Sex education is a very tricky subject. What exactly do you tell children about sex with out it being, well... weird? How young should they start learning about sex and relationships, and where do you draw the line on what to tell them? We may not have been getting it right in the past, but there is still hope for the future.
All I can remember from my early school sex ed was a brief "when a man and a woman love each other very much..." talk, followed by a video of childbirth for the girls in the class. I've no idea what the boys watched, but it can't possibly have been as gory. Then, in my teenage years, I recall a biology teacher handing round examples of different types of contraception so we could see what each looked like while she described what they did. It was all geared towards making us rather cautious about sex!
I have no idea how I found out all the other stuff. It certainly wasn't from my friends, as mine were all far too shy to talk about anything so personal. It was probably from women's magazines. And masturbation. And perhaps that really fantastic VHS cassette of porn that my parents didn't hide well enough. Somehow, I pieced it all together and have made it to my 30s intact - having had a lot of orgasms, plus a distinct lack of unplanned pregnancies or nasty infections along the way.
But it isn't quite so easy for kids these days. They live in an extremely sexualised society but everyone seems too damn scared to give them the information they need to make sense of it all. I don't know which is worse - bad information or no information at all! Young people get given poor information about sex and relationships from their schools, television shows, bad pornography, and from other ill-informed kids bragging about things they probably haven't even done yet. How do they know what's right and what's wrong?
If they've got questions to ask, they might go to a charity like Brook, who offer free confidential information about sex to under 25s. That's if they were told about such services at school, or have the sense to look for more information in a good place. If you simply try a Google search for any questions you have on sex, who knows whether the results that are returned will be answers provided by trained professionals or by absolute idiots.
Young people themselves are asking for better sex education, and are even suggesting that they should be trained to provide it to those younger than themselves. But they can't win this battle alone. Zoe Margolis wrote in the Guardian this week: "If we don't fight on behalf of young people and the education they have a right to then the impact on their lives, their relationships and their sexual health will be felt for generations to come."
Margolis is a prominent supporter of Brook, and is currently organising a fundraising comedy event on their behalf. Taking place on 13th January at the Bloomsbury Theatre, Sex Appeal has a great line-up and promises to raise a lot of money for a very worthy cause. How worthy? Well, Brook's Sex:Positive campaign encourages people to 'Say Yes to 21st Century Sex and Relationships Education'. Surely this is something we can all get behind. After all, don't kids deserve to have all the information they need to make their own choices in life?
Lori Smith is the BitchBuzz Sex & Relationships columnist and has acquired most of her knowledge on the subject through practical experience so far, but she hopes to pass her theory test soon. She will be speaking at the Eroticon andCybher conferences in 2012 on the slippery subject of sex writing.
Image from Brook's Sex:Positive Tumblr.