Sex education doesn’t teach us how to have good sex and relationships, rather how to roll the condom onto a banana and how to avoid contracting a sexually transmitted infection.
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I am, my current lady friend is, my ex-girlfriend, a recent lover, and my best friend all are. We all place ourselves on the bisexual spectrum. I didn’t seek out these people, and these were things I got to know well into the friendship. We’ve all come to our conception of our sexuality through different paths, but this was not a realization we had during high school when we were having sex education. Instead it was through society and experiences that our self-identity around sexual orientation and sexuality changed.
School is the first real exposure to sexual education for most children and teens, but its focus is so skewed towards the science that it forgets the feelings.
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One main theme sticks out when I think about sexuality and the dating scene for young people – that hyper-masculinity and heteronormativity create a shallow foundation during the formative years around sex and relationships. I believe we are products of our society, and we’ve been taught to think from a young age that heterosexuality is the de facto sexual orientation. Through mediums like advertising, we are taught that men desire women and women desire men. We become socially conditioned to visually (and virtually) undress the opposite sex and crave sexual intimacy with them. The heterosexual focus of the media provides very little to prompt us to critically think about alternatives to heterosexuality and thus where we ‘really are’ on the sexuality spectrum.
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School is the first real exposure to sexual education for most children and teens, but its focus is so skewed towards the science that it forgets the feelings. The feelings are why we have sex, as it is something wonderful, fun, exhilarating you can do with another person (or people). Sex education doesn’t teach us how to have good sex and relationships, rather how to roll the condom onto a banana and how to avoid contracting a sexually transmitted infection.
The ‘school ground’ is formative for sex education whether through boasting about the most ridiculous sexual move to using disempowering and possessive names for the female anatomy.
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The concept of good sex and how to have good sex is thus left to society to inform a newcomer, but for most people, unless they have an enlightened and nurturing support network, they will become another victim of our heternormative and hyper-masculine sexual standards. As someone who attended an all-boys school, I listened to those who were apparently having sex – the boys slightly older than me–and they had horrific ‘advice’ based off their experience (read: imagination).
The ‘school ground’ is formative for sex education whether through boasting about the most ridiculous sexual move to using disempowering and possessive names for the female anatomy. There is also much insecurity and a desire to prove oneself. Alas there is only one acceptable size of penis – HUGE. It’s very rare to find a boy who will admit to finding a little pleasure from some anus/ prostate stimulation. Only one boy from school admitted to this, but he also happened to be one of the biggest and toughest in the school’s top rugby team.
This environment is not conducive to learning how to have good sex or good relationships. This environment has a negative impact on men’s ability to emotionally connect with themselves and others as sexual beings since it is so focused on the hyper-masculine physical act of sex rather than the emotional elements as well.
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It would be multiple women and about six years before I’d even consider that I may not be totally straight.
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I definitely didn’t learn anything about homosexual relationships from these early years and I’m not sure I even knew there were bisexuals. I was already too repressed to even consider I may be anything but straight due to all the social constructs I had digested and absorbed. I could masturbate to heterosexual porn so I wasn’t gay, therefore I was straight. Sexuality all figured out, right? Wrong.
So wrong.
It would be multiple women and about six years before I’d even consider that I may not be totally straight. This signifies the polarization between heterosexuality and homosexuality where there is often little consideration or awareness for those who are bisexual, but that’s another article. We need to be having better conversations in our formative years to acknowledge a spectrum of sexual orientation and sexualities to fill the existing vacuum with advice on how to have good sex and relationships.
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Image credit: Hey Paul Studios/flickr