The joy of sex, education that is

Having listened to the critics of Ontario's new sex ed. curriculum, it was with great anticipation that I actually read the document this past weekend.

With all this talk of masturbation, anal sex and oral pleasure, I was prepared to be titillated.

Let me tell you, Penthouse Forum this is not.

Health eating, making good choices, abstinence — where's all the filth I was promised? Leave it to the Liberals to take something as exciting as sexuality and make it about as interesting as the gastrointestinal systems of ungulates.

In all seriousness though, go read it. I'm sure you'll wonder what all the fuss is about.

The new sex ed. curriculum is not an instruction manual to better sex. It's not Amway for swingers.

Gr. 1 students are not learning about orgasms and the missionary position. The curriculum starts with the the parts of the body, including the genitals, and works its way up to sexual activity in Gr. 7 and Gr. 8, when many children have already begun experimenting, if not actually having sex.

It talks about personal hygiene, healthy relationships and decision making, building on the previous year's lessons so that by the time they enter the pheromone-perfumed halls of high school, students know what they're getting into.

We can't be with them all the time. Our job is to teach them to make decisions for themselves when we're not. How can they do that if we don't show them what the choices — and the consequences — are?

I'm 40. My first exposure to the naked human form outside the four walls of my parent's home in Deep River was on the playground in Gr. 2 when Darrell Meilleur brought a Playboy magazine to school. A few of us tore out pages and chased the girls around the yard with them. What a time we had.

I was around nine when I saw my first truly sexual imagery. Like many of us, I'm sure, that introduction came from a friend, or more precisely, a friend's father's collection of dirty magazines and videos.

We had no context in which to process what we were seeing — and obviously couldn't ask our parents about it for fear of getting in trouble — but, boy, were we fascinated. And we learned all kinds of interesting "facts" that had absolutely no basis in reality.

I would venture to guess that my experience is not all that different from many of yours.

When I was 17, there was a pregnancy scare or two with the girl I was seeing at the time — we were too embarrassed or too fearful of getting in trouble from our parents to get proper protection.

That my experiences aren't unusual is the point. I think we can all agree learning about sex in class is a far better forum than Hustler magazine or porno.com. And in my opinion, it's better than learning about it at home, too, where discomfort, prejudice and bias mean some subjects won't get a mention.

I don't know that I was emotionally scarred in some fashion by those experiences, but obviously, I felt my sexual education was lacking, because as I got older, I resolved that with my own children, sex would not be a taboo subject, that no question was too weird or gross or uncomfortable to answer.

Unfortunately for me and my wife, our children don't feel the same way. They don't want to talk to us about it. It's too embarrassing.

Renowned sex educator Sue Johanson put it this way to NorthernLife.ca this week: How many parents feel comfortable talking to their children about blow jobs? I would turn that around and ask, how many children are comfortable hearing about it from their parents?

The classroom setting is the perfect environment to broach the subject. At their desks, students are a captive audience. In class, sex can be presented in a factual way that diffuses discomfort.

Teenagers have the physical maturity to have sex, but rarely the emotional maturity to make good choices. The problem is, they're going to have sex anyway.
It's our job as adults, as parents and as teachers, to provide them the tools to make those good choices until that emotional maturity develops.

It's about breaking down the taboos around sex and arming children with the knowledge they need to navigate a sexualized world, a world that takes this fundamental need and perverts it into something that sells everything from underwear to frozen peas.

If anything, the curriculum doesn't go far enough. The most depraved sexual content is just a search term away — I would have liked to see pornography included in what my children learn at school.

It's too late to be prudish or puritanical about it. That's not the society we live in. So let's educate our children to succeed in the world as it exists, not as some of us wish it did.

If we do any less, we've failed them.

Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Northern Life and NorthernLife.ca.