Let's Talk About Sex...Wait, No, Let's Not!
By Mary Stiles
It is a topic that is seldom discussed in most homes. It is snickered about in grade school hallways and spewed across stalls of public restrooms. It hits you in the face when you turn on the TV and songs glorify it on the radio everyday
Sex.
"It is a special thing that happens between two married people who love each other." This is the first definition I received from my parents at the age of 8...just before an all-too-well-informed boy in my third grade class explained, what I then thought was, the horrifying truth. I was informed of the physical aspect of sex too young. Yet, I was not warned about the traumatic emotional effects until the age of 17 in my senior year Faith class.
Mr. Koesters' Faith Commitments class is a two semester course that devotes an entire month to sex education. Mr. Koesters' intentions are to delay young people's decisions to have sex before marriage. He wants to inform students of the risks involved in becoming sexually active. A "Pre-Sex Agreement" was designed by Mr. Koesters for the class. It is a photocopied list of questions for each partner to fill out before they decide to have sex. The class also divided in to groups to complete a research report on sexually transmitted diseases and presented them to the rest of the class. Many of these presentations included pictures and some very surprising statistics. But what I found most shocking about them was that I had never heard these facts before.
In a country where the average young woman who loses her virginity before she gets married, does so at 16, why are we being taught these things when we are 17 and 18? We pride ourselves on our freedom of speech and advanced education system and yet we are still too afraid to talk about sex? The religion class I took as a sophomore had a required textbook called Sex, Love and You. This small book addressed the male and female reproductive organs and gave textbook names to body parts some of us didn't even know we had. This was informative and it was helpful, but it was just shy of what was really necessary--The Truth.
We need to hear the real deal before some of us make an uninformed decision that might change our lives forever. Mr. Koesters teaches his students to see sex on a different level than our society portrays. The course has made a great impact on the students, however the timing may have been a bit late. If sex education were a bigger part of the sophomore or junior year religion curriculum, maybe someday more adults will look back on their golden years with fewer regrets.
Return to the Network Editorial Index