How do you put a condom on?
My sex education was inadequate to say the least. Our first lesson wasn’t even taught by a biology teacher, it was taught by our scary maths teachers whose joy in life was to make at least one child cry every class. During this lesson she made us watch a video of a woman giving birth, which was basically birth control in itself. This video certainly scared all of the 10 year olds in the class, even leading to one of them to pass out on our maths teacher …
The rest of our sex education consisted of reading from textbooks and labelling diagrams. The teacher would randomly pick on someone to read a passage about penises, but if you laughed, you’d be kicked out of the classroom. Not any easy ask for pre-teens…. As you can probably see my sex education was pretty bad, and not very informative beyond scare tactics. We didn’t learn anything about how sex actually worked and we didn’t even learn how condoms work. I’m currently not alone in having had a bad sex ed experience. I’ve found that whenever I asked people the question:
“How was your sex education?”
This is often met with laughs, and with 90% of people saying that it was bad to non-existent. People either just labelled diagrams, and put condoms on bananas, or they didn’t have it at all. What’s even worse is that I recently learnt in the United States that there are still 13 states where sex education does not even have to be medically accurate.
Similarly, as most people can testify in their sex ed there was little to no mention about the LGBTQ+ community. It is evident that sex education is failing us all, and when this topic comes up a lot of people feel upset, and have a consensus on wishing that it was better, and included more pleasure based sex education.
In fact, before I started Freyja I had originally wanted to run a political campaign in the UK to improve the sex education curriculum. I started to work on this, however, I quickly realised that this was not going to ever work because there was no way that I was going to be able to get a politician to talk about sex, or sex education because it was regarded as too taboo. It was clearly not the way to make a change, which is why I started a porn company, as that seemed to be the only way to improve sex education faster.
If you think about it, a better sex education is the solution to so many pressing problems in our society. A better sex education would improve consent, and in turn could reduce sexual violence. Similarity, it would just improve everyone's relationships around sex, reduce STDs/STIs and more. So, why are we not doing something about this? Is the reason we aren’t solving this really because it is just ‘taboo’? If sex education is to improve, then we all need to start having conversations about it with our friends, with our families, and raising pressure to improve the national curriculum, otherwise we will just be subjecting another generation to the same problems when we could have the chance to improve it instead.