This article from the NY Times, "On Campus, Opening Up Conversations About Sex", covers the Sex Week at Harvard, where young people were informing their peers on different contraception methods, as well as medical equipment used for different exams (a gynecologist’s speculum for Pap smears for example). Two issues caught my attention. The sexual conversations were not only on healthy sexual life, as in the use of condoms, or sexual violence. They also included equally important issues such as sexual pleasure and fulfillment, and being able to live in a “judgment-free atmosphere that embraces all lifestyles”. I think that especially when talking with young women about sexual rights and sexuality, it is important to highlight the right to pleasure. I have worked on these issues with college students before, and some young women are surprised, and repeat to themselves, “yes, I have a right to enjoy my sexuality!”. The other aspect that was interesting in the article is how some colleges, like Yale, removed the name of the university from the “Sex Week” title, because of “administration pushback”. In many colleges, there has been opposition to sex weeks, “don’t like the idea of university resources being used to promote sexual activity. Others think the events promote an irresponsible, pleasure-first approach to sex”. I think people are having sex, with or without information about it, so why not promote access to information and thus empowerment to be able to choose? I would relate this article to gender roles, globalization and sexuality issues, and reflection on how to change structures at different levels of our societies and in the spaces we move.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Lets talk about sex
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I agree. Sex is as natural as any other form of human activity, and it needs to be treated as such.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to see just how differently people deal with it across the world, because growing up, I never had Sex Ed in school. In fact, a lot of Indian schools don't. All we received were a few hours of the teacher awkwardly trying to navigate the Reproduction chapter in Biology class, without actually mentioning the word "sex". I didn't have the "birds & bees" talk with my parents either(although, that one I don't mind).
In Guatemala, it's somewhat the same Yamuna: all you get in high school and undergrad is a talk on STDs (with pictures of "what can happen to you if you have sex"), promoting or emphasizing abstinence. In Guatemala, there's a law that still needs to be implemented, where all public schools have to include Sex Ed in their curricula, with specific issues according to age and grade. The catholic church primarily has strongly opposed to this right (I think it is a right for adolescents and youth to be informed on their own bodies and sexualities), and instead the church offered writing the curriculum themselves ("birds & bees" vocabulary mainly). Not talking about sex, or not directly talking about sex, doesn't avoid it from happening. Kids and youth are having sex, so why not inform and educate them so they can have sex in safer, well-informed and fully satisfying conditions.
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