A rant

This really bothered me. Yes, it’s cute and funny, but it’s also a lot of what’s wrong with our take on Sex Ed.

It’s Sexual Education, not How to keep teens from knocking each other up. Sure, this tactic would great for keeping kids who already understand how sex works from making babies, but there are girls out there that don’t know how they get pregnant, or don’t even know what their period is. There are boys that don’t understand how condoms actually work, who try the candy bar wrapper because they think it’ll work.

Let’s not even get started on STI’s and such, we’re talking basic reproductive facts. As basic as “That stuff that comes out of your penis has baby makings in it, and when you put it inside a girl, it can make a baby. It doesn’t matter if you’re standing, sitting, laying down, holding a penny between your legs or what – penis in vagina CAN make a baby, even if you pull out.” KIDS AREN’T BEING TAUGHT THAT.

Let alone a chance to explain to kids how their FEELINGS work –some of you might not identify with the biological bits you’ve got. Some of you might have undergone surgery as infants to make your body conform to male or female. Some of you will feel attracted to girls, or boys, or both, or neither AND ALL OF THIS IS NORMAL. Other people do it to, and no one tells these kids this.

This isn’t a coherent essay, well thought out and organized bullet point by bullet point, but it shouldn’t have to be, either. This should be BASIC COMMON SENSE, but no one is concerned with arming our future with common sense, or basic literacy, or the ability to count fucking change – we’re content to operate in an generational island, ignoring our pasts and our futures and largely our present as well.

This started as me just wanting to get something off my chest, but it’s burrowed its way down to touch a real issue that I apparently feel very strongly about. That fact right there – the fact that I didn’t even know I felt this strongly about this issue- is exactly my point. We’re trained to insulate ourselves from our thoughts and feelings, from the world around us and the world a million miles away and the world going on in the house next door – it’s a problem, and it’s a problem so big I don’t even know how to start tackling it.

I have no proposed solution, no game plan for correcting this hideous state, but for now, being aware of it is enough. As long as I don’t let myself sink back into numbness, as long as I remind myself to keep wracking my brain for a way to fix this, the problem will get better. I won’t go out and preach, I’ll live the solution by example, and teach it to those around me by my very interactions with them, and that is how this will be solved. By real people, making real changes every day. Little things, moment to moment, is how the world turns.