Trigger warning: This article discusses sexual assault. If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, go to rainn.org or contact (800) 656-4673 for support from trained staff.
May is National Masturbation Month. The month of May was dubbed National Masturbation Month in 1995 by “Good Vibrations,” a sex toy store in San Francisco. The store designated May as the month in honor of Joycelyn Elders, a former Surgeon General who was forced into resignation by former President Bill Clinton after suggesting that masturbation should be a part of sexual education at a United Nations conference on AIDS.
While many at Garfield may find this situation completely outrageous, our current culture surrounding sexual education is very much just as prude, convoluted, and detrimental as 1995.
In 2020, the Washington state legislature passed a bill, Senate Bill 5395 to update requirements concerning sexual education programs. The legislation required every school to provide comprehensive sexual health education by the 2022-2023 school year. As defined by the bill, “comprehensive” sexual education is defined as “medically and scientifically accurate, age-appropriate, and inclusive of all students.” In addition, Seattle Public Schools is mandated to offer two learning opportunities for sex education. Despite this, Garfield was waived from this requirement last year. According to Health Education Manager Lisa Love, SPS needed extra time on the high school level to “devise a plan that included reaching as many students as possible.” This school year, sex ed will be taught in biology classes as well as family health meeting that dual education requirement. According to co-chair of the biology department, Dr. Finley, the course will have intentional overlap with family health so that students have “the opportunity to revisit topics many times as their physical and mental development continues and they encounter new situations with their bodies and relationships.” Although that approach is beneficial to many students, overlapping curriculum means the continued exclusion of many important topics.
Most students have learned about sexuality before entering Garfield; mostly through elementary/middle school Family Life and Sexual Health lessons, parents, and friends. However, high school is a key point of sexual development that Garfield overlooks. Focusing primarily on birth control and STD prevention, Garfield’s sexual education curriculum does not cover LGBTQ+ student’s sexual education,rape culture, and navigating sexual healthcare. In addition, the sexual education curriculum largely neglects the existence of LGBTQ+ students. Last year, the closest the sex ed curriculum got to explicit education on queer sexual health was the brief mention of dental dams as a form of STD prevention. The usage of terminology referencing gender-nonconforming identities is also sparse. This not only cuts them out of important knowledge about their health but leaves a blank space in the minds of non-queer students who often latch onto negative stereotypes about their peers. More often than not, if it is addressed, casual homophobia and transphobia are confronted only by other students.
This gap in education separates students from the gravity of the issues. Because of this, students are deprived of valuable knowledge to care for themselves, and on the other hand, students are insensitive and do not know or care for what is and isn’t appropriate. This builds up a culture of ignorance that normalizes intolerance – a culture where many students find humor in casually threatening each other with sexual assault in front of others or making misogynistic, homophobic, and otherwise ignorant comments amongst themselves and targeted toward others. When not outright offensive, this culture of ignorance forces students to identify the proper boundaries of consent from their own research on the internet, leaving them vulnerable to inaccurate and potentially dangerous content and people.
Even in what is covered, sex ed rarely delves into how to find treatment for STDs or other problems in the medical field such as the gaslighting of female patients with genuine health concerns. Though sex education is being taught more, it also needs to be taught more extensively. The current curriculum prioritizes reproductive education and disease prevention and mostly disregards the cultural forces and changes which make the aforementioned topics relevant to our lives. If sexual education wants to be a pertinent form of education, it has to become more inclusive in its curriculum or else students will resort to outside resources that the school, unlike its own classes, can not guarantee the safety of. The sexual education course is only a little over a week, being 8-9 days. Even if there needs to be workaround other units, it’s far from an impossible feat to expand the horizon on sexual education here at Garfield.
