sex education

By Pavol Stracansky

WARSAW, Jun 1, 2010 (IPS) - Pressure from the Catholic Church to effectively stop sex education in schools is threatening the health of tens of thousands of teenagers who fall pregnant every year because they have little or no knowledge of safe sex, education groups in Poland have warned.

They say many youngsters go into their first sexual relationships with little or no idea of contraception and the health consequences of unprotected sex, as conservative clergy covertly stifle any school sex education that does not conform to the Church’s strict Catholic teachings.

Anka Grzywacz, educator with the Polish Ponton Group of Sex Educators, told IPS: "The Catholic Church has a huge influence in Poland and in schools. The Catholic Church does not want sex education to be taught and, therefore, schools simply do what the Church wants and just do not teach it."

More than 20,000 Polish girls below the legal age of consent give birth each year, according to official figures. But it is believed that many more teenagers fall pregnant, and because of Poland’s strict abortion laws and the unwillingness of doctors to perform even legal abortions, they undergo dangerous illegal abortions or head abroad to have the procedure carried out.

The first time someone went down on me, I was about fifteen and we had broken into an abandoned house on the highway walking distance from my house. The summer after grade nine was what I used to refer to as the best summer of my life. To put it mildly, I packed all the hijinks a teenager could get themselves into in two short months. For instance that very night, I had snuck out of my house to hang out with the boy I liked and his friends.

Sneaking out was exhilarating, but rather simple. I’d come home right around my curfew, say goodnight to my mom and go into my room. The moment I would get home she would go to bed. Once, I knew she was asleep, I’d put some pillows under my blanket, tiptoe out of the house and put my shoes on once I was outside. The trick was to come home before she woke up, something I forgot to do that very night.

The guy I liked, his friend and I had broken into an abandoned house. The place was a mess, clearly, we were not the first kids to enter the premises. Broken plates littered the floor, some of them broken by our very hands. Our friend passed out on the living room couch while the boy and I snuck into one of the bedrooms. A dirty mattress laid bare on the floor, but I didn’t mind. Two firsts would happen that night. It was the first time someone would explore my cunt with their hands and with their mouth. It was great. It was exhilarating. He was slightly off the mark, but I didn’t mind.

Olga Wolstenholme is looking for writers to join her over at her site.  She sent me a note asking for me to post the details here.     - - arvan

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about masturbation and sex education and I would like to hear your stories about it. Now, what I propose is that those of you who are so inclined send me an email at olgawolstenholme@gmail.com and share your stories with me so that I can repost them here on Cuntlove.  At present, the topics I would like to cover are: 

1. How did you first learn about sex?  Did you have “the talk” with your parents?  Were your friends your main source of information?  What did you learn from movies, tv, books?  What was sex ed like at your school?  Did you ever walk in on your parents? 
2. What are your personal experiences with masturbation? Have you ever masturbated?  How old where you when you first masturbated?  How did you feel about it?  Did you ever get caught?  Did you ever masturbate with your friends? How do you masturbate?  How would you explain it to someone who has never masturbated before?

As you can see there are two distinct themes: masturbation and sex education.  There is no need to talk about both subject nor is there a need to answer every question.  Simply share with me a personal story that comes to mind when you think about these questions.  Try to keep it between 200 to 500 words for each story, but feel free to send in more than one. What I’ll do is collect them and share them here with the other readers.  Stay on topic, but feel free to give as many details as you like. Make sure to tell me in your email whether you want to remain anonymous. (Who Wants to Tell a Story?)

I recently read in Sex for One that Betty Dodson was convinced that she had abnormal labia since one of them was longer than the other. As she tells it, when she was a kid she thought that she had deformed them by masturbating too much. She even made a deal with God that she would immediately stop masturbating if the situation was rectified, only to eventually make a compromise with herself, which consisted of only masturbating on the shorter side in an attempt to even them out.

It wasn’t only Betty was in her thirties that she came to realize that her labia were perfectly normal and in fact desirable. Her lover at the time asked if he could look at her cunt and ashamed she told him what was “wrong” with her lips. Fortunately he assured her that they were perfectly normal and in fact beautiful. In an attempt to reassure her and show her that labia came in all shapes and sizes, he took out some porno magazines and showed her photographic evidence.

This was the first time that Betty was exposed to that kind of material and the experience blew her mind. She came to accept her own body by simply seeing that other women had similarly shaped labia and that our bodies didn’t all fit into one image of how things ought to look. 

When I was eleven, my brother (who is five years older than I am) told our Mom that it was time for her to give me the talk. The walls in our house were rather thin and I could hear them having this conversation in the kitchen from my bedroom. To be fair, I might have been eavesdropping (I wanted to be a detective at the time).

I was rather mortified at the prospect of having this conversation with my mother and  besides at age eleven I was pretty familiar with the subject, not from personal experience mind you, but I had a firm grasp of how babies were made. My best friend and I had already seen our first porno: an orgy of hippies fornicating in a meadow, a tape we had found in her Dad’s closet. So when, my mother called me down into the kitchen, I was happy to tell her she didn’t need to put either of us through this, since I already knew all about it. She wanted to have the talk just as much as I did, so she let the subject drop.

My parents were separated and weren’t the best communicators in the world, which meant that my Dad also took it upon himself to have the sex talk with me. His version was to awkwardly knock on my bedroom door and hand me a book about puberty and sex, at which point he immediately left. That was it, not a word was spoken. Still at least I had access to some information and he didn’t just hand me a box of condoms like he had done with my brother.

I half-suspected this would happen: after our sixth screening (the bisexuality documentary) was overwhelmed with people, the seventh movie in my sex-positive film series was far quieter. It was nice to have breathing room! The really cool thing about this is that I can now promote the film series to new groups ... I've been afraid to do any new promotion because we've had so many people at some screenings, I'm nervous that we'll be overwhelmed. So now that I can do some more reaching out, I'd love new ideas about new people I can tell about the film series!

In the meantime ....

I've taken a while to post about it because I went to San Francisco on the interim, but the last Sex+++ film was "It's Still Elementary" -- courtesy of GroundSpark: Igniting Change Through Film.

"It's Still Elementary" is a bit of a meta-documentary: a documentary about a documentary! In 1996, a film called "It's Elementary" confronted the question of how to educate grade-school kids about gay and lesbian issues. It showed a number of grade-school educators taking on the issue -- in the 1996 political climate, they risked their jobs to do so! -- and it also showed the kids in their classes creating their own respectful, honest conversations on the subject. Of course there was a firestorm of controversy around "It's Elementary", especially when it was broadcast on TV in 1999. Conservative religious groups did things like call it a "powerful pro-homosexual propaganda film" and mount fundraising campaigns against airing it, writing to their followers that "If we fail to take a stand to put a stop to this outrage, the sin of sexual perversion could be promoted to a potential audience of tens of millions of children" (source).