I couldn't help but picture the guy giving the sex ed talk as Chris Farley in his "van by the river" mode.
I wouldn't admit to being a "sex researcher" in a Republican-controlled state (she's in MI, right?) There goes your funding.
Class was in East Lansing, apparently. She's on the faculty at Northwestern's med school, though.
I thought I'd be the only one who found Dreger to be a bit problematic, but there's unexpected support for this view in comments at Daily Nous. Probably a combination of the infamous philosopher friendship deterrence system and academics' fear of being put online surreptitiously.
Apparently she's hated in the trans community for supporting a view of trans people that they reject. Also, she's pretty obviously a bomb thrower. But I'm not going to sign on to your bias for activists who are lovable models of Olympian restraint and good taste.
The republican congress just voted for an additional $75 million for abstinence-only sex ed in 2016 and 2017. These people love their abortions, is the message I'm taking from this.
Maybe they just love sexual frustration.
Aha! I assumed she was in Evanston and that was particularly mind-blowing to me. OK. Who the heck knows what they get up to in MI.
Also, the "It's classist to make fun of abstinence instructors" angle at the Daily Nous is silly.
I think the real problem here is she has too long of a commute.
Maybe she takes a vaporetto across the lake.
Transporting a vaporetto across states lines is just the kind of crime a good, abstinent woman wouldn't commit.
5: ogged, where did you learn about her lack of popularity among the members of the teams community.
||For TRO, the outlook for petroleum engineers may not be as rosy as you hope.
These days, a very large number of people are already studying in petroleum engineering programs (see attachment, showing data made available through the Society of Petroleum Engineers, SPE), at a time when: the number of recent graduates, who began their studies several years ago, is already at about historical highs and growing rapidly (see attachment); our program's board of industry advisors are recommending that we "do not grow" our undergraduate program at this time; and oil and natural gas price projections and expectations of U.S. governmental policy influences are viewed as not particularly encouraging by the U.S. petroleum industry.|>
Stupid iphone. Should be "trans," but Miby is right about it being a good typo.
The phone also tried to change "trans" to "trams". Maybe a tram would help with her commute.
Could work, but I think it needs a middle name.
Something heavy metal sounding.
Or, use my own taste in music.
I remember my parents being genuinely surprised that we didn't have more sex education than we did. I think the subject had been so much in the news in the 60s that they'd assumed there'd be some substance to it. Columbus is or was very similar to East Lansing culturally.
In fact, we got very little that was not abstract—diagrams of reproductive organs—or comically out of date, like pictures of socializing teenagers in the styles of the 40s. The teachers were gym teachers and coaches, notorious bullies with very little use for someone like me. In my school a large, strong, coordinated boy was invariably a varsity athlete of some kind, even the proto-hippies and potheads. I was anomalous in that way, an object of suspicion; the teachers and I held each other in mutual contempt.
Had they been forced to address sex education, I'm sure they'd have gravitated to abstinence-only après la lettre. In this case, nothing is better than something.
Good thing I already have such low expectations for sex ed.
Yeah, really, isn't this a subject pretty much all of us expect to homeschool? Like history and civics -- the school is going to tell them stuff, and you're going to tell them that the school version isn't sufficiently nuanced.
"Like your teacher said, littering is bad. But sometimes you just can't have that many beer cans in your car and there's not a recycling container near."
My kids haven't gotten much -- there was one day of HIV prevention/avoidance in ninth grade, and there's a gym teacher who is either tasked by the school or self-appointed as the guy who hands out condoms randomly to the older students.
The sex ed I had, as I recall: 1) one year my parents pulled me out of it, because I wasn't allowed to know that sex existed and I think my parents were worried everyone was putting condoms on bananas 2) the next year, we learned nothing about birth control but everything you'd want to know about diseases of the reproductive system 3) same as previous year, with a younger health teacher spending one day talking about the difference between sex and love.
Actually acknowledging that there are condoms would have been a step up.
I keep on thinking that I should do the condom/banana thing at home at some point. I mean, it is a manual skill that one ideally shouldn't be figuring out on the fly. OTOH, I am easily embarrassed, and haven't interacted with a condom myself personally since... 1995.
Randomly? That seems like an idea that could go wrong.
I think the only sex ed class I had was in Israel in 8th grade. My Hebrew wasn't that great, so I wasn't sure how much I understood. My parents never talked to me about it at all. I guess it's no wonder that sex has always been such a mystery for me.
isn't this a subject pretty much all of us expect to homeschool?
It is, which is classist in a way, but I don't know what to do about it. "Correctives" not only improve vital factual knowledge but also teach your kids skepticism and critical thinking.
