As I recall, the first time I was “educated about sex,” it was 1985 or 1986 and I was a fifth-grader sitting in the library of my public elementary school. I knew that we must be talking about something controversial because only the girls were in the room. The boys had been sent to the gym with the school’s one male teacher and the principal, who was also male. We girls watched a film that explained the changes our bodies were going to experience as we became women. The film did not speak of sex but hinted that our bodies needed to change so we could one day have babies.
In the sixth grade, boys and girls were separated again, but this time we got to see the girls’ and the boys’ films. Imagine the giggling that ensued in the library this time! Still, we did not really learn about sex because the movies did not really explain much. In my public high school health class, we learned about sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), saw horrific images of untreated STDs, and were told that abstinence was the only real way to avoid such awful medical problems. Again, not much education about sex per se, but the message was clear—if you don’t want bad things to happen to your body, you should not have sex. I was raised in a fairly conservative and religious family, and although my parents had an encyclopedia-type set of books that described body development and sex, again, we didn’t really talk much about it. The types of sex education I experienced were more similar to the abstinence-only approach.
I took an anthropology class in college that taught about relationships, sexuality, family systems, and cultural influences on these topics. It was the first real educational experience, beyond a human biology class that discussed the anatomy of females and males that explored the topic of sexuality— although not officially CSE, especially since it was happening so late in my educational career, this sex education experience was more similar to the CSE approach. When I started teaching my Psychology of Gender class many years ago, I was often appalled at how little my students knew about sexuality. It was not that they were unexperienced—many had had assorted sexual experiences—but when we discussed sexuality, it was clear that their educational exposure to the topic was as limited as mine had been.