Sex is good.
When I was a little girl I was very curious. About everything. And I never let anything stand in the way of me finding something out even if I wasn’t supposed to know. So when my mum said I couldn’t watch horror movies or programmes with people kissing, that just made me want to know even more.
One of the clearest memories I have from being a kid, is a show called Sex Tips for Girls. It was on Channel 4 stupidly late at night, and taught women how to keep their man’s attention with lessons like “how to give the perfect blow job” and “how to make anal sex enjoyable for BOTH of you”.
Now, I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I do know that I never knew how gay men had sex, or why the risk of AIDS was meant to be higher with gay men, and when I asked my mum, she wouldn’t really tell me, but during the episode in question, about anal sex, I learnt about how AIDS infection is more likely to occur during anal sex.
See, this show wasn’t even anything to do with homosexuality. It was just a silly little sex tips show on at stupid o’clock (thinking back to my concept of time, it was probably only about 11pm), telling girls how to spice up their clearly deteriorating relationships, but here’s the thing; if I’d never been sneaky and watched it, I wouldn’t have figured out how gay men have sex.
Which brings us to me being fourteen.
Some of you may have seen a video I posted towards the end of 2010 about my sexuality, if not, this is the video in question:
I was a very confused at fourteen, for the reasons outlined in that video, and I ended up experimenting with a female friend, as well as a couple of boyfriends, to learn everything. For instance, I knew very little about the clitoris. I just knew that I had one. But what didn’t help was the state of my sex education.
When I was about ten or eleven, a leaflet came through my door from, basically, the tampon companies. The idea was that it educated you directly, and I remember bringing it in to primary school and having it confiscated, because apparently, education is a bad thing.
So we move on to secondary school, where apparently the sex education was supposed to be pretty good, and we did have two or three lessons, but all I remember, apart from the tampon company representative teaching us the bare minimum about periods, being terrified of the word “vagina” (she kept saying “between your legs”), and giving us menstruation starter packs, is two lessons of putting condoms on dildos, and me trying to split a condom with Vaseline because the woman in the sex clinic just did it.
Then there were more leaflets.
All in all I think I ended up with about six leaflets with diagrams of reproductive organs and stupid cartoons trying to relate to the youth.
But they were ALL about heterosexual sex.
The one half sentence I ever remember hearing in sex ed about anything other than heterosexual sex was “…and lesbians need to use protection, too”. To this day, nobody has told me what that protection is. I only know a lot of things because of porn and google, and I also know that there’s not much purpose-built stuff available.
So nobody told me HOW two girls have sex, and I genuinely knew people that thought anal sex was safe, because we were ONLY taught about penetrative sex between a penis and a vagina, and that you could get flavoured condoms for blow jobs.
How dangerous that is terrifies me. And the sexual health statistics in this country disgust me.
What are we doing to our youth?
- We need all-round sex education.
- We need to be taught that, yes, sex can be a very good thing, but it also has to be safe, and we need to be taught about all kinds of sex.
- We need to be taught that same-sex intercourse IS normal, and should be treated as such.
- We need to be taught about growing up as an LGBTQ child.
- Maybe even more marriages would stay together if people understood themselves a little better and didn’t just rush in to everything.
- And maybe, just maybe, we’d have less teen pregnancy and youth STD epidemics if people were more educated, and respectful of sex.
Things like Sex Tips for Girls may seem harmful, but I owe so much to that programme, even through my experimental years. I think there should be something like that worked in to the educational system, just so that people are more aware of their bodies.
Also I think the age of sex education should be lowered to about eleven, because I already know that some people had lost their virginity before we had those lessons, and I remember how the boys were getting just before we left primary school. And I’ve seen how quickly the kids are growing up these days.
Luckily for me, I was so terrified of everything, I didn’t lose my virginity until I was eighteen, but that doesn’t mean I’ve always been sensible. I was lucky to be quite sexually aware at an early age and sought out a lot of information, but most households in the UK don’t even have the internet, so how are those kids supposed to learn anything? It’s not like you can search it at school, or the library, there’s parental blocks on everything.
If nobody will tell them, and they don’t have access to the information that easily, what are they supposed to do?
This is a call to arms, guys. I need you to support me in what I’m going to be doing very soon.
I’ll be writing letters and emails directly to the Education Secretary (currently Michael Gove), but I want to stretch this out to the whole of the UK and Ireland. And yes, I’m aware that Ireland has a whole other set of religious reasons to have a poor sex ed system, but it’s still not acceptable. I want you to all write letters and emails to whoever’s in charge of your education system, CC everything to me, and help me build this campaign, the campaign for all-round sex education.
The basis is, we want real sex ed for every child, and, to quote Jema directly “Basic sex education for LGBTQ kids AND an introduction to gender identity/transgender could make so much difference.”
I know I’ve rambled on for a while, and I probably stopped making sense ages ago, but if you want to join me, my email address is CassG08@gmail.com