And our kids get that, from an early age and other kids don't.
31: It doesn't sound well-thought out, but it also sounds fairly harmless (contingent, of course, that I think the population of parents of children in the school who would be offended by an idiot gym teacher handing their child condoms is pretty small.)
I mentioned this elsewhere, but my high school's sex ed teacher was something else. Lots of talk about the importance of foreplay and how girls have as much right to expect orgasms as boys. (She apparently retired in the mid-90s after a parent complained. The first complaint ever!)
1) one year my parents pulled me out of it
If only they'd let you attend, you could have learned about the downsides of that method.
34: I guess I'm a bit concerned about a teacher deciding which of the students looked like they might need a condom soon.
31: You'd prefer he pick and choose. "Sorry, Timmy, we all know it would only go to waste."
Peep, hate to break it to you but sex can cause pregnancy.
We had sex ed in 5th grade, focusing on body parts and mechanics, and then again in Life Management Skills in high school, which IIRC was a reasonable public school version of sex ed - condoms on bananas, lots of factual information, a bit of "you should be in a caring relationship" but not necessarily married. Later, in AP/IB biology, we got to watch footage from tiny cameras inside the vagina during sex, splooge and all. Also the heat-detecting camera version of sex. All still super hilarious to me, twenty years later.
Of course, the real sex ed was UU, but that's been discussed here endlessly aitihmhbhmbhf
My sex ed class was great, a full trimester taught by a woman science teacher in an all boys school to a bunch of seventh graders, which has to be the most thankless job ever. But she did a really good job of being both factual and positive about sex and spending a lot of time on consent/rape type issues that us idiots needed to hear. Also she would tell semi-explicit personal anecdotes, especially awesome because she was the wife of the fat guy from the Poloce Academy movies.
condoms on bananas
They should do that with zucchini or really large cucumber. Kids today have too much ego and need to be taken down a peg.
Hmm, there must have been a 7th grade version as well, because I just recalled a vivid memory of that science teacher saying that sex and breastfeeding are the two most intimate things you can do with another person.
Also she would tell semi-explicit personal anecdotes, especially awesome because she was the wife of the fat guy from the Poloce Academy movies.
That made me think she was going to do in-class demos like in that Monty Python skit.
Also, thanks for 39 -- cleared some things up for me.
Mine was taught by gym teachers, and was totally sexist. Boys and girls were divided, and I have no idea what the girls learned, but while us boys learned some simple mechanics, and covered STDs in horrifying detail, a huge amount of it was just about how boys use relationships to get sex, and girls use sex to get relationships, and the potential emotional consequences of that, etc. I remember that part of that general conversation was a heavy emphasis on the "risk" that anytime a boy has sex with a girl, he will have her wanting a serious relationship and if that's not what he wants, that may upset her and then in her sorrow/anger she may claim that the sex was rape.
Oh yeah, we also had lots of emphasis on foreplay in the 7th grade/fat guy from Police Academy class. And a weirdly super explicit textbook that was clearly some kind of 70s sex educator relic whose motto was basically "if it feels good, do it." I remember one thing it claimed was that teenage boys love to masturbate together in groups and that most do so, which I had a WTF reaction to at the time and since.
I met a guy whose high school sex ed was done by the football coach and who advised putting $10 in savings every time you masturbated on the grounds that savings was important and $10 was still far cheaper than dating.
There was a gender-split thing in middle school once, where the girls all got put in an auditorium to listen about fashion. I specifically remember being told about the LBD, and how every woman needs one. (That's the Little Black Dress, just so's you know. Indispensable and practical.) I think the premise was how to dress appropriately at work, with a bit of "and then you go from day to night like THIS!"
Huh, reading other people's versions makes me feel like my experience was an outlier in a good way. The public schools I attended had sex ed for some part of the year (maybe a quarter, maybe a semester) every year from fifth grade until ninth grade. Fifth grade was body parts and mechanics. Sixth grade was diseases, which was unfortunately taught by an evangelical teacher, but he did emphasize that condoms were good, if not foolproof, protection. Seventh and eighth grade were "your changing body" type stuff, along with some consent and lots of birth control information, plus a review of STIs. (Although no demos of condoms/barriers. I'd never seen a condom until I was old enough to buy them.) I think ninth grade was just birth control and diseases, but I don't remember. I remember abstinence being recommended, but there was mostly just lots of information.
47: $10 in savings every time I masturbated?! I would be rich!
49 sounds like what we had, except I was at a Catholic school.
49: Yeah, we had some iteration of sex ed from 5th grade (periods, pubic hair, sperms) through high school (foreplay, consent). In junior high I remember watching a film of a Swedish lady giving birth. The best part was the teacher ran the film backwards at the end.
