Sex Miseducation

By Emily Osborn*This article has mentions of homophobia, transphobia, sexual assault, and other topics that may cause upset, please proceed with caution*“When a man and a woman love each other very much…” Most of us are familiar with this wonderful opening line from sex education talks in schools across the country. While education about relationships and sex has improved leaps and bounds in recent years, a lot tends to be left to the imagination when it comes to learning about the birds and the bees. Many young people are left learning about what an orgasm is on PornHub, and even more are left without learning what consent is. This has led to a deficit of knowledge among generations, leading to urban legends about ways to avoid pregnancy and horror stories of first sexual encounters gone wrong. Let’s look at some of the ways poor sexual education in Ireland has impacted us and try to figure out where it all went so wrong.  “Our teacher made us watch Juno,”- Jessica, 23.While asking people about their sex ed experiences growing up, the movie Juno came up several times. I was also forced to sit through this, which our teacher pausing every so often to explain to us how ‘horrific’ teen pregnancy could be. Oftentimes, teaching sex education makes teachers feel embarrassed and awkward, so movies and other supplementary material are used to fill in the gaps, regardless of their actual educational content. In more recent years, teachers and groups from outside the school can be brought in to talk about sex and relationships, but when the school has control over what groups or organisations are chosen for this, the results can be poor. While there is an RSE curriculum set by the state, each individual school has control over what they choose to teach, and what they choose to leave out. Many people I spoke to mentioned having talks by Pro-Life organisations, Catholic chastity groups, and groups that didn’t acknowledge LGBTQ relationships as part of their programme. This can be traumatising for many students, can alienate them from their peers and ultimately reinforces the stigma around all these things. While talking about sex to a room full of twelve-year-olds can be embarrassing at best, teachers need to acknowledge and teach this as just another subject on the syllabus. Failing this, groups and organisations invited to schools to teach sex ed should be totally inclusive and non-judgemental and cover a range of topics suitable for the age range of the students they’re teaching, to avoid making the topic of sex any more taboo than it already is. “We were made write down the definition of an STD ten times in our copies,”- Megan, 21.Traditionally, sexually transmitted infections have always been a massively taboo subject. I didn’t learn about the symptoms of any STIs until I was in my first year of nursing college, and many people don’t learn about these until they visit the doctor’s office with a rash or an itch ‘down below’. The way STIs are taught in the Irish school system is that you must avoid them at all costs; with no mention of how to do this, or what to do if you get one. As a result, it’s hard for a lot of people to believe that most common STIs can be cleared up with a course of antibiotics. The sub-par education around sexual health leads a lot of people to believe into adulthood that STIs are ‘dirty’ and that anyone who has one must also be dirty. Contraception is another area of sex education, with many people walking out of RSE class knowing how to put a condom on a banana, but not about other birth control options such as the coil or the IUD. Several studies found that there was a direct correlation between poor education on contraceptives as well as poor sex ed in general, and high levels of unplanned pregnancy in young people. It’s clear that our current sex education system is failing us, and serious change needs to happen to make sure that proper sex ed is implemented in every school in Ireland. “Sure, you all know what consent is surely?” This quote was said in a 5th-year sex education talk. This illustrates how sex ed is often considered an optional topic in many schools; you wouldn’t hear a teacher say the same about any other subject, such as “Sure, you all know what calculus is surely?”. The first mention of consent in sex ed for most people comes in around 4th or 5th year, with no mention of consent in any discussion about sex in younger years. For many people, the extent of their consent education consists of ‘both people having sex must say yes to the act beforehand’. This is a poor explanation in many regards. Most people aren’t taught that consent should be freely given, without coercion or fear. Most people also aren’t taught that consent can be withdrawn at any time, regardless of how far into the act you are. People definitely aren’t taught that saying ‘yes’ to sex when you are heavily under the influence of drugs are alcohol is not consent. This has many knock-on effects on people’s sexual experiences later in life. Many people who have continued with sex acts that they were uncomfortable with, or when they would rather have stopped, didn’t feel that they could say no after initially saying yes. Not teaching kids about consent from an early age can lead to extremely traumatic outcomes and perpetuates rape culture in future generations. Basics of consent should be taught from an early age, and by the time a person reaches college, there should be absolutely no question regarding what is and isn’t consent. The way consent is taught in Irish schools is simply not good enough. “You either feel like you’re a fetish, or a joke”- Síofra, 23.The lack of LGBTQ inclusion in Irish sex ed has become an extremely relevant topic in recent years. Before the marriage referendum, with the majority of public schools in Ireland being Catholic-run, this was intentionally left out of the sex-ed curriculum, and any questions directed at teachers about LGBTQ sex and relationships were dismissed. Nowadays, where LGBTQ sex ed is included, as it unfortunately still is not in many schools, the information given is substandard, with a lot of LGBTQ youth left with more questions than answers. Many people were left learning about these relationships from both pornography and from movies, which did not offer proper information about contraception, hormones, bodily changes, or portray relationships in a good light. In movies, LGBTQ characters are stereotyped, and the butt of the joke, whereas in pornography, LGBTQ relationships are highly fetishized, which can lead many LGBTQ youths who are forced to use these as a stand-in for poor sex education having poor ideas of sex and consent, as well as their own body image. The lasting impact this has on young people is prevalent, with many people growing up in the closet, unable to come out because of the fear that they’d be alienated by their peers, their teachers, and the people around them. The Catholic influence on schools’ sex education programmes further alienates LGBTQ youth, with many young people prior to the marriage referendum thinking they were living in sin for fantasizing about the same gender. Like many things, when it comes to sex education, the church should have no place when teaching children and young people about their bodies, their identities, and their future sex lives. The quotes used in this article are all from people’s real experiences of sex education in the Irish school system, and there were so many more that I would’ve loved to include if I didn’t have a word count to adhere to. Many readers will relate to at least one of these included narratives, and most people have a sex-ed horror story of their own. This illustrates that across the country, sex and relationships are taught in a way that doesn’t educate, but rather, stigmatises, alienates, and fails young people all over Ireland. For a comprehensive sex education curriculum, the Irish government need to take control over the kind of sex ed that’s taught in schools and mandate proper and extensive education on consent, contraception, LGBTQ relationships, and everything in between. No longer should we have students with stories of having to sign waivers promising to ‘wait until marriage’ or students who arrive in college who don’t know what sex is outside of pornography. As mentioned above, there have been many improvements in recent years to sex education, especially with many public schools no longer being Catholic-run/owned. We still have a while to go before our curriculum is perfect, but if I were to give one take-home message from this article, it would be “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant, and die.”