Look what I just found at Twisted Spinster’s great blog. The Obama administration teaches school kids the following things about sex:
“Males and females are aroused at different levels of intimacy. Males are more sight orientated whereas females are more touch orientated.”
“This is why girls need to be careful with what they wear, because males are looking! The girl might be thinking fashion, while the boy is thinking sex. For this reason, girls have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn’t invite lustful thoughts.”
“When couples live together outside of marriage, the relationships are weaker, more violent, less [equal], and more likely to lead to divorce.”
Go visit the OP because there is more. I just copied as much as I could before my gag reflexes started getting too strong.
Before you have a vomiting jag of major proportions, I want to repeat: this is the kind of sex ed that Obama’s administration is promoting.
Clarissa's Blog 
‘“When couples live together outside of marriage, the relationships are … more likely to lead to divorce.”’
How does an unmarried couple go about getting divorced?
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Good point. 🙂 🙂
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Actually I just noticed that the Twisted Spinster made it in her original post. Ah well, shows me for not going back to the source.
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I actually know what that may be about but it’s phrased very badly and the causal chain is somewhat tenuous… shall we say? Statistically, in the UK, people who have cohabited for a long period of time (as in years) and then get married have a slightly elevated divorce rate compared to people who only lived together for a short time or did not live together at all. However, once you pull out those marriages where the participants are from a religion where divorce is extremely difficult / culturally shameful and living together is also verboten, you find that the the elevation almost vanishes. It is still present though; something like a 1.5% higher percentage, but my theory is that the reason those marriages are somewhat more unstable is the same reason the participants didn’t get married earlier on – i.e. the relationship was always somewhat more unstable. In other words, the causation is the other way round; unstable relationships lead to higher levels of long term cohabitation, lower levels of marriage and higher levels of divorce. Essentially. long term cohabitees who put off or chose against marriage, are doing so for eminently sensible reasons, particularly given that we still don’t have no-fault divorce as an option.
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Considering how we know Republicans are so much worse on this topic, why would any liberal want to send their hard earned tax dollars to support public schools? Let us have the right to pick the sort of school we want to sent our children to instead having to support a one size fits all government school.
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A country cannot be considered civilized without a public education system. Without it, we will have half of the population completely illiterate and abused day and night by crazed parents. I’m not looking forward to being assaulted by crowds of feral children. I’ve seen what they look like. Have you?
As for the sex ed, it’s all a joke anyways. These are things people learn at home and A LOT earlier than high school age. By the age of 5, our sexual scenarios are all written anyways.
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I support public education in the sense of making education available to society at large, including the poor. I agree with you that this is an important foundation of society. That being said, why does public education have to be “government” education? Why can’t this be taken care of by society as a whole?
You seem to have this optimistic “have your cake and eat it to” scenario where the same crazy conservative parents that you do not want controlling their kids do not march of to the polls and take control of school boards and the lives of everyone’s children. Where does this come from?
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How can society as a whole organize schools? Practically, what would it look like?
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The vast majority of parents should be able to pay for private schools. These can be the same public schools with the same teachers now being paid directly by parents instead of the government. We could then have a government voucher system for those who could not pay to school their own children. We could have a system like this with almost no one even noticing that there has been a change. It would just give more power to parents, including the reasonable and rational ones, to place their children in schools that actually teach.
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The vast majority of people live from paycheck to paycheck in this country and carry a mountain of debt. They can barely pay the monthly bills, let alone private schools.
I’m not very familiar with secondary education in this country. But I am familiar with higher ed and one glaring difference between public and private universities (besides the price) is that in public universities the corruption is non-existent while in private universities it is rampant. The number of profs who simply shouldn’t be teaching is huge in private schools, while in public colleges, there is no legal way you can stick a spouse or a friend’s son in a teaching position. Everything is a lot more transparent and above board. That’s my experience. People should feel free to share theirs, of course. I’m not claiming to be an authority on this.
