The less-than- 100% efficacy of barrier methods or hormonal birth control are no secret when it comes to trying to prevent pregnancy or an STI. If you’re still playing “just the tip,” go put yourself in the corner (and then get yourself tested). Same if you think pull outs aren’t just for couches.

Whether we learned about sex from our parents, our teachers or our peers, sexuality is often an uncomfortable topic for adults to talk about with teens and preteens. Candice Leigh, tantrika and teacher of NSFW’s debut Masters Series workshop Tantric Touch, said she
thinks teenagers could benefit from earlier exposure to sexual education.

The sex positive yogini was raised in Texas where her mom, Donna, was one of her middle school sexual education teachers. Pretty progressive, right? Sex Ed in middle school! Sure… abstinence-based Sex Ed.

‘SEX CAN WAIT’

“As a middle school counselor working with the second highest per capita county in the nation for teenage pregnancies, the school district I worked for in the late ‘90s through 2005 received a grant to implement an abstinence-based curriculum,” Donna told NSFW via email. “So, counselors at the middle school level had the challenge of teaching Sex Ed as part of the guidance curriculum.”

A “safe sex” program had been taught prior, but “parents were not too keen on the idea of their 13 year olds learning how to put a condom on a banana,” Donna wrote.

Donna said she taught “Sex Can Wait” to eighth-graders, who were exposed to the more “explicit” material than the lower two grades. The program “taught the facts about the real consequences of unprotected sex, the real facts about STDs, and of course the reality of an unplanned pregnancy” without promoting shame, embarrassment or fear.

“Having been a middle school counselor for 22 years, I believe that sixth, seventh and eigth graders are just not emotionally mature enough for the emotional aspects of sex,” Donna wrote. “Their hormones are going crazy, so having a plan to refrain from sex probably helped many kids recover from the heartaches of a breakup. Middle schoolers can be so fickle. They change boyfriends or girlfriends within weeks. If they were sexually active, it just added so much more anger, hurt and humiliation that they just had a terrible time overcoming.
“As far as I know that was the extent of the sexual abstinence program taught in that school district.”

EVERYTHING IS BIGGER IN TEXAS… EXCEPT SEX ED

Candice told NSFW that looking back, she wishes she learned about exploring sexual energy at an earlier age. “It would have been such a positive experience to learn about empowerment when choosing partners, the way arousal works, replace joy instead of shame and fear, to celebrate one’s ‘first time,’” Candice said in a previous interview. “I think I was grounded when my parents found out I was having sex which was a really mixed and confusing message.”

That might not surprise you since we are talking Texas. Ted Cruz. ‘Nuff said. Those who believe in abstinence-based Sex Ed, often Christian conservatives, say it’s the only method to guarantee an empty womb and a clear STI panel. And they are right. “I think the students need Sex Ed offered in the high schools in Texas but not necessarily just abstinence-based,” Donna wrote. “Kids are going to do what they want to do, so if they had more information about safe sex rather than only abstinence, maybe Texas would be more successful in helping their students make wiser choices when it comes to sex and the teenage pregnancy rate would decline.”

In 2010, Texas came in third for highest teen pregnancy rate, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The CDC reported that Texas dropped to fourth place in 2016, behind Arkansas, Oklahoma and Mississippi. (New York, where NSFW’s HQ is located, ranked No. 8 in least amount of teen pregnancies in the same year.)

IS ABSTINENCE-BASED SEX ED THE WAY TO GO?

While Donna stands behind the curriculum for students in middle school, those opposed to the
curriculum say “no fucking way!” Kids are going to be kids —curious, hormone flooded, Id-driven kids.

Science and observations of human nature backs that theory. “Abstinence-only programs are ineffective at reaching their primary goal of keeping young people from engaging in sexual activity as well as at meeting the needs of all adolescents,” Laura Lindberg, a research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group, wrote in a co-authored Op-
Ed for The Hill. “They also create barriers for young people in making informed decisions about their health, require unethical behavior from educators, perpetuate inequities and discrimination and promote stigma against marginalized individuals and toward sex more generally in society.”

In fact, according to Lindberg, once adolescents emerging from the cocoon of “no sex until marriage” do have sex, the likelihood of pregnancy or contracting STIs increases.
 

"We fail our young people when we don't provide them with complete and medically accurate information,” she added, regarding her September 2017 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

“I have a close friend who currently is a children’s director at a Methodist church in Austin who teaches sessions on sexuality to fourth- and fifth graders,” Donna wrote before signing off. “I asked her some questions about what she thought about teaching Sex Ed. She said that conversations about sex need to start early and to not be afraid to talk about it. It’s a human sexuality class that is focused on God creating us in God’s image.”