what is so effective in other countries, could benefit the United States. Even just improving the system and educating students a little more (with already ample funding as demonstrated by Finer’s study), instead of worrying about the morals behind abstinence only education would help bring this rate down.

Turn Towards Media

This lack of sexual education has been causing teens to turn towards media to learn the information they are not attaining in school. Bruce E. Pinkleton and his team conducted a study that found on average, teenagers spend 8 hours a day using mass media and 86% cannot say that these role models on TV promote good sex decisions. We are awake for about 14 hours a day (at least I am) and over half of it is spent watching some kind of media. Wake up: check my phone. About to go to bed: check my phone one last time. Hours spent scrolling, not looking for anything in particular but finding and attaining mass amounts of new information.

Information that is not specifically taught in schools can be lost in translation when seen on the TV or Twitter, and this is super important when it is being related to sex. In the same study by Pinkleton, the number of sex related scenes that appear on television have “increased … 56% in 1998 to approximately 70% in 2005” and we are still using the same sex curriculum that was proposed in 1996. These images and scenes will leave any young onlooker lost and looking for answers – answers that cannot be found in the classroom.

Lack of Information

As I have already briefly covered, movies and television shows had gotten my hopes up for what was to come in my education. Based on Abstinence-Only Sex Education: College Students’ Evaluations and Responses, the current sex curriculum that is in high schools

An example of a television show that includes themes relating to sex is Netflix's "Sex Education."

does not include “birth control or STD prevention” which is leaving teens to turn towards mass media to teach themselves. If the number of times sex scenes appear have increased by over 14%, why can’t the government actually learn something from what is being aired. If we aren’t learning how to protect ourselves, we are bound to end up seeing the “improper” and “unsafe” way to go about sex if we are spending over half of our day using all forms of media. I don’t remember the last time I saw someone pull out a condom before a sex scene in a movie. To be fair, there are some that show a condom but it is not like it is an instructional video on how to make sure it is on properly and that it will not tear.

Because of this teenagers today only know about the sexually transmitted diseases that they could potentially contract, not how to prevent them. Left floundering, young men are actually beginning to copy what they see in pornographic videos. Cindy Gallop’s Ted Talk outlines her having sex with “much younger men” and a lot of the time, they do not treat her with respect and mimic actions that they have seen in these films. Gallop’s experiences are proving that these statistics aren’t just statistics. The lack of sexual education is actually affecting the younger generation of, in this case, men.

The Solution

21st Century Sexual Education

The sexual education that I am advocating includes teaching students how to use protection to save themselves from becoming pregnant and potentially transmitting sexually transmitted diseases. Other advocates of safer sexual education believe that “students should be taught age-appropriate, medically accurate information” so they can make informed decisions when it comes to sex.

Specifically, I would like a separate health class that is not integrated into biology. Biology teachers (especially if you take Advanced Placement) already have so many topics that they have to cover. A separate health class would allow time for different topics to be covered. These topics could include, but are not limited to, in depth coverage of the sexually transmitted diseases, types of protections, and how to use these protections. There have even been health classes that do not only focus on sexual education. They could also discuss other topics such as drugs. Many private schools already offer this kind of course, public schools are the ones lacking in this respect.

There are other benefits to a health class that includes sexual education rather than to just prevent teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. It has been found that sexual education actually empowers boys and girls to stand up against sexual violence. This would be due to the fact that they know when their sexual boundaries have been violated. When someone falls victim to sexual assault (which has become a very popular news topic), they would be more likely to speak up against their attackers because they would know for sure that they had been violated. Hence, helping the community, as a whole, against sexual predators.

It is unfair for the government to not give us the information we need to better ourselves and our communities. We are being left to learn from movies; maybe the government should watch any chick flick to see what a proper health class looks like. We must come together as a community to fight the injustice being forced upon us. We deserve a well-rounded sexual education.