Sex education through the ages
The ongoing debates around the Prevention of Adolescent Pregnancy bill, including its being renamed the “Comprehensive Sexuality Education bill” in the press and on social media, show just how sensitive “SexEd” is, almost as if it was something new and, for countries like the Philippines, alien and imported (read brought in from “immoral” Western countries).
I will use “SexEd” as a generic term to describe what societies have been doing through the ages, and I mean going back centuries, a fact that shows how people across cultures have always been concerned about the need to “talk sex.”
Much of this SexEd was done around the age of puberty, usually segregated by sex and integrated into rites of passage such as male circumcision and for females, menarche (first menstruation). These rites of passage were often extended, older men and women going off with the pubescent male and female for “retreats” about what it means to become a man or woman, including roles to play and expected behavior. It is not surprising that the rituals, which still exist today in many cultures including the Philippines, would include pain as in circumcision and rules around enduring the pain.
Pubescent girls, on the other hand, would be taught hygiene around menstruation, instilled together with the mistaken notion that menstrual blood was dirty. Menarche becomes a marker in life, a time to learn modesty, including for example, keeping one’s voice down, limiting one’s physical movements, and more. Grandmothers would gift the dalagita (a transition into womanhood) with a camisa de baño, a dress to use when bathing, a protection against male preying eyes.
We can see the rituals reflected dominant norms. While women were cajoled about modesty, young males would be brought to the brothel for first sex, something that was and is still done in the Philippines. Note, too, how these cultural norms would incorporate misogynist or anti-women values: women as objects, women as dangerous.
SexEd was medicalized starting in the 20th century, integrated into schools and concentrating on the bird and bees: how pregnancy occurs and how pregnancies are prevented. Religious conservatives opposed such education, out of fear that talking about sex to young people made them want to do it. In truth, young students would sleep through the boring lectures, learning nothing and when teenage pregnancies occurred, girls were blamed for the “accidents” and expelled from school.
In the last few decades, awareness of human rights, especially in relation to women’s and gender rights has reshaped SexEd, leading to Comprehensive Sexuality Education or CSE. The emphasis now is on sexuality education rather than sex education, intended to be lifelong, from childhood onwards. The emphasis is on people, rather than sex and all kinds of learning settings, from the home (are boys being allowed to learn how to cook?) to schools, offices.
We find CSE well described in the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2013, a product of years of debate and consensus-building. The implementing rules and regulations run 53 pages with Rule 11 providing a good overview of what CSE is. In this section we read about age and development-appropriate education around reproductive health and reflected on concerns such as “self-protection against discrimination, sexual abuse and violence … and responsible teenage behavior.” Yes, “teen pregnancy” is already mentioned here.
If SexEd has evolved through history, so too must CSE. Children need to be taught as early as possible about child sexual abuse, including cybersex trafficking, with documented cases of victims as young as 2 years old, with their own parents as traffickers. Outside, in the real world, we’ve known too that most of the child rapists and abusers are not strangers but relatives, family friends, and neighbors.
With so much material today about sex and sexuality on the internet, we find an even greater need for comprehensive sexuality education to explain contexts and how people—young and old—should make their decisions around sex and sexuality. American sexuality educators, for example, are now reporting more cases of young people, males in particular, thinking that choking one’s boyfriend or girlfriend is expected, even obligatory, because choking has become standard fare on porn.
Enough with the claims that CSE involves teaching masturbation to young boys; they don’t need to be taught in the first place. Let’s deal with day-to-day scenarios where we go beyond sex to sexuality, and talk about responsibility, honor, caring, and falling in (and out of) love.
—————–
mtan@inquirer.com.ph
