Sex Ed

There was a minor furor back in April when the Ontario Ministry of Education released an updated Health curriculum after consultations with sexual health experts, educators and other provincial education ministries. Church and “family focused” groups freaked out over children as young as 6 learning to use the words penis and vagina to describe, well, a penis and vagina. That wasn’t the worst of it, though, according to the critics: kids as young as 8 were to learn that there are homosexual relationships (what the children of same sex couples did before learning this, I don’t know) and adolescents were to learn the facts about anal and oral sex as well as the old standby of vaginal sex.

Rev. Ekron Malcolm, who is with the Institute for Canadian Values and was a major critic of the original revised curriculum, was quoted in the National Post, saying: “schools don’t need to be teaching my children about sexual orientation or sex education. Those decisions should be left to the family, to the parents, to guide children. These topics can be taught at the high school level, at the university level, when children can make up their minds.”

In terms of homosexuality and gender identity, there are huge problems with ignoring the fact that there are gay relationships and people who don’t adhere to traditional gender standards. (Never mind that fact that teaching homosexuality doesn’t mean teaching homosexual acts; just that boys can like boys and girls can like girls and people can marry someone of the same gender.)

A principal friend of mine had a gender equity assembly at her school which involved many skits dealing with male/female stereotypes and inequities as well as homosexuality. The next day, my friend had an office full of parents complaining that exposing their children to the idea that homosexuality was an acceptable practice contravened their religious and cultural teachings. And isn’t this what is really at the heart of Malcolm’s complaint, that parents should be able to teach that homosexuality is an abomination, contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the document which my principal friend had on hand for her enraged parents meeting).

I knew a boy once who was being “guided” by his parents when he was told he was no longer allowed to dress up in his sister’s clothing. This was a highly intelligent, creative and empathetic boy who was made to feel that his exploration of gender identity was wrong. And believe me, he had a forming gender identity at age 7.

It is the child’s understanding of this identity of which Malcolm can’t conceive: “I can’t imagine a child now has to question their gender, question their identity,” he said. “I think there’s enough confusion among our children in the world, for them now having to question themselves. This is where I would draw the line.”

The confusion in the world is precisely the reason why we should teach sexuality in schools. Sex is way more readily available with the internet nowadays. When I was an adolescent, you’d hear stories of people stealing their parents’ porn tapes and sharing them with their friends or sneaking peaks at the top shelf magazines at the variety store. The exposure was minimal, rare, usually accompanied by a group and required some resourcefulness. Now, you can get all manner of pornography for free from any computer without parental controls and none of it is mediated with a discussion as to what’s going on.

Adolescents need to understand the different types of sex and their risks and how to protect themselves from these risks. Critics argue that grade 7 and 8 is too young to introduce students to the taboo acts of anal and oral sex but the crux of the issue is that a lot of kids that age are already doing it. I remember becoming aware of people participating in oral and vaginal sex in grade 6 – and those were only the stories that made it to my ears. Who knows the number of girls who were convinced that having anal sex would preserve their virginity and prevent pregnancy.

Sexual education is a delicate, sometimes cringe-inducing necessity. Part of it is certainly the nitty-gritty physiology of parts and acts, but another part of it is arming kids with knowledge in order to make their own decisions – it has been widely reported that teenagers who have been sexually educated from a young age often delay having sex. Sex ed class is also the only time you’ll have the attention of every single student.

Unfortunately for Ontario, the outcry over the new curriculum worked and Dalton McGuinty backpedaled on his support for the curriculum two days later. An interim edition of the Health curriculum is now available on the Ministry’s website with all the dirty stuff taken out. Grade ones still learn to “identify the major parts of the body by their proper names” and education around puberty is still in there for the grade fours. However, there is absolutely no mention of homosexuality anywhere in the general and specific curriculum expectations.

In Montana, the state government has come out with a curriculum document that details how to sexually educate children from kindergarten to grade 12 (see specifically pages 36 – 40). It is a fully inclusive document which details a variety of sexual knowledge. The document has attracted some conservative backlash, certainly, but as far as I know, it is still being implemented in schools. Hopefully the Ontario interim curriculum document will have a chance to be reviewed with an eye to inclusion and public health and the final document will take into account “the confusion” of the world and arm our children with the knowledge necessary to meet this confusion.

With This Misogynist Tradition, I Thee Wed

Ah, Margaret Wente – you never cease to annoy me of a Saturday.

This week it was her column telling us why weddings matter more than ever. Wente writes how as a young adult she thought marriage was a “dusty relic of the patriarchy” and weddings “a silly, conformist ritual full of fake piety, tasteless clothes and ostentatious spending.” But now, of course, as an experienced 50-something, she can see the error of her young adult thinking. (This is a sly arguing technique – because you can’t really argue with an elder who is telling you that essentially your beliefs are wrong because they believed them when they were young, but now they know better.) Wente now sees her decision to seek out “self-actualization and adventure” over the “banality of coupledom and family life” as wrong – huh? But she got both! Dozens of times women who married young have told me to enjoy my single life now – they wished they had. I’ve had conversations with women who I met travelling who were divorced and in their 40s doing the backpacker thing because they wished they had done it in their 20s, but got caught up in marriage and kids.

Marriage is a dusty relic – based on the exchange of property – and few people understand my ire at the father of the bride walking her down the aisle to her husband-to-be. Some couples have chosen to have both the bride’s parents walk her down the aisle, but the symbolic tradition still remains: it is the woman who is being passed from one man (and his wife) to another man. Never mind the fact that my (and most women's) last name is that of my patrilineal heritage only.

Having been through several weddings (the cheapest of which was $15 000), weddings do invite outrageous spending. Part of this, of course, is the fact that everything you spend money on for a wedding is grossly inflated because it’s for a wedding. And our society says that’s okay because we place such importance on this one event.

Let me digress for a moment here and say that I certainly do not judge those people that enjoy the tradition and pomp of a wedding. Some people love the pageantry and the flowers and the centerpieces. But two things remain. One: I urge people to really think about where certain traditions come from. Two: I think it was Salman Rushdie that once said that women want a wedding, not a marriage (I’ll ignore his gender generalization to make my point). And for all the white tulle and roses, that’s the whole point of the day – two people promising to stay in their foxhole together.

Wente argues marriage is “indisputably the best arrangement for raising children.” I totally agree that having two people raise children is better than single parenting and having a male and female role model (although these do not have to be the mom and dad of a heterosexual couple) is ideal. But what is most important is that two people agree to stick it out together in the long run. It doesn’t take a 40K wedding to make that commitment – a simple “you’re stuck with me ‘til I’m old, babe” would suffice.

And finally, I'm not sure Wente can effectively argue that a life with someone else is "infinitely richer" than being single. For her (hopefully), she is happy because she is with a good man, not because she is part of a couple. I'd rather be single than in an unhappy relationship. If I left my partner now, I'd miss him, not having a boyfriend. And because Wente has been in a relationship for the past however many years, she has nothing to compare it to - perhaps she would have been more adventurous as a 40-something, or done things she wouldn't have as a married woman.

As Wente notes, marriage rates are in decline and people are waiting until into their 30s to marry. And there's nothing wrong with this. There's nothing wrong with getting everything you can out of life and not placing landing a husband as your primary goal. And hopefully when we all look back at our 20s and 30s, we'll say, hey - we were right. And as elders, no one can argue with us.