John Oliver on Sex Ed

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John Oliver covers the sex ed situation in the US fantastically. Our youth deserve better.

“There is no way we’d allow any other academic program to consistently fail to prepare students for life after school. Human sexuality, unlike calculus, is something you actually need to know about for the rest of your life.”

Feel free to leave a comment. All opinions are welcome. Just be respectful and think things through before posting.

Happy thinking!

-Nancy

14 thoughts on “John Oliver on Sex Ed”

    • Really? Oh my gosh, I was homeschooled too, and I had a similar experience. I eventually learned about sex at 15 from the guy friend I had a crush on. It’s incredible how many times my parents insisted sex was something that shouldn’t be taught in schools, and that parents should talk about, but all I ever got were purity talks. Not even a basic “this goes into that” explanation.

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      • I had seen that you posted about homeschooling (I’m gonna pull that up right now). I had quite an atypical childhood in many respects (even by homeschooler standards). My parents did the best they could, but there have been far too many things which I had to learn myself. I learned about sex far later than you did. I was very religious and was comitted to abstinence and purity culture, even Josh Harris’s non-dating courtship thing. To this day I have a lot of baggage about that all. Sexual repression was taxing on me, and I still am working through it (I’m still rather young; early twenties).

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      • The whole purity culture scene is a pretty crazy thing–I’m sorry to hear you wound up in it. Not to say that choosing abstinence is necessarily bad, but the way purity culture goes about discussing dating [or rather courting] and sex strikes me as very unhealthy. A lot of my homeschooling peers were in it, and the things they said to me about dating and sex definitely took their toll on all of us.

        I’ll definitely check out more of your posts. I’m also in my early 20s and it took me a fairly long time to stop being literally afraid of sex once I finally learned what it was. I don’t know if this is comforting or not, but in my experience it takes several years for most people to get used to the idea of sex, which is why most teens (in traditional education, at least in the north) are just getting used to it, (and joking about it a lot) having learned about it in middle school, whereas I was just getting used to it towards the end of high school through the first half of college. I think it’s perfectly normal to need some time to process how the concept of what sex is fits in with you and your life, and that’s healthy, if somewhat frustrating.

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      • Yes, abstinence can be good in some ways (I think it led me to focus on other things). Maybe more harmful for me was the idea that any relationship not completely focused on marriage was illegitimate. It set me up for many lonely years and bitterness over it all after leaving the faith, but even before then.

        Ultimately life is what it is. It’s a pleasure to meet a fellow homeschooled deconvert. I’m sure you can relate with the unique difficulties such an upbringing can have.

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  3. Our hang ups about human sexuality are huge. I don’t understand it. It’s part of life, yet we treat it as if sex is a dirty secret. This then leads to unwanted pregnancies, STD’s and sexual myths such as jumping up and down will prevent pregnancy. Statistics show abstinence only ‘education’ doesn’t work.

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  4. The wife and I were talking about this a few weeks ago and what we felt about sex ed in the schools. We’re fairly open about sex with our kids (all boys). They all know the age-appropriate mechanics and that it’s normal. I’m trying to avoid implanting shame into them about it. That’s an awful hangup to overcome.

    Thanks for posting the video. Few say it better than J.O.

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    • Thanks for your comment. John Oliver is fantastic. I’m glad to hear from a parent who’s doing their best to avoid the shame dialogue I was raised in. I imagine it’s a very tempting path to follow simply because many parents want their kids to delay sex as much as possible, even though all the shame does in the end is lead to them hiding it from their parents.

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