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In my “good old days”, sex education consisted of marching the senior high classes down to the auditorium to watch a movie of a child being born. No information was given prior to or during the presentation. There wasn’t a voiceover describing what was happening. There wasn’t a visual to speak of, that is to say nothing explicit or definitive depicted. Simply put, a woman was lying on a surgical table with her feet up in stirrups and a nurse told her to push and after three or four minutes a baby was hefted from behind the surgical drape. The end. Perhaps, we did have about three classes leading up to the movie (yeah, I’m so old it was a movie). If I remember correctly, one of the classes consisted of a hand-out in the form of a mimeographed page (the carcinogenic kind of reprographic) with line drawings of the internal workings of a human male and a human female. The instructions to the students was to label the various parts of the reproductive systems. All in all it was pretty clinical. The male sketch was at the top of the page, the female sketch was at the bottom. We had about 15 minutes to fill in the blanks and hand our work in for 25 per cent of our final mark on “sex ed”. Not once did the teacher talk about how those parts worked. I imagine some of us had figured it out, but most definitely, two or three students didn’t have a clue what the heck it was all about. And that was sex ed in the good old days.
In my good old days, sex wasn’t something to discuss, with anyone at any time. I sure as H E double don’ts wouldn’t ask my mom anything. Like your mom, my mom only seemed to know the basics. The “ins and outs” so to speak. And Mom, more or less, passed her meagre knowledge along to each of us. For instance, about two months before LOML and I got married, she gave me her “Rhythm Method” book to, you know, plan my future. The book included a “fertility wheel” (a lot like the “cow calendar” I saw in a neighbour’s barn) which only an engineer— or a farmer—could have figured out. With three brothers and three sisters, I suppose mom had it figured out, family planning and all. I figure if seven children was what my parents had planned, the wheel worked. But sex education isn’t just about family planning, is it?
Yep, back in the good old days, sex was bad. Thinking about sex, talking about sex, having sex, asking questions about sex—all bad. When I was in my teens, I knew nothing about any kind of sexuality except heterosexuality and even then, I didn’t know the word “heterosexuality”. And, honestly, my knowledge of heterosexuality was pretty scant. I knew nothing about sexually transmitted diseases and zero about bullying, rape, consent or healthy relationships. I did know how to label a diagram, though. I’d heard a lot of descriptive words for body parts and how body parts were used. Mostly, because I was just plain old ignorant. I smiled and laughed and scowled and frowned, when it seemed appropriate. Oh the stories I could tell you about the misinformation I clung to in “the good old days”.
Believe me, most of the people I know want better for their children and for their children’s children. We want progress, not the return to the less informed “good old days”. We want better for our children and their children. Garnering support from certain sectors of the electorate by regression and repression of information isn’t the answer, Doug Ford. Just because you’re happy to have learned all you know about sex in the back seat of Daddy’s car on prom night doesn’t mean it’s the answer for everyone. Was it even “good for you,” Doug?
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