My seventh grade sex ed class (taught by the science teacher, co-ed, generally good) had a lot of "your changing bodies" stuff, including, memorably, that we should expect to start to smell differently and more prominently and so "no more wearing your favorite pair of underwear every day, girls!"
51: My friends who went to area Catholic schools were shocked that we got such detailed information. They said their unit consisted of a nun and a single word: DON'T.
I didn't really have any at school. We had some body part types stuff. But at our school, the health education classes were one of the ones that kids doing a lot of exam subjects would skip, in order to get more time.
So along with about 25% of our school year, I had very minimal sex education.
"Honestly, with this many exams to study for, you kids aren't going to need to know anything about sex."
It's an educational philosophy, I guess.
This was also the height of the AIDS epidemic, so we had lots of school-wide information about condom use and AIDS. I distinctly remember a school assembly where we watched an educational movie in which Rae Dawn Chong said "it's hot and dry up there," referring to anal sex. Can this really have happened?
55 to not needing to change your underwear.
58: No, it could not have happened. You have a disturbing and yet amusing fantasy life, TRO!
My kids got the better version, more-or-less. I'm sure it existed some places even in the 60s, hence my parents' expectations, and gym teacher embarrassments persist many other places even now. Worsened by conscious ideology. But UMC parents mostly minimize harm, so that the kids turn the experience into funny anecdotes.
58: I remember the Rae Dawn Chong movie. "AIDS is hard to get!!!"
I legit can't remember much about our sex ed. Body parts, yes, with the immortal use of Mr. Donahue palming two basketballs as a visual aide representing the female reproductive system (basketballs-ovaries, his arms-fallopian tubes and so on). I remember a teacher passing around a basket of things in which we were supposed to identify which object was not a form of contraception (it was the lube. KY is not a contraceptive.) And some videos about diseases. But I don't recall any discussion of relationships/foreplay/anything that a student in the classroom might be expected to do with the information we were getting.
I went to high school right at the peak of condoms-(in packages)-as fashion. Kids wore them pinned to their shoes, to their backpacks, and so on. Let's talk about sex, baby!
62 -- hah! Googling reveals that the Rae Dawn Chong movie is on YouTube. "Sex, Drugs and AIDS (1986)". It's 18 minutes so I havent had time to watch the whole thing and find out if the "hot and dry" line is really in there.
49: Mine was similar. 5th and 6th videos and risks, certainly no positive explanation for why you'd take on those risks.
In 8th grade, 1/4 of our year was a HomeEc rotation; I don't remember a day of sex-ed, but it'd have made sense there.
Senior year of high school we had a life skills class, where we did spend a full class period on sex, with disease acknowledged but not the center of the discussion. It wasn't bad, but felt "too little, too late"... probably because, surely, everyone else was having sex. Right? Only losers like me were still single...
Obviously pwnd by 65. Thanks! "Drier and tighter" instead of "hot and dry" says Rae Dawn.
58: I remember the Rae Dawn Chong movie.
Now I'm pretending this line was delivered in Noah Baumbach's Highball.
While we've got the sex and death threads going, I wish I could think of something to post about taxes.
So the lesson is that (if I have a kid) I'll need to ask at the local UU church about enrolling my kid in their sex education curriculum.
73: No, when the time comes, just do an "Ask the Mineshaft" and Unfogged will tell you exactly what to tell your kid.
My 9th grade high school bio teacher (co-ed boarding school) did a bit of sex ed. In my all girls school in the 8th grade we read "Changing Bodies, Changing Lives" which was put out by the same group that wrote "Our Bodies Ourselves."
That was about menstruation and puberty as much, if not more, than sex and contraception. The one bit I'll never forget is the story of the boy who got an erection whenever his mother ran the vacuum cleaner.
Why his mother? Was she wearing a French Maid outfit?
I should try to look it up, but it was just that when he was in bed and he heard the vacuum cleaner, he got aroused.
Are you all inventing memories? I'm sure we had sex ed, but I can't remember who taught it or what was taught. I should ask one of my seventeen children to research it for me.
Okay here's the quote from google books
Whenever I hear a vacuum cleaner, I start getting hard. That must be because I used to love those days when I'd stay home from school, sick, and I'd be up in my room while my mother was vacuuming downstairs. That's a real good memory.
The kid's name was Tony, but I initially misread it just now as Troy.
Wait, it's not because the kid gets himself off with the vacuum?
What cod-Proustian bullshit is that?
