I almost missed blogging for sex education day. Oh Noes!

But here I am typing away. I have a 12 year old boy so comprehensive, medically accurate sex education is a very important subject to me. I read once that parents do all sorts of stuff to get their kids to learn to walk or to read, but sex education is the only thing that we put off teaching kids till they ask about it. What a load of horse shit (apologies to my little addict pony, Latawnya). We don’t wait till a kid asks us to teach them how to cross the street or that fire is hot.

But this idea is pretty well entrenched in parent’s heads- so I am grateful for sex education in schools that explains how STDs are transmitted and how pregnancy happens and how to stop them. My kid will someday be out in the world having sex with “their” kids and I don’t want to be a grandma before I’m 50- so it’s better that everyone gets the basics.

But it really is just the basics, and sex is so much more than putting on a condom. It’s learning your own body and all the different ways it responds to someone else’s body. It’s big waves of emotion. It’s everything that leads up to getting naked and all the stuff that comes after you’ve put your clothes back on. School doesn’t teach that. But it could go further than it does now.

School could teach boys and girls that pressure, begging, pleading, harassing etc. are a hairsbreadth away from rape. They could teach boys and girls that consent means an enthusiastic hell yes and anything else should be considered a no. They could teach boys that it is their responsibility to stop and not the girl’s responsibility to stop them.

But they don’t teach that, so I go solo on that trip and teach it to the Kid despite all the social messages he gets to the contrary. I have a fairly liberal “no censorship” policy in my house. That means that the Kid gets exposed to adult ideas and situations and when he has a question or I think he needs to know something- he gets a direct answer. It also means he’s seen Margaret Cho doing her thing on DVD until I got tired of having to explain every blue reference and sent him to bed so my friends and I could finish the video in peace.

The Kid has reached an age where almost everyday there is some new discussion about controversial things in the world like sex and drugs and feminism and racism.