FWIW, my serious suggestion for sex ed would be:
1.) teach how to use birth control,
2.) teach that masturbation is natural and won’t make you go blind.
Beyond that, I’d be glad to see some sort of information on how to resist pressure to have sex before you, personally, feel ready, but I don’t see how that could be done in a public-school setting.
I do, however, have a hard time seeing how any sane person could oppose #1 and #2.
Look, when did a teenager ever need to be taught to masturbate? I mean, it’s not exactly a complicated skill. I worked this shit out for myself at the age of 11 and I was a late bloomer! Monkeys can figure this out! Dogs, too, if only they had hands!
But teenagers need very much to be taught that masturbation is normal, IMO.
You seem to be assuming that people do not already know this. I question that assumption.
Isn’t sex ed the parents’ job? I don’t think I ever really had a sex ed course. My parents said, use a condom because if you get a girl pregnant it’s your responsibility - the most you’ll get out of us is babysitting now and again while you work.
Haven’t knocked a girl up yet.
Be safe, don’t skank, just wank.
I think masterbation is an important life skill.
Many, if not most, teenage women do not masterbate. A shocking amount of them havn’t even looked at their genitals with a mirrior. They just plain don’t know whats going on down there.
Thats disturbing on several levels. First off, many women can only reach orgasm by masterbation. If they get too many bad ideas about masterbation in their head too early they seriously miss out on their capacity to enjoy sex. They may never be comfortable with their own sexuality. They may never get to know their body and it’s responses. They may never discover their clitoris (especially if they are with an insensitive or inexperienced partner) and they may never reach orgasm on a regular basis. Tragic as that is, the implications go much farther than a woman’s capacity for pleasure.
A girl (or anyone really, but a girl is more likely) that in unsure about herself sexually is ripe to be manipulated. A woman needs to know what sexual feelings feel like and what the ultimate result is. They need to know what it all means, and have some kind of mastery over it. Otherwise their first sexual experiences will be big confusing messes where they feel a lot of something, have some guy telling them a bunch of stuff, and don’t know what to do with it all. A girl that masterbates is better equipted to be an equal in sex. She will be less likely to have sexual experiences she regrets and will be less easily pressured. She will have confidence and she will know when a guy is doing something manipulative, painful, or otherwise wrong. And she will also have the confidence and understanding to say “no” when she wants to instead of being overwhelmed by the situation.
So yes, I think teenagers should be taught about their bodies and it’s responses to self-stimulation so that they are better prepared for equal, enjoyable, and safe sexual experiences with others in the future.
Well, OK, there is one thing teenagers need to be taught about masturbation: If you’re a girl, wash your hands (and any other equipment) first, or you might get a yeast infection.
Awwww, crap. Might as well cancel my vacation to Sweden.
I actually wish they wouldn’t teach sex in school because they usually do it so badly. The local news had a segment where they covered an abstinence presentation given to a school. The core of the message was that if you have any kind of sex, you’ll get a horrible STD. The only way to prevent getting an STD was to wait until you were married. I would not want my kid getting that kind of message.
Maybe the situation is different for females - but this would be totally unnecesary for males, I think.
We’re smart enough to figure it out. Even when I was a little kid I knew the ‘masturbation makes you blind’ thing was just silly superstition. I doubt anyone actually believes that sort of thing anymore.
Maybe females are more inhibited in some way, but this sort of class seems silly from a male perspective. There’s not really anything it’d teach us.
Well, there is a difference between academics and morality. Schools should stick to the academics, and the parents and whatever religion (if any) they belong to should teach the morality aspects.
If I’m not mistaken, Joycelyn Elders, during her brief tenure as U.S. Surgeon General, did suggest teaching children about masturbation as part of a comprehensive sex education program and this contributed to her being run out of office by the guardians of “family-values”.
The Jocelyn Elders thing was true, from what I’ve heard.
And as a public school teacher, I personally don’t think this idea is bad. It’s certainly no worse than several others of which I am aware.
But I sure wouldn’t wanna be the one to teach it.
When I was in high school, back in the early nineties, our small, rural school in the Bible Belt had a great sex ed program. We learned about all the methods of birth control, how they can each fail, how effective they are, etc., plus dealing with self-esteem issues, the waiting-vs.-not issue, resisting pressure to have sex before we’re ready, the whole nine yards. If we could manage it, any school can manage it.
That being said, there was still a very distinct feeling among most of my contemporaries that wanking was just…icky, and no self-respecting guy admitted to doing it. As for female masturbation, why, you must be joking. Girls didn’t sweat or fart, much less do something as disgusting as playing with themselves. Sex, of course, was fine and dandy, but masturbation? Eeeeewww.
I’ve got a related GQ thread going on right now: “Does no sex/lots of sex affect a person’s health?” You can link to it at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=194559 .
Some posters on that thread have cited some evidence that, in fact, sex is healthy and celibacy (even celibacy + masturbation) is not healthy. But none of that evidence relates in particular to teenagers.
Even today, it is generally assumed in America that as a matter of public policy, sexual activity by minors should be, if not forbidden, then very much discouraged. High-school condom-distribution programs exist but they’re alway controversial, and defended as a concession to necessity: The kids are gonna do it anyway, better they don’t get in trouble. The same spirit animates any movement to teach kids masturbation.
But nobody ever comes out and says: It’s better for teenagers to be fucking than not fucking. It’s unhealthy for them to keep their virginity past a certain age. Is this a defensible position, or not? Does anybody on this thread have an opinion?
Unhealthy? What about catching or spreading diseases? What about unwanted pregnancies? If you don’t have, sex, or have sex only with the person you marry, for example, you cut down on, or eliminate these potential problems.
And, what is so unhealthy about not having sex anyway?
How does being married reduce the risk of an unwanted pregnancy?
Posted by Joel:
Some posters on the GQ thread I mentioned came up with reasons why it might be unhealthy. I’m not entirely convinced, I just wanted to insert the question into this thread, which nobody has really discussed up to this point: Leaving aside the risks of pregnancy, disease, etc., what is the healthiest option for teenagers: Fornication, masturbation, or no sexual release at all?
Don’t forget, late marriage is a relatively recent social invention. For most of human history, in most times and places, people got married when they were teenagers; therefore, presumably, their teenage years included a lot of sex. This was normal. Teenagers are supposed to have sex. It’s what we’re genetically programmed for. In modern America we cannot encourage children to marry so young – which leaves them a choice between fornication, masturbation, and no sexual release at all. Which is best for them?
For one, if you’re married, you and your spouse usually want a kid or two, so when the wife is pregnant, the baby is wanted (usually, not always, I know).
Also, when you wait until marriage, you’re usually more prepared to take care of a child, you usually have steady income, a stable home environment, and are better equipped to handle rasing a child or two, whereas if you’re a horny-ass teenager sleeping with whoever, then a pregnancy is more likely to be unwanted since it could potentially bring on complications like one or both parents having to drop out of school and getting a job, something which could make the pregnancy undesirable to either or both parents, or if the father want’s nothing to do with raising the child, then he could be sued for child support, something which would probably make the pregnancy undesirable to the father.