I went to high school right at the peak of condoms-(in packages)-as fashion. Kids wore them pinned to their shoes, to their backpacks, and so on. Let's talk about sex, baby!
Did we talk about the article about why we don't have better condoms? My takeaway from it was that while I'd figured out much later that a lot of the response to the AIDS crisis was alarmist, I didn't realize just how bad it was, and just how little actual science the various recommendations were based on. (Prompted specifically by the article's discussion of lambskin condoms.)
high school right at the peak of condoms-(in packages)-as fashion
Did people who weren't Black pop stars actually do this? I only remember it in TLC videos and maybe A Different World.
I think I learned the word "spooge" here, which was a bit late for sex ed, but not too late for me to put it on various forms that I suspect might be harvested for marketing purposes. Sure enough , I have had mail addressed to me in my capacity as MD of "Spooging Moose Communications"
As for the other stuff I have an ineradicable but quite possibly entirely false memory of my parents telling me that sex was really pleasurable, however absurd the mechanics of it sounded. I mist have been around eight. In my memory they are terribly earnest about it, and concerned that I shold believe them. I couldn't see why I should.
83: Not the same, but there was a coffee shop in Berkeley that gave out condoms as branded favors, kind of like books of matches.
83. Why are you asking Heebie? She's black and used to be pretty fabulous.
82 is super interesting but jesus, that article is too long.
Did people who weren't Black pop stars actually do this?
They sure did in my high school. But it was certainly mostly black kids and white kids who mostly hung out with black kids.
I, like ogged, remember that I had sex ed, but not what its content was in any detail (pretty sure there was a movie showing spermatozoon to ram itself head-first into an egg, which stood me in good stead when, years later, I read "The Night-Sea Journey"), or even what school I was in when I had it. I think in the weird Jewish school that I was later kicked out of?
I had a very practical and straightforward sex-ed experience in public school (mechanics, diseases, contraception), done as a month-long unit in Health/PE every year from 7th-10th grade.
I wonder if it's still like that or if the crazy abstinence people have gotten to the school board. (My high school is in crazy Tea-Party land—Eric Cantor's old district.)
The closest thing to packaged condoms that were a regular accessory to my fellow Catholic high school students' uniforms were Brown Scapulars. More of an insurance against Purgatory than STDs, though.
The stats on condom use in that article suggest to me that lots of people have in fact never used condoms. Probably some people in this discussion.
I used them consistently in the one relationship I've been in where I felt responsibility for taking the lead and making the arrangements. A lot of shyness and reticence. Every other relationship has been frank and verbal, with a partner who took precautions and said so.
87 gets it exactly right.
We first had sex ed in 5th grade, when they split us up by gender and showed us film strips about the mechanics of things (the girls saw both the boy and girl strips, the boys only saw the boys).
I can't recall if we had it again in Jr. High (I think it was in 9th grade, which I didn't reach in that school system), but we had sort of a standard, disinterested class taught by a gym teacher or whatever in HS. Definitely not any of the crazy moralistic garbage you hear about, but also nothing really informative or sex-positive.
weird Jewish school that I was later kicked out of
There's probably a story here and I'll bet you could tell it in the most anti-climactic way possible.
If Viagra and Cialis got into a fight in the side-bar, who would win?
teenage boys love to masturbate together in groups and that most do so, which I had a WTF reaction to at the time and since.
Poor TRO, left out by all the other boys.
Don't worry, Tim. At our age, it's just a once a month thing, mostly, so you're not really missing out anymore.
Have I mentioned that one time BOGF and I borrowedused an unlubricated condom from her roommate? Her roommate's doctor father was the source, and our theory, after an extremely unpleasant and ultimately failed experience, was that this was the father's subtle method to discourage his daughter from sex.
Why do they even sell those things?
There's probably a story here and I'll bet you could tell it in the most anti-climactic way possible.
:)
If he told it climactically we would all get pregnant.
At our age, it's just a once a month thing, mostly, so you're not really missing out anymore.
AKA, "Noodle Night"
Speaking of once a month things, along with condoms there seems to be no one very concerned about improving tampon technology.
Fortunately, I've gone through maybe half a box of tampons since 2008, and reasonably expect never to use one again.
Pregnant straight up to menopause, huh.
Conveniently this thread aligns with the 20th anniversary of losing my virginity.
Like all of you don't know the exact date too.
Like all of you don't know the exact date too.
I do not. Is that actually the norm?
I don't, either, but it should be right around the 20 year mark for me, too.
I'm with Thorn and Heebie. Except for the twenty-year bit, which is well in the past.
(Are we going to discover that President Jackson and Heebie once shared a magical experience?)
I do, but only because it's on an exceptionally easy to remember date.
