This is a really important point. Even for more average families, monitoring your kid’s online activity is considered responsible parenting by many nowadays.

I work with a girl who learned about sex from Star Trek fanfic in her late teens and early 20s while she was in college. Her family is super fucked up. She is not alone.

You can understand how a condom works without understanding how to use one effectively. That’s a good way to end up with a condom that tears, slips off, or gets put on too late to be useful.

I think the issue isn’t necessarily the lack of access to information, it’s the shame that’s attached to sex and sexual curiosity. So they can look up all kinds of information but they’re just as likely to get a bunch of terrible information along side the good. If they live in a community where no adult is willing to…

Adults in America know so little about this stuff, it’s terrifying. In college, I minored in psychology and focused a lot on the psychology of sex and relationships. My psych of sex prof, on the first day of class, told us about a policy she had about questions. If there was one you were too afraid to ask in class,…

I think a lot of kids have a general idea that there is such thing as birth control but a. don’t know where/how to get it, b. don’t feel comfortable buying it and/or c. have a ton of misinformation about how to use it.

Have you ever googled some of those questions? The interwebs is full of terrible, terrible and incorrect information.

I was recently shocked by this when having a conversation with my husband about health class in middle and high school. He got the “basics” of puberty in elementary school and then it was never touched on again - he went to a Catholic all-boys HS so they never touched the stuff. My public school had great sex ed,…

You overlook the fact that for some communities, a lot of kids never learn what sexual intercourse is, because not only is the school not talking about it, their families aren’t either. This is bad because some of these kids know so little about how this stuff works, they end up getting abused and never know it until…

Fixed it for you.

Uhm, only in much the same way that watching NASCAR teaches you how to drive in normal city traffic without endangering yourself or others. In other words, absolutely not. I’m suggesting that in the absence of real information, kids think porn teaches them to have sex, and that is a very scary thing.

Yes, that, but also the 16 year old has unlimited access to F1 / NASCAR racing videos on the internet but no one bothers to teach him/her how to put on a seatbelt.

The funny thing is that a lot of “abstinence” places also seem dead-set on enforcing gendered rules about girls capitulating to the wishes of boys for their approval, dressing up and flirting, dating, emphasizing that the most important thing about a girl is her sexuality, not her intelligence etc. Acting younger, not…

A ton, in some places. A friend taught a microbiology class to nursing students that took a giant detour half way through the quarter when she realized how little they knew about HIV and STIs. And those were the students who are ostensibly interested in health and disease!

Yeah I had a very eye opening experience in college when I realized there were quite a few women around me who didn’t realize that pee comes out of the urethra and is a whole other hole (hehe) than your vaginal opening.

I thought first base was somebody actually acknowledging your existence.

It’s like handing the keys of a Lamborghini to a 16 year old after only teaching them how an engine works, rather than teaching them how to actually drive. What the fuck are these people seriously expecting to happen, and how the hell do they keep managing to rationalize it to themselves in the face of such…

I was an invited speaker at a high school recently and I spent some time engaging the students in discussion about whether abstinence is a practical strategy to promote for people living with HIV (with a heavy subtext of “Do people generally do great at abstaining? Do you?”)

[raises hand] At this point, how much sense would it make to make Sex-Ed a required college course?

I get always get stuck on the inhumanity and lack of common decency. You’ve signed up to fight, and possibly die for your country but your gravitas and sense of honor doesn’t extend far enough to not pull Porky’s style bullshit on YOUR FELLOW crew member ?