Before I say anything else, I just want to get this out there: Putting a condom on a banana is nothing at all like putting a condom on one’s self. For one thing, there are different angles. Also, one is done in a crowded, awkward moment while the other is done in an intimate, passionate moment. Perhaps most importantly, if you accidentally pinch a banana, it won’t leave you singing soprano for a week.
Having gotten that out of the way, I’d like to talk about some other, more general problems with contemporary sex education. The current debate is between abstinence-only programs and programs that teach the use of contraceptives. If you ask me, this entire debate is ridiculous because neither program prepares students to deal with the emotional and ethical dimensions of their sexual behavior.
I’m not saying that educators should impose their values on a captive audience. I am saying that parents and educators in this country should find a middle ground between “Thou shalt not” and “Insert tab A into slot B.” It’s certainly possible to raise and discuss questions of ethics without imposing a particular agenda. In the case of human sexuality, I would say it’s not only possible, but necessary.
Hear me out on this because I’m not talking about ethics in the Bible-thumping sense of the word. There’s an ethical dimension to almost every human action, and certainly to every interaction. Most of the time, we aren’t conscious of the ethical dimensions of the choices we make. Hell, most of the time we’re not even conscious of the fact that we’re making choices. But we make ethical choices in what we say in class, how we act at the bank and where we buy our groceries. And you better believe we make ethical choices in who we screw and how.
However, contemporary sex education describes sexuality as if it were a biological transaction. Learning about sex is not like learning about geometry. Sex cannot be reduced to facts, figures and statistics because it is a practical subject that affects every single person alive. Sex education misses the boat when it focuses on communicating dry information, such as how to recognize a herpes sore or prepare a piece of fruit for protected intercourse, instead of practical dialogue, such as learning about a partner’s emotional needs or respecting each other in the morning.
You can’t have casual sex any more than you can snort a casual line of coke. Any attempt at sex education that does not deal frankly with the emotional and ethical realities of sex is practically worthless.
Again, I’m not saying that anyone should push a particular agenda. But young people need someone to raise these issues, present various points of view and facilitate discussion.
Some say sex education should take place in the home. I agree with this in theory. But in practice, it’s just not happening. When I was younger, I got “the talk.” One parent told me the mechanics and left it pretty much at that. Like countless other young people, I went into adolescence woefully under-informed. In all the talk about what goes where, no one ever told me what I was going to feel. No one ever mentioned what it was going to be like to be horny or confused. And nary a word was breathed about how my partner would feel.
Though there’s something to be said for learning “the hard way,” there’s no inherent virtue in making mistakes that could easily be avoided if one were to possess more information. Because of a lack of information and candid dialogue, generation after generation ends up repeating the mistakes of its predecessors. There’s got to be a better way. There shouldn’t be “the talk,” there should be many talks. Sex should be a topic of conversation like any other topic. For one thing, there’s way too much information to dump into one talk. Also, a lot of the information won’t even make sense to kids until they’re older.
My point, put simply, is this: Sex is more than just mechanics. Incorporating this reality into sex education would mean an increase in dialogue but a decrease in banana sales to public schools. I suppose tradeoffs have to be made somewhere.

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