Teaching Good Sex
I try not to just copy and paste articles that I like to read into my blog. But this article was too good not to.
In it, Laurie Abraham writes about a sex ed program being conducted in a Philadelphia high school that is meant to teach kids about sex, looking at both the negative and the positive sides of it. The article brings up the idea of “disaster prevention,” what most sex ed teachers are taught or required to teach to their students. Reading through this article, I think I might want to marry the teacher that she follows, Al Vernacchio. I think he and I have a lot of ideas in common.
So, the link to the NYTimes article, and a great site called a Guide to Getting It On, a comic book-themed site designed as a source for all information related to sex. And we’re not just talking STIs and birth control, they’ve got Date Ideas, advice on Having Sex for the First Time, advice for me on How to Increase Your Hang Time, Sex Terms and more. Did you know that Jade Stock is a Chinese Taoist term for a penis? And that a Jelly Roll is another term for labia? Check it out, and pass it along to a friend! You’ve got to be pretty experienced to already know everything they have in this site. And lastly, some of my favorite excerpts from the article:
“Sex as baseball implies that it’s a game; that one party is the aggressor (almost always the boy), while the other is defending herself; that there is a strict order of play, and you can’t stop until you finish. “If you’re playing baseball, you can’t just say, ‘I’m really happy at second base.’ ”
“There is abstinence-only sex education, and there’s abstinence-based sex ed. There’s almost nothing else left in public schools.”
“It’s axiomatic, however, that parents who support richer sex education don’t make the same ruckus with school officials as those who oppose it. “We need to be there at the school boards and say: ‘Guess where kids are getting their messages about sex from? They’re getting it from porn,’ ” Joannides exhorted. “All we’re talking about is just being able to acknowledge that sex is a good thing in the right circumstances, that it’s a normal thing.”
