What's the Deal with Sex Education?

As a high schooler, I always wondered what my experience with sex education was going to look like. Movies were my only point of reference, so I was fully prepared to struggle to put a condom on a banana, or to be told that I would “get pregnant and die” like the characters in “Mean Girls.” However, none of these scenarios became even remotely close to what I actually experienced, which was nothing. In the four years that I was at my high school, I never received any kind of formal sex education. 

This is actually quite common for students in the United States. According to Planned Parenthood, only 39 states and the District of Columbia require public schools to teach sex education. 

For instance, SESP sophomore Molly Schneider grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin where sex education is not mandated. Schneider attended a Catholic school that encouraged abstinence, so she was forced to look elsewhere to learn about sex. 

“Everyone had a lot of questions, and there was a lot of Googling done,” she said. “My mom was very progressive and taught me sex-ed and then taught all my friends, so any time they had sex-related questions they had to come to my mom.” 

Even if a state does require students to be taught about sex in school, there is a great deal of variation in the curriculum itself. In fact, according to the Guttmacher Institute, only 17 of the 39 states that mandate sex education require that students are taught medically accurate information. As a result, students can encounter a range of material that covers anything from contraception to abstinence. 

SESP junior Mark Biedke took his high school’s health class over the summer of his sophomore year. He said the entire sex-ed portion of the class took place over two days, and it covered basic anatomy and forms of contraception.

Biedke said that though he thinks his sex education was more informative than what some of his peers at Northwestern experienced, he was still left with a lot of unanswered questions. 

Similarly, Alexa Mikhail, a junior in Medill, felt that her high school’s sex education was not very substantial. Mikhail said the material was taught over the course of one unit in her health class, and it was not taken very seriously by her peers. 

She said the material did more to perpetuate stigma than anything else and added that it was very heteronormative. The Guttmacher Institute reported that as of February 2020, only 10 states require schools to teach “inclusive content with regard to sexual orientation,” so the vast majority of sex education pertains exclusively to sex that takes place between men and women. 

“Nothing was ever taught about pleasure, nothing was ever taught about any other kind of sex,” Mikhail said. “There’s so much I don’t know, and there’s so much I feel like I learned when I got to college too. There are so many things I didn’t know about how sex is supposed to be, how to actually stay safe instead of the generic ‘wear a condom’ and what happens when XYZ happens.” 

Schneider, Biedke and Mikhail all said they believe Northwestern students could benefit from some form of sex education in college. Whether it comes to fruition in the form of a TND during Wildcat Welcome or as a discussion-based seminar, it is important for all students to be informed and safe.

“Something that was never taught was that [sex] is something people do because it’s an enjoyable thing, and I think it’s shamed to be an enjoyable thing at a very early age,” Mikhail said. “I think in our culture that makes it really unfortunate, and it becomes a topic that we don’t discuss enough.”  

Though Northwestern may not currently offer any formal kind of sex education, there is a myriad of resources on campus that students can use to get their questions answered. For instance, Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators, also known as SHAPE, is a student group that works to educate students about sex by hosting events and fostering dialogue. SHAPE works in tandem with the Center for Awareness, Response and Education, or CARE, which addresses different forms of sexual violence that students might experience and promotes preventative education.

Both organizations have a wide range of information available on their websites and are more than happy to answer any other questions that students might have.