“When you have a class of 30, you get a pretty wide range of experience,” she says. “Sometimes the questions are exploratory to fill in the blanks of what they’ve heard from their friends or from the media. Then we get some kids who are embarrassed that they don’t know anything at all. Especially those who haven’t been in the country for a long time. They may come from a place where genital mutilation is still occurring and the idea of a woman masturbating would be very upsetting to the parents, so you just have to navigate these land mines as a teacher.”
One thing Mitchell can safely say is that she’s never had a student ask her about basic biology. “I’ve never had a kid ask me about a fallopian tube or the vas deferens,” she says. Instead, the questions run the gamut from myth-dispelling (“If I think my friend is pretty, does this mean I’m gay?) to wanting something they heard about online or from their friends spelled out. (“What’s fisting?” “What’s S&M?” “What’s a strap-on?”)
“I don’t think answering the questions means they will go out and engage in these acts,” she says. Often, the kids simply have no context for what they’re seeing, and no safe, reliable forum (depending on their situation at home) to ask the very candid questions they need to ask. “The questions typically are the means by which we go on to discuss other important social issues of sexuality, power relations, gender, religious and moral beliefs. I really think it’s better to have the kids talking about it. If we silence them, what are they going to do?”
One thing that Mitchell and other educators agree on is that the assumption that this generation is necessarily more sophisticated because of their heightened media exposure is entirely wrong. “Kids don’t know more,” says Mitelman. “What they know more of are buzzwords. They tell you about the clitoris or blow-up dolls or whips and chains—the stuff they see in media. But they know very little concrete information.”
The CFSH survey confirmed that Canadian youth are plagued by misinformation: “They do not consider themselves to be at risk for HIV/AIDS and their overall knowledge base about the disease has declined since 1989,” the authors concluded. “Youth, particularly under 16, are now more likely than in 1989 to believe there is a cure for AIDS, that birth control pills protect against HIV, to be confused about how to use condoms correctly.” Other urban legends remain pervasive—that anal sex is “safe” because it won’t get a girl pregnant, and that Mountain Dew can be used as a spermicide.
In fact, misinformation may be one reason that, although teen pregnancy rates are down nationwide, STI rates among teenagers in Canada are surging. In the CFSH survey, young people 15 to 24, although they represent about 14 per cent of the population, reported over two-thirds of chlamydia infections between 1997 and 2004. Also on the rise are incidents of gonorrhea and syphilis. The report found a clear link between the rise of all STIs and the non-use of condoms. Older teenagers, they determined, concerned primarily about pregnancy, prefer to rely on the pill. A 2006 survey by the Canadian Association for Adolescent Health found a quarter of sexually active youth between 14 and 17 did not use a condom the last time they had sex.
This, Grossman says, is the very reason pushing pleasure is a disaster. Overcoming the fear of pleasure is not teens’ problem, she says. “People are going to discover on their own what feels good,” she says. In expending so much time “normalizing” everyone’s sexual proclivities, Grossman believes that sex educators are prioritizing the wrong kind of information, not to mention downplaying the emotional and psychological ramifications of casual sex. “I think a lot of fear is a good thing,” she says. “There are life and death infections involved here.”
What we need to present, she believes, is an ideal—one based on health and not pleasure—and that ideal is abstinence. “Is everyone going to follow that ideal? Of course not,” she says. “That’s ridiculous. I’m looking at the obligation to present an ideal and tell kids that the closer you can get to that ideal, the better for you.”
In some places, parents, horrified by what schools are teaching—or what they think schools might be teaching—have introduced an exit clause. In June, after much debate, Alberta’s Tory government passed Bill 44, a highly controversial amendment to the province’s Human Rights Act, so that Alberta parents can pull their children out of class during planned discussions on religion, sexuality and sexual orientation. (The bill has been viewed by many to be less about health and safety concerns than keeping kids away from lessons on same-sex relationships.)
Amid the pedagogical warfare, inevitably teenagers are going to do what they’re going to do. And what information they don’t find in the classroom, they will seek elsewhere. Helping to fill the info gap are popular websites like Columbia University’s website Go Ask Alice!, gURL.com, and Scarleteen.com (dubbed “Sex ed for the real world”), where teens are invited to ask anonymous questions and solicit advice. Often, untrained peer counsellors are the ones answering their questions, and they’re doing it in stunning detail. In addition to safer-sex advice, these sites offer info on the joys of oral sex, how to use “safe words” in S&M play, and even how to fake an orgasm. Or there’s the Midwest Teen Sex Show, an infotainment webcast for teens ages 13 to 18 that uses raunchy, teen-friendly humour to cover everything from fetishes and “backdoor business” to “how to make your own dental dam.”
And that, of course, is the good, clean stuff. No matter how distasteful frank sexual conversations seem to some adults, having them needs to be our No. 1 priority, says Lyba Spring. When you combine all of the misinformation out there with rampant Internet porn and a sex-crazed popular culture, you have a recipe for disaster. “They’re so messed up,” says Spring. “We have to make an effort to turn it around.”
