If I remember my sex education correctly, sex is when a sperm faceplants an egg, and nine months later, a baby turns up. After this revelation, my 13-year-old classmates and I were shown a video of a birth, and then a woman none of us had ever seen before turned up to tell us how to insert a tampon. Just in case there were any outstanding questions, my parents sent me off with a copy of Usborne Facts of Life.
I was hoping things would have improved in the intervening 27 years, but, alas, as Sophia Smith Galer’s Losing It reveals, there is still a long way to go if we want young people to be not only sexually literate, but “sexually competent”. We are sending young people out into the world ill-equipped to navigate the maelstrom of hormones, online dating, pornography and misinformation they will encounter. What’s more, according to current studies, nearly 40 per cent of young women and 26 per cent of young men feel their first sexual experience didn’t happen “at the right time”.
To be sure, what is on offer today is considerably better than the frankly baffling information I received. Young people now learn about contraception and STIs, as well as pregnancy and how to avoid it – the “bugs and babies” approach, as Smith Galer calls it. By the time they leave secondary school, they are also meant to have been taught about sex online and in the media, sex and the law, how to “stay safe” and “respectful relationships”.
Oh, what I wouldn’t have given for just some of that information when Beverly McKenna managed to convince us Year Nines that you could get pregnant from sitting on a lavatory seat. But, as Smith Galer points out, none of this really prepares anyone for having sex. Teenagers might know how to roll a condom down a banana, but they have no idea “what it means to be in control and happy the first time we have sex”. Smith Galer argues that a sex education that is heavy on fact and light on feelings has done little to counter the truly damaging sexual scripts that continue to mess us all up – seven of which she locks horns with in her new book.
First up is “The Virginity Myth”, the belief that virginity is something quantifiable – and therefore valuable. This nonsense has been in cultural currency for thousands of years, giving rise to bogus “virginity tests”, purity pledges and the concept of a “bride price”. Reading through the anxiety-ridden testimonies collated by Smith Galer, it is clear that young women are still desperate to preserve their virginity, while young men are desperate to get rid of it; both equally tangled up in misplaced notions of shame.