I do not know the exact date. I don't even remember the time of year. I am pretty sure I could pin down the year.
I know the month and year (by reference to my nearby-on-the-calendar birthday), but not the specific date.
And I'm sorry if that sounded judgmental, Andrew Jackson; I really wouldn't have been surprised if it was something people generally remember and I just missed out. I do know time of year (quite possibly mid or late April!) and year.
I generally remember dates of any significance with ease*, but within a few weeks of the blessedanticlimactic event, I'd lost track of which day of the week it had been, and thus the date (that is, it was either a Tuesday or a Wednesday). But it was right after Labor Day of '93.
*I hope you all enjoyed the birthday of L/ane V/gnola, the first girl I ever officially asked on a date and, not coincidentally, the first girl who ever wished to be just friends with me, last Saturday
Oh hey, I may have started my practice on the 12 anniversary. Never thought of that before.
NMM to Sabado Gigante
My mother will be devastated. She loves that show.
an exceptionally easy to remember date.
My first kiss was GHWB's inauguration, so that's always been an easy one.
Here is an article on Dreger and the stuff she was previously noted for.
Also "virginity" lol. Still a horrible, horrible word.
Mine was the same day as the season 2 finale of Buffy, so while I don't remember the exact date, I'm sure the internet could tell me.
It was her father's birthday so maybe that's why it sticks in the mind.
I only remember mine because it was January 1st.
Re: 107
No idea. Don't even know the month, or whether I was 16 or just 17. I know it was after my then girlfriend's early January exams, and before her birthday which was April. That is about as precise as I can get.
123: A special present for him? Or perhaps presented an opportunity?
I'm pretty sure it happened. Not sure if I was there.
Mine was the day that Rutles mockumentary aired. Also the day of my first threesome (MFF). I was much younger than I remembered.
128: You lost your virginity in a threesome! Awesome, dude! (am I using that young people slang correctly?)
Didn't that happen to the kid in Almost Famous?
45: !!!
Did that school have a nutrition lesson, too?
||
I'm experiencing an odd cool feeling at the base of the brain. The opposite of "seeing red" due to frustration and anger. I think I just won an online argument for the first time.
|>
||
Relevant to a previous parenting thread:
Our house was on a hill, and the house below us liked us. So we'd throw all the lions over the fence, and we'd be in our pajamas, climbing over the fence to keep them quiet. Then Dad would go to animal control and say, "Nope, we don't have any lions."
|>
Another vote for general period and circumstances, but no date.
Reminiscences and counterfactuals, as we say here, never include calendars.
Cross-posting to the correct thread:
I can pin it down to a two-month period (April-May) in a particular year. I strongly suspect it was a Saturday. But I can't do any better than that. Oh, and that's only if "losing virginity" means intercourse. If oral sex counts, then it would have been some time in the prior summer or early fall.
I remember the time of year well enough to know that we're just a few weeks past the 19th anniversary; with a bit of Googling I could almost certainly pin the exact date down. The memory of the circumstances is crystal clear, though.
I can't actually remember the first time I had *enjoyable* sex. Tedious painful freshman try, and two years later climbing the walls and annoying the neighbors and motorcycle rides with ferrets, but I don't remember the transition although I was otherwise straight and sober.
Also, thinking back, it's possible that about half the really hard learning I've ever done was in the sophomore year between.
motorcycle rides with ferrets
The universal indicator of good sex.
137: Darn! I knew I've been missing out!
annoying the neighbors
That was definitely a component of my early sexual experience. Actually just one neighbor who would write us polite notes asking us to try to be quiet. We were such assholes this probably made us louder -- as if to chortle "Ha! Ha! We're having sex and you're not!"
During my senior year in high school, I dated my next-door neighbor. That was, uh, convenient.
Man "Spirit Crusher" has such a great chorus.
I remember how old I was the first time I had sex, but not the month or season. The first time I had consensual sex was right around Valentine's Day, a year or so later, in Cambridge (MA). The first time I had genuinely great sex was about three years after that (when I stopped dating people who had never before had sex).
As far as Dreger goes, this is her take on some of the reaction to her trans* and intersex research and advocacy.
I don't recall the date, but if anyone knows the start date of my then-girlfriend's summer enrichment program, I'm pretty sure it was a terribly inappropriate number of days after that.
when I stopped dating people who had never before had sex
Schools never teach the second half of the sex ed course: principles and techniques.
From the link in 82:
His idea is to take common agricultural waste products, like cow tendons and fish skins, break them down to pure collagen, blend them with plasticizers, and turn the resulting soup into film.
The marketing copy practically writes itself.
