What is the wonkiest thing you were ever told about ways a person could get pregnant? Here are a few responses I received when I asked this question on the Girl Boner Facebook page:
By sticking a pussy willow in your ear
By loving someone very much
By…swallowing
By having sex more than once
By being in a hot tub
By standing on your head after sex
Without ever having sex
By praying for it
As bizarre as these ideas might sound, most of us have heard something similar at some point. And given that sex education is extremely limited in the U.S., it’s easy to believe potentially harmful falsities.
Over the weekend, I released a bonus episode of Girl Boner Radio, to explore a question for a listener whose daughter thinks she can get pregnancy by making out. Dr. Megan Fleming and Dr. Lanae St. John contributed thoughts for the episode, which follows my special chat with Lanae on “good girl” shame and sex-positive parenting.
When I began piecing the “quickie” episode together, I realized some pretty striking changes in United States sex education. Since writing my Girl Boner book, which released just over a year ago, even fewer states are requiring that sex ed in schools be scientifically, medically or technically accurate.
For those of you thinking, Wait. Why would any state allow sex education that isn’t accurate?
Great question! And one we should all be asking. And yet, none of this has made any major headlines of late. While the answers are complicated, not requiring scientific accuracy allows for “value-based” teachings, such as sex is inherently dangerous or only intended for procreation.
I personally believe we can honor people’s values and provide comprehensive, actually helpful education at the same time. The rewards of doing so would better the world and our culture in invaluable ways.
To learn much more, including which states don’t require any sex education and ways to work around these obstructions, stream the episode on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify or right here:
What goofy message have you learned about sex or sexuality? What are you doing to help kids in your life to minimize sexual shame? What struck you most about the episode?
In a way, I’m glad I got around these ‘wonky’ replies. I got my answers in a simple, factual and objective way from my mother when I was about six years old. It was ‘no biggie’ and years later she told me she had not seen any advantage in telling me about babies being born in a cabbage patch and changing her story when I get older.
Of course, by then I ‘technically’ knew how things worked, but everything else I only learned later. The love, the connection, the difference between sleeping with someone and sleeping with someone you love… you know… the stuff that a six-year-old just wouldn’t understand yet. But compared to others, my sex-ed was clinically sterile and as medically accurate as it can be.
After listening to my Uncle tell my friend something which I misunderstood, I thought that French Kissing could get the girl pregnant. Long before even that I thought kissing could do it and would not kiss my grandmother for a long time.