In America, sex education can range from excellent to nonexistent, depending on where you live. Because there is no federal regulation on sex ed in schools, states get to choose whether or not to mandate it and what information to provide.
At college, this regional diversity is a bigger problem than it is in most places. Even if you’re in college in a state that provides great sex ed, odds are many of the students there hail from some other state, where they might never have taken a sex ed class.
And that disparity is odd. There aren’t many other subjects where we would allow some college students to be completely lacking — if some students here had never been taught to read or do basic addition, we would be concerned. But it’s somehow acceptable that some students coming to USC might never have received basic anatomical information about their own