Sex Ed at my school consisted of putting a condom on a banana before the condoms became water balloons for the following break time, leaving my desk smothered with lube for the next few weeks. No-one in my former class has had an unplanned bundle of joy yet, but if any have since acquired a queue at their bedroom door, it’s no thanks to our Sex Ed class. It took a friend from a different school a few years to recover from the mental scars of institutionalised scaremongering, as the pupils were each given a cup of water and were told to then pour the water into other people’s cups, mimicking a sexual encounter and the supposedly inevitable STDs that would follow.
Of course there needs to be a focus on the risks in sexual encounters and how to avoid them, but the majority of these classes has a very limited view of what sex is. There is a gap in young people’s education where people are not told how to have happy and enjoyable sex, while ensuring that their partner or partners are feeling equal pleasure, our model teacher should be Barbara Streisand in ‘Meet the Fockers’. Whilst it is a step forward that Sex Education is now compulsory at state secondary schools, regardless of a pupil’s religious beliefs, the teaching is still very narrow and doesn’t improve our sexual attitudes or our loving behaviours towards each other. I remember only a singular focus on vaginal penetrative sex, something that remains unchanged. Yes, this form of sex facilitates reproduction but it is also heterosexist and excludes other ways in which all people with different sexual orientations can mutually enjoy themselves. There was also no focus on consensual sex with the assumption that everyone knows what that is.
George Lawlor, a politics and sociology student from the University of Warwick was recently at the centre of a media storm after being invited to consent classes and consequently rebutting the invitation with a Tab article and accompanying picture reading, ‘This is not what a rapist looks like.’ Lawlor felt the invitation was like a ‘massive, painful, bitchy slap in the face’ as ‘it implies I have an insufficient understanding of what does and does not constitute consent and that’s incredibly hurtful. I can’t stress that enough." Lawlor’s insensitive article exemplifies an attitude that facilitates rape culture in mistakenly thinking that a stereotypical rapist exists. What does a rapist look like? When most rape victims know their perpetrators, there isn’t a single answer but it could be found a lot closer than you think. The production of Lawlor’s article also implies that his voice is the only one that should be heard within sexual discussion, reiterating a negative sexual hierarchy and undermining the positives of sexual discussion by denying a voice to those that need to be heard. When a Guardian video entitled ‘Sex, lads and grey areas’ reports that ‘one in seven females experience serious physical or sexual violence while at university’, you’d think that individuals can take one for the team of humanity in the hope of lowering that statistic, without having to write a solipsistic article after their pride was wounded. Having consensual sex is also not always just a simple yes or no situation, feeling pressurised is never ok and it isn’t just the responsibility of the person feeling pressured to make themselves heard; it is the responsibility of both people to make sure that they are both freely and actively consenting.
Al Vernaccio’s TedTalk called ‘Sex needs a new metaphor’ explores the replacement of sex as a game of ‘baseball’ with sex as eating pizza. At first watch, one thinks that the intended audience was American but some of us too have told our friends of first base, second base, third base and home runs. By replacing this whole way of thinking with pizza, as Vernaccio explains, we would have a much healthier reciprocal attitude to sex. The sequential bases correspond to increasingly high scores and the implication of a male batter’s climactic home run, setting up a game of sex favouring heterosexual relationships and male pleasure in an instructed way of ’playing’. The oppositional attacking and defending within baseball are also detrimental to both healthy and more enjoyable sex for all parties involved. Rather than opposing each other, people eating pizza are working towards a shared goal, for all parties to enjoy the meal. Vernaccio makes the very helpful observation that playing baseball depends on the external situation, i.e. you are going to play on a scheduled match day, correlating to a date night or following a club night, setting up preconceived expectations of what is going to happen, thereby creating a pressurised environment. Conversely, eating pizza follows an internal hunger and a discussion about toppings and sauces and the complimentary dishes that are going to be enjoyed as part of your meal before you eat it, ensuring that all parties are comfortable with what they are going to experience before they do it. Pizza doesn’t require a bat and a ball, anyone can eat it and there isn’t an end result to the game, it finishes when any party is no longer hungry. You may be a meat eater, a vegetarian or someone who likes their slices really gooey but no ones counting score.