Anyone who remembers their mortifyingly embarrassed-looking teacher (who, incidentally, was probably our age and fresh out of uni, the poor bastard), peeling a condom over a banana will recognise that we’ve all got quite a long way to go when it comes to making sex education relatable and affective.
But attempts by Pine Valley Middle School in San Ramon, California to do just that have massively backfired after parents were left ‘infuriated’ by ‘X-rated’ photos used by teachers as part of a sex education slideshow.
The presentation was designed to tackle myths around contraception and used some internet memes and the like, presumably not only to make the whole thing seem up-to-date but also funny. Reasonable enough, right? Any way that you can make this incredibly awkward but equally important subject funny and engaging has to be a good thing, right?
Well, a lot of parents didn’t seem to think so when they saw the slides. One showed a group of teenage men with the caption ‘douche bag’ alongside the (useful) caption that ‘douching does not wash sperm away.’ Another shows a man on all fours with a woman standing on his back with the caption ‘girl on top can still get pregnant’.
All relatively tame – but the one that caused real problems was an image of a man with blood on his face accompanied by the text ‘a real man loves his woman every day of the month’, presumably to make the point that men can still give their girlfriends oral sex even when they’re on their period.
Some parents found this all to be a bit much, considering that the oldest students in middle school are just 14.
‘This is horrific. This is unacceptable material. That’s something you can’t unsee. This is definitely more than R-rated. This is X-rated,’ an anonymous parent told ABC 10.
Listen, it might be a bit much to introduce a 14-year-old to the intricacies of period sex, but the truth is that kids who are old enough to know the ins and outs of sex (sorry) should surely be considered old enough to learn about female pleasure in a context that’s real. (And not from porn.)
Teaching sex education clearly is a thankless task, but at least this method has got us all talking about sex, which can only be a good thing, right? Salt-n-Pepa told us to do that 23 years ago. Isn’t it kind of sad we’re still struggling?
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiecullinane
Picture: Eylul Aslan
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.