“Quick, cover his eyes! There’s S-E-X on the screen,” shouted my father upon seeing Jack and Rose kissing in the backseat of a station wagon in the movie Titanic. An 18-year-old at the time, I groaned, as once again, the panicky, familiar hands of my mother came down like a curtain of darkness. Being immigrants from Iran who married at a young age, my parents felt it best that I kept my “innocence” until I married. If I hadn’t been privileged enough to learn about these topics at school, I would have known nothing about sexual health or anything related therein.
For years, I thought of my parents’ practice as quaint and isolated. However, when I took a college course on human sexuality, I was stunned to realize that my parents’ desire to keep me effectively ignorant about sex was pervasive. Many people experience stigmas and are misinformed regarding such topics. Lack of accurate education has been a harmful factor in many people’s lives. In medical school, we were educated on the palpable discomfort that may occur while eliciting sexual histories from patients who, reacting to the created atmosphere, might be equally reluctant. In contrast, when patients realized that I was explicitly receptive during these conversations, they spoke comfortably and openly, which, most importantly, was beneficial to their care.
Despite my parents’ culturally-bred ignorance towards sexual health, I still believe that today’s sex education is severely lacking. During my clinical rotations, I saw several patients from both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum who were clearly misinformed about certain topics of sexual health. One female patient had come to us wondering what might be causing her private part to bleed once every month. Another male patient had never heard of a condom or its benefits before. Although intrinsic risk factors such as levels of education and cultural background can impact one’s fund of knowledge regarding these topics, there are still many extrinsic factors we can work to improve.
In the United States, sex education in schools varies significantly across districts. Many schools operate without state-guided health education curricula, leaving decisions up to individual districts (Maziarz et al. 2020). Ultimately, our country’s goal should be to standardize the sex education system we have in place and to identify and implement the programs that stand out from others in terms of efficacy.
A good starting point would be to identify barriers to discussing sexual health topics in the U.S. education system. A 2020 scientific article titled “Is there a gender difference in U.S. college students’ desire for school-based sexuality education” explores the reasons for why there are increased female to male ratios in sexual education courses (King et al. 2020). A survey was sent out and the results showed that many men felt they knew enough about sex already. Further, if they were to take sexual education classes, they would rather it be under the guise of an anonymous online course.
Similar studies have shown that students would learn very little from their parents regarding these topics, and often relied on their friends or the internet to gather information (Sprecher et al. 2008). This raises even more red flags regarding how we present the information to our students. Hopefully, it will spark a series of further discussions on ways to improve the mediums of education.
References
1. King, B. M., Burke, S. R., & Gates, T. M. (2020). Is there a gender
difference in US college students’ desire for school-based sexuality education?
Sex Education, 20(3), 350-359. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2019.1668762
2.
Maziarz, L. N., Dake, J. A., & Glassman, T.
(2020). Sex Education, Condom Access, and Contraceptive Referral in U.S. High
Schools. The Journal of school nursing :
the official publication of the National Association of School Nurses, 36(5), 325–329.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1059840519872785
3. Sprecher,
S., G. Harris, and A. Meyers. 2008. “Perceptions of Sources of Sex Education
and Targets of Sex Communication: Sociodemographic and Cohort Effects.” Journal of Sex Research 45 (1): 17–26.
