After watching The Education of Shelby Knox in class two weeks ago, I thought I would follow in some of my classmates footsteps and write about my own experiences of sexual health education–especially as it served to inspire the topic for my final paper.
My first memory of official sexual education is in fifth grade, during my “Library” period. We spent a few class periods discussing HIV/AIDS and the way it is transmitted through bodily fluids. To be honest, I don’t remember how explicit the teacher was when it came to discussing condoms and sexual intercourse, but I already knew about the mechanics of sex thanks to an article entitled “The V Files” I had read in Teen People magazine in third grade.
My sex ed.
In seventh grade, I took a health course, but I honestly can’t remember if we discussed sex or not. I assume we must have, but what I remember most from the class were the lessons about eating disorders. Around the same time, rumors began to fly around my middle school that one of the girls had gotten pregnant and had an abortion. She was branded a slut and excommunicated from most social groups–though I never particpated personally in this name calling and exclusion, I certainly didn’t speak out against it, or even think otherwise. Having been raised Catholic, with married parents, and friends whose parents were married or had been married at the time of their birth, I thought extramarital sex was an extremely rare and terribly immoral thing.
By eleventh grade I had realized this wasn’t the case, though I still had illusions about saving myself for marriage. I also took a one semester health class, in which students showed up stoned to present research on why smoking weed was bad, and the male student who sat next to me graciously informed me (without prompting) that he preferred when women shaved “down there.” Our sexual education in this chaotic class consisted of a period of frightening images of STDs and being told to use a condom–not that we were shown how to do so. Condoms were available in the SPARK office–after 3PM, and only if our parents hadn’t signed a form saying we weren’t allowed to have them.
And finally, the issue I’ve chosen to write my final paper on–abortion–was mentioned all of once, in the context of explaining the before it was legalized women used coat hangers to perform unsafe potentially deadly abortions. WHAT!? How exactly did that work? How does abortion work now!?–questions I thought but didn’t ask, questions I WISH I had asked but then again, my instructor probably wouldn’t have known or supplied the answer anyway.
Though I have always considered myself prochoice, I didn’t ask any of these questions again until this semester. After watching a film from the 1970s which shows a woman having an abortion, I was struck by how different it was from typical antiabortion propaganda–so struck that I wrote a blog post entitled What does an abortion look like? This has become the inspiration for my final paper topic, as I hope to examine visual representation of abortion online, and question why, in a space (the internet) overflowing with feminism, there is almost no visual counter to this ridiculous propaganda.
Cool! lol