Sherry Chandler

One last rant (yeah, right)…

One of the major struggles my husband and I faced as parents was in trying to teach and guide our sons about sex.

The problem was how to go about teaching them to protect themselves against sexual predators and AIDS and the corporate push to sexualize children while somehow nurturing a joy in their sexuality that would translate into a healthy mature sex life. A healthy mature sex life being a rare commodity in these United States.

Somehow, we considered knowledge to be our ally in this struggle. While we were not above an imperative “keep it in your pants,” we were not naïve enough to believe that a pair of teen-aged boys would actually heed such an order. So we figured we wanted them to know everything we could teach them — about their own sexuality, about female sexuality, about heterosexuality and homosexuality, about conception, about birth control, and about venereal disease and how to prevent it. Even about the joys of masturbation.

We made it a policy not to be shocked by anything they might ask. We didn’t condemn or make taboos about anything but cruelty and abuse. Just the facts, ma’am, but no means no. And you are allowed to say no to anyone.

We kept our intervention to a minimum and did not try to manipulate. But we also tried to keep ourselves approachable, to be there when we were needed.

Of course, that was in the happy-go-lucky nineties, before we entered the age of ignorance and sex education became a dirty word, before our teen pregnancy rates began to go back up.

Maybe we got lucky, but it seems to have worked. Somehow knowledge didn’t make our boys less innocent, and they got through high school and college and into adulthood as tolerant, relatively well-adjusted adults.

That’s why I’ve been glad enough to see headlines like this lately: Abstinence Programs Face Rejection. More States Opt to Turn Down the Federal Money Attached to That Kind of Sex Ed.

It isn’t knowledge but ignorance that makes kids vulnerable. I think this is true across the board. You can’t make kids better Christians by keeping them ignorant of science. You can’t keep them sexually innocent by keeping them ignorant of sex. You can’t make them heterosexual by condemning homosexuality. And, it seems to me, the best way of all to make them kinky (however you might define kinky) is to put up a great fence of taboos. The forbidden is always seductive.

You can, however, by keeping them ignorant, make them more vulnerable to those who would exploit their ignorance, be it a classmate, a teacher, a priest, or a corporate executive.

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