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“The vast majority of parents should be able to pay for private schools.”
Izgad, have you any idea how much private school costs? Please don’t speak about things you are ignorant about.
In any case, I’m not sure the “public school system” is the problem here. Most of it works fine. I went through the lousy public school system in Florida (except for my first grade, which was in a private school, which my parents couldn’t keep sending me to because they couldn’t afford it), and I can read and write rings around a lot of privileged people who went to private schools. It’s not the system itself, it’s what you bring to it. I had none of the overwhelming helicopter parent support kids have today. Back then (the 70s) it wasn’t considered proper parenting to run your kids’ lives so minutely and we were encouraged to think for ourselves and make our own decisions about whether we’d do well in school or not.
And so on. I don’t believe in this idea that everything has to be perfect or the children won’t learn. One thing they need to learn is that life isn’t perfect and they won’t get what they want handed to them on a silver platter, and also that adults can be idiots and sometimes you have to take part in meaningless and stupid charades like this “sex education” class.
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For the purposes of this discussion I am talking about taking the same public schools we have and allowing parents to directly pay for them instead of using the government as a go between. We could even make it that only licensed secular schools could get vouchers.
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“For the purposes of this discussion I am talking about taking the same public schools we have and allowing parents to directly pay for them instead of using the government as a go between. ”
– And when crowds of parents refuse to pay because they have much more important expenses, then what?
Right now my taxes go to educate the children of the people who have nothing and can’t pay either the taxes or for the children’s schooling. I’m very happy to pay those taxes because I both can and want to afford this expense. If I stop paying those taxes, who will educate all the children, the children who now live below the poverty line? There are millions of them.
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Your taxes are going to pay for the schooling of 90% of the population. Certainly not all of those parents are too poor to pay. If the government is going to set standards for child care so that anyone who wants to raise a child must follow them then those standards can include education.
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“Your taxes are going to pay for the schooling of 90% of the population.”
– I’m a very generous person. 🙂
” Certainly not all of those parents are too poor to pay.”
– Who cares?
” If the government is going to set standards for child care so that anyone who wants to raise a child must follow them then those standards can include education.”
– But it doesn’t set such standards. The horrors that parents can now inflict on their children and then be applauded and celebrated publicly for that are so beyond schooling.
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” I don’t believe in this idea that everything has to be perfect or the children won’t learn. One thing they need to learn is that life isn’t perfect and they won’t get what they want handed to them on a silver platter, and also that adults can be idiots and sometimes you have to take part in meaningless and stupid charades like this “sex education” class.”
– I agree with this. Children of normal parents already know all there is to know about sexuality and contraception at this age (from their parents) and will use the opportunity to laugh at the weirdo of a teacher who starts telling them these crazy things.
” I had none of the overwhelming helicopter parent support kids have today. Back then (the 70s) it wasn’t considered proper parenting to run your kids’ lives so minutely and we were encouraged to think for ourselves and make our own decisions about whether we’d do well in school or not.”
– And you were very lucky. I meet these overgrown babies who have been sheltered and protected by parents all the time at my university. Just a few weeks ago, one appeared at my office and said, “My mother doesn’t understand why I got a C on this test. She says she saw me study for hours and she thinks I should have gotten at least a B.” Can you imagine? He can’t discuss his own grade with me without quoting his mother. Who is not in the class and whom, thank God in heaven, I have never seen.
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As for the sex ed, it’s all a joke anyways. These are things people learn at home and A LOT earlier than high school age. By the age of 5, our sexual scenarios are all written anyways.
This is weird. I had little or no idea about sex and how it worked until I was in high school and our biology teacher explained the mechanics to us. Of course, then the “education” we had been given previously made a little more sense. (It was similar to what you are accusing the Obama administration of doing; it predates it by decades, at least.)
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“This is weird. I had little or no idea about sex and how it worked until I was in high school and our biology teacher explained the mechanics to us.”
