Sexuality is a part of each person's being from birth until death. However, it is generally felt and expressed as an individual experience of physical happiness and pleasure through childhood. Sexuality starts to emerge as an inter-personal issue in preadolescence, and often begins to define romantic relationships shortly thereafter. Adolescence is a time of great cognitive change, and as a young teenager recently described it to me, it is the time when people suddenly become aware of both their own sexuality and other people's sexuality in new, exciting, and dynamic ways. While this experience has the potential to be a sexually positive, life-affirming one, it is all too often a negative experience that may lead to fear, embarrassment, shame, and sexual discomfort.
Education is the road to opening the door for adolescents to incorporate their sexuality into their self concept in a physically and psychologically appropriate way.
There are two primary issues around which adolescents need sexuality education: the physical and the psychological/emotional/social.
The Physical Sexual Being
It is relatively common for me to speak with women who were unaware of menstruation in any way before their first ovulation cycle. While perhaps I shouldn't be, I continue to be surprised with every woman I speak with who found herself, sometimes confused, sometimes terrified, in this situation. While I understand parents' reticence to start talking about sex and sexuality with their children, even in the very concrete terms of our own bodies, I think it is critical that they do or that they find someone else to do it for them.
Furthermore, I think it is important for girls and boys, certainly no later than 12 or 13 years old, to have a working understanding of how babies are created, how they grow, and how they are born. Intrinsic to that process is an understanding of their own bodies and the bodies of the opposite gender. Additional topics of information that it is critical for adolescents to learn includes sexually transmitted diseases (what they are, what they look like, and what to do about them) and pregnancy and STD transmission prevention methods (what they are, what they prevent, how well they prevent, how to use them, where to find them). There are a myriad of other topics which are also important, including how people with physical disabilities are sexual, sexual dysfunction, expressions of sexuality through the life cycle, and an understanding of what it means to be gay, lesbian, and transgender.
The Psychological, Emotional, and Social Sexual Being
This body of information is much more difficult to clearly define than the physical being. However, the range of information which should be included in a comprehensive sex education includes, but is certainly not limited to the following:
- society's assumptions about physical beauty
- society's assumptions about romance and love
- society's assumptions about what it means for an adolescent to have sex
- how to recognize emotional manipulation in a romantic relationship
- how to respond to emotional manipulation in a romantic relationship
- how to make good choices about sexual relationships
- how to say no to sexual advances
- how to recognize date rape
- how to break-up with a romantic partner (or be broken up with!) and be able to move on
This list is, importantly, in no way complete. Also, the issues which are listed above have emotional and social issues which are associated with them. Integrating information about the physical body in all its glory and the social and emotional issues which are associated with that information are also key components of comprehensive sex education.
I understand that my philosophy on human sexuality and education differs from many others. While I do think there is substantial need for individualization in terms of when an adolescent is in need of, and ready for, much of what I talked about above, it is critical that all of these topics should be covered by the time an adolescent is leaving home at the latest, and as early as the individual adolescent is starting to encounter physical changes from puberty and is beginning to engage in sexual activities.