Sex Ed in the Bible Belt

By Margaret McKeehan, Open Magazine. Posted May 20, 2008.

The first time I can recall knowing about sex was in second grade. Someone whispered the word sex while I stood in line to leave the classroom. We giggled. I'm not sure I knew what it meant, but I knew it was taboo. Later that year one of my friends was given detention for kissing someone under the art room table. I didn't understand the punishment; I didn't understand that kissing was bad. In fourth grade I had my first sex-ed course, if that is the appropriate designation. Much like the course I would go through during the next year, its primary focus was puberty, not sex. Teachers were willing to answer questions about sex, but most of our questions were unrelated. One girl asked what would happen if someone gave birth while going to the bathroom. Would the baby drown in the toilet? Perhaps my biggest sexual education of elementary school was on the bus in fourth grade. One of my friends had seen a porno. He whispered, "I actually saw the guy put his thing inside her." Wait. That is what sex is? Finally informed, I would giggle even more when it was mentioned -- I was nine.

By the time I reached middle school hormones had hit and I had real questions to ask, but I didn't ask any of them. The class was co-ed and traditionally composed of more goofing off than education. It was also my first encounter with scare tactics. The context of these tactics is important. I attended an inner-city school where most of the students lived in the projects. Pregnancy in middle school was fairly common. My high school, although more than twice the size of my middle school, had fewer pregnant students.

At both schools we had the same abstinence-only speaker, known ironically as "the sex guy." The class made it clear how conservative his stance was. We had practice babies to take home for a few days that cried and needed to be fed by a key every three hours or so. One girl had been so irritated by it that she put it in toaster, or so the rumor goes. We tried on pregnancy suits and were told the costs of raising a child. We were shown uncensored footage of childbirth.

Most of our time was spent discussing STDs. Although some demonstrations were reasonable, several were just scare tactics. One of the more reasonable demonstrations began with everyone being given a cup of clear liquid. Two students had cups with a clear dye that represented an STD -- a person could look healthy but harbor a disease. We were then instructed to exchange part of the contents of our cup with three other people in the class. After we had done so they dropped an indicator into our cups to reveal the dye was now in many students' cups; a large portion of the class had an STD. In another example we were shown a wheel, like the kind you can win prizes off of at fairs, except we spun for different types of STDs. The chances of escaping the STDs with one spin were very slim. One tactic I experienced was particularly disturbing to me, an example I initially thought persuasive. The instructor offered two chocolate bars. One contained laxatives and the other was a regular chocolate bar. We were offered both, but not told which was which. When we declined, we were told sexual partners are like chocolate bars -- the risk isn't worth the pleasure. These implications are unsettling -- sexual partners are presented as untrustworthy and as deceitful as a chocolate bar. In retrospect, it was an incredibly unfair way of presenting sex. My middle school sex-ed class left me with one distinct impression: sex is painful. Nothing depicted it positively. My hormones were raging, but the actual idea of sex was repulsive and frightening.

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