– Oh, my parents didn’t explain anything to me either. Neither did anybody at school, of course. I read about the technical aspects of sex in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. My first partner was equally ignorant. It took us about 6 months to figure out what should be placed where during sex.
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“(It was similar to what you are accusing the Obama administration of doing; it predates it by decades, at least”
– I’m not saying that Obama has started this. I’m saying that he, a man of very patriarchal personal beliefs, is continuing this trend of telling school children rubbish about sex.
Both Obama and his wife sound like extremely controlling parents. I heard that Mrs. Obama doesn’t ALLOW her daughters to have as much candy as they want (hello, eating disorders and unhealthy body image.) And Obama himself made comments about the need to protect his daughters from sex.
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Wow, you were really deprived. My parents taught me the facts of life when I was around ten or eleven, but I’d already picked up some stuff because by that time I was reading at an adult level. Do you mean to tell me your dad (or other parent or guardian) didn’t sit you down and give you the “birds and the bees” talk? It used to be a fixture of American life.
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I notice they don’t even bother to mention non-heterosexual scenarios there. I guess we don’t count, since the administration won’t scrap the Defence of Marriage Act and allow our marriages to be recognized at the federal level, and the only kind of sex they want to endorse is the kind where you’re married.
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You don’t want them to mention non-hetero relationships because if they do, it will be delivered in the kind of language that will cause incalculable harm to gay students. I’d rather they just kept silent than bullied those students.
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It continues to sadden me that people put in charge of “educating” youngsters think that the place of non-hetero people in sex. ed are to either be unseen and unheard, or otherwise become accepted targets of abuse and bigotry. 😦
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I know, this is an absolute barbarity.
What’s really sad is that before coming here, I heard so many myths about the wonderful sex ed in the US. How students are taught how to put on a condom since grade 5, how they are taught to suggest sex respectfully, how they are taught to say no and accept a no, how they are taught about gay relationships being completely normal, how contraceptions is handed out to school children for free.
Where is that America that we imagined when we invented those myths?
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That America existed for maybe fifteen seconds on June 24, 1982. Then a Concerned Mother complained, and that was that.
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Clarissa – I, too, have heard of this wonderful sex ed that we used to have … apparently we had it at a time when I would have been exposed to it in school, as I am old enough to have graduated high school before they started teaching the abstinence-only nonsense.
While I feel incredibly lucky to have escaped that (I can only imagine what it would have done to me to have learned that each sexual encounter makes you “dirty” and “used” — my first encounter was nonconsensual, at the age of 14. I had enough trouble establishing boundaries and figuring out how to have good sex that I wanted just with that experience; I would probably have had a lot more bad experiences if I had been taught the kinds of things girls are taught in abstinence-only classes!), I also do not feel I was given any actual information about *sex*. I was taught about the mechanics of reproduction and menstruation, about the changes of puberty, and about sexually transmitted diseases and how to prevent them, but I was never taught anything about what sex is like. No descriptions of sex acts (learning this stuff, penis-in-vagina intercourse was all that was implied to exist, and even that I only conceived vaguely. I did not know exactly where the vagina was, or what a penis looked like …), no discussion about sexual relationships (a primer on healthy vs. unhealthy sexual interactions, as well as on how to set boundaries, would’ve been very helpful and may well have prevented the bad experience I alluded to earlier), no nothing except for the most basic reproductive physiology.
I reiterate, I feel immensely fortunate not to have been given any misinformation; it’s just that the information I was given, though all true, was so sparse, clinical and devoid of context.
That’s my story, but this post by a woman who seems to be my same age indicates that the kind of sex ed you were told about does exist in some parts of this great country.
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I’m really touch oriented — can’t stop groping them there males, and exposing them to my “fashion”.
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I also keep discovering that, according to such sources of wisdom, I’m a man.
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I suspect it is reassuring to the middle-aged men who write this claptrap to believe that women don’t notice how a man looks. After all, if we aren’t “visually oriented,” we aren’t going to notice any of their physical shortcomings …
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I think that we have to be careful before we blog on reported misogyny and check the background sources. There’s a report bouncing around the Internet about Egypt’s new laws on “farewell sex” and reducing the marriageable age of girls to 14. True or false?
http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/04/25/210198.html
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As far as I’m aware, the Federal government does not decide what gets taught in public schools at this level of detail. I believe the sex ed curriculum is up to the city and state. In addition, these quotes are taken from an organization that is one of many linked to on a government webpage as sex education resources – so don’t fear that the specific teachings quoted here are the doctrine that the democratic party has chosen to support as the one right method…
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Oh, I know this one!!
What the federal government does is allocate funding for sex education programs, from which the local school districts may choose if they wish to make use of said funding. I imagine that, in theory, if a school wanted to do sex ed its own way, it could — i.e., there’s no law against it — but they’d have to create a curriculum from scratch and provide whatever course materials (textbooks, videos, whatever else) out of its own money. (Most likely, the teacher would be asked to do all of this, and pay for whatever is needed out of hir own pocket).
So I would say that what the government does is not to dictate, to the letter, what each school will teach, so much as that they decide to grace certain third-party sex educator organizations with their approval, and will give schools grant money to implement any of these approved programs. You can opt out — some states *have* opted out of accepting any money for sex-ed programs that actually teach about sex — but it’s harder to do sex ed without this outside help. (I do not know if schools are still allowed to ignore sex ed. I suspect not.)
Here is an article with more information than I cared to read about how federal funding of sex education programs works!
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Thanks for the explanation! I wonder if they offer an abstinence only “approved” program on the list because there are schools that will just refuse to teach anything else, due to community pressure. I moved to GA after high school, where the majority of the people I went to college with had an abstinence-only education. That’s bad enough BUT the programs also left students with the impression that you could get STDs (all of them) by kissing a boy, so possibly the “approved” program has some merits over the programs a school might choose on their own if they were dead-set against abstinence.
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Every time this “men are visual” thing comes up as an excuse why women’s appearance is to blame for everything, I always wonder where that leaves blind men.
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So do I! I guess blind people aren’t supposed to get married, lest they pass their blind genes (like the one where they lost their sight to do an accident) on to the next generation.
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I think these kinds of gender delineations are intended as prescriptions not descriptions.
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For instance, if you say: “I’m more visual, that must make me a man!”, this is considered to be a pathological statement, in defiance of the necessity to conform.
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“What’s really sad is that before coming here, I heard so many myths about the wonderful sex ed in the US. How students are taught how to put on a condom since grade 5, how they are taught to suggest sex respectfully, how they are taught to say no and accept a no, how they are taught about gay relationships being completely normal, how contraceptions is handed out to school children for free. Where is that America that we imagined when we invented those myths?”
That’s precisely the type of sex education I received in public school. In my district, 7th grade was the time for the big sex ed class and I am happy that it was part of my schooling. My mother gave me the basic “birds and bees talk” but this was much more detailed and “ideology-free.” It was actually nice to learn the information and have it _not_ be through my parents. I remember being shocked at seeing a condom. And we all giggled nervously as the teacher demonstrated how to place a condon (on a fake penis) but it was useful information. I really also appreciated learning about the various methods of contraception–which is particularly important for women. And the teacher did discuss abstinence–but more in the sense of DON’T HAVE SEX UNTIL YOU ARE READY–which was a good message. I don’t know if the reason I received this model of sex education is because of my age (I was in 7th grade in the late 80’s) or because I went to secondary school in a progressive district/state. Regardless, I think sex ed is important. But the abomination that Twisted Spinster described in her OP doesn’t count as sex ed in my opinion. Sigh.
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Wow, that sounds very good and enlightened.
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I don’t know why that displayed as Anonymous.The comment regarding sex ed is from Evelina Anville. 🙂
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