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On a March morning in the spring of 1986, our teacher, Mrs. Boykin, lined us up at the door, our fifth-grade class making a single column along the wall from the door to the sink in the back of the class. We were marched into the cafeteria, which served as the makeshift auditorium when not serving Turkey tetrazzini or rectangular pizza to the hungry elementary school children. She seated us on the floor facing the large, portable screen where we watched the cycle of human life begin. We watched, some with awe, some with intrigue, most with disgust, as the time-lapse film showed the fetus growing inside the womb. Ultrasounds and birthing class snippets until that moment when the newborn sprung forth from somewhere under the white sheet into the awaiting arms of the old male doctor. This video is burned into my mind, even thirty-something years later.
The boys and girls of our four fifth-grade classes were then separated. The girls remained in the cafeteria while the boys were shuffled back into the classroom to watch the remainder of the sex education video, the male version, which included erection, ejaculation, and impregnation. Somewhere, in another universe, the girls were learning about fallopian tubes, ovaries, and cervixes. Neither room was learning about the act.
Fast forward to 2007. It was two weeks into the new school year, a hot August afternoon, barely ten days into our daughter’s middle school career when my wife got the call. There was an incident in the girl’s bathroom, our daughter had been a “witness” and had been called to the office and questioned. The incident involved two eighth grade girls engaged in a sexual act, to which my daughter was an audible witness. She saw nothing but heard enough, and when an adult came into the bathroom, she was called to the office to explain what she heard. She had already gotten the same talk at her school, had been shown the conception to birth videos (probably the same ones we watched all those years ago) and learned the anatomy of her sex. What she hadn’t learned was anything about the act of sex. That night, my wife gave her the lesson that was so clearly avoided at her public school. My wife’s lesson included sex, both heterosexual and homosexual, masturbation, pregnancy, fallacies of pregnancy—things like you can’t get pregnant in a hot tub—self-worth and love. My wife, amazingly progressive and strikingly honest in these conversations, explained the does and don’ts of sex, the goods and bads and uglies.
Fast forward one more time to Monday, April 16th, 2018. This Monday, my sixth-grade son goes the school lesson on sex education. He came home, traumatized, and told us about eggs floating down a tub, and “the semens.” From what we could gather, his sex education class was exactly the same as mine, and my daughters, and most likely every other American school-aged child in between. My wife set out again to enrich the story. For several hours, my wife explained to our son the parts of sex education that they don’t teach in schools. As she did with my daughter, she talked about masturbation, intercourse, sexuality in all of its forms—heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality. She explained oral sex, wet dreams, spontaneous erection, and the process of how intercourse actually works, prior to the conception part.
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The most important part of this lesson, however, and the part that is so tragically missing in our “sex talks” these days, is the conversation about consent. Consent must be granted before, and during, and constantly throughout. At any time, your partner can say no, or change their mind, and this is okay. It is hard to fully grasp the theory of unlimited consent, and I have no truly remarkable examples to provide. A colleague of mine today reminded me of the disparity between what we teach our boys and what we teach our girls. Girls are taught how to protect themselves, how to be mindful of how they dress and behave, and how much and when they drink, and not to set their drink down, and how you must be sure to say “No” loud enough and often enough. Boys, however, are taught about their animal instinct, their libido, their overzealous sex drive. They are fed diets of “boys will be boys” and “raging hormones.”
I was fortunate as a boy, I had positive role models. I was surrounded by two sisters who constantly reminded me, sometimes painfully, how I was to treat females. Also, had they found out I had sex, fully consensual sex, they would have punished both me and my partner, me more than her of course. At twenty-nine, I was hesitant to tell my sister that my wife was pregnant. At twenty-nine.
As I sit here and ponder how I want to continue the conversation with my son, I think the most important lesson is that of respect, and consent and value. Women—if heterosexuality is to be his intended sexual preference—have the right to be valued. They deserve to be respected first, and they reserve the right to say no—any time, and at any stage. As he grows and matures, we will have many conversations about sex, I hope. I hope he feels that his mother and I will show him the respect to be honest with him, to give him answers that his misinformed teen friends might get wrong.
Sex is an act of love, and not an act of aggression. We are raising a new generation of boys into manhood, and we have the opportunity, and the obligation, to teach them that sex isn’t simply theirs for the taking, it isn’t just something to be expected. It’s up to us to teach him this. It certainly is not in the video.
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