Let's Not Talk About Sex (Baby)
Sex ed, tennis balls & opting in.
I remember being taught about sex by the nuns at St. John’s Catholic School. I kid. We were never taught about sex. Only that it was a sin and if we even thought about it we were going straight to hell with all of the public school kids.
High school was no better. I vaguely recall something about dissecting frogs and sex ed but I was preoccupied with organizing my trapper keeper and fluffing up my bangs. I only learned about sex from the other cheerleaders who went to parties with boys and drank Bud Light. I don’t recall being invited to these parties mostly because I had the body of a 12-year-old boy so I spent my weekends dancing around to Wham.
Not like we’ve learned all that much since the glory days of the 1990s. According to NPR, Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas has been teaching students about STIs with a bunch of tennis balls. Personally it makes sense to me. Teenagers must be aware that if they play tennis, they will contract a venereal disease.
Of course sex ed is not mandatory in Texas, although football and cheerleading are. And, not surprisingly, the Lege has made the abstinence-first sex ed opt-in rather than opt-out. Are parents really supposed to remember to sign permission slips for sex ed? I’m the kind of person who carries around one of those mugs that says, “But first, coffee!”
If those lackadaisical parents aren’t careful, their kids will be sitting in the library with all the other losers, with nowhere to hide since all the books have been banned and removed from the shelves. Then again, is it worse to opt your kid in and find they’re the only kid in sex ed? Then you’ve marked her as the future prom queen.
An article in The 19th defines comprehensive sex ed as medically accurate, LGBTQ+ inclusive and age appropriate. Please. You had me at “medically accurate information.” I don’t need to get my information from a bunch of wokeballs when I can just attend school board meetings and listen to random housewives lined up at the mic and screaming about vaccines. And that’s just RFK, Jr. (Up top.)
I was told this by a good friend who'd gone to Houston's all-girl St. Agnes in the Sixties: After a protracted, public debate, the school decided to teach some sort of sex education. The nun who drew the short straw opened the first class by writing "Sex Education" on the blackboard. She then turned slowly, grabbed her forehead, said, "I have a terrible headache," sat down and went on to her eternal reward, so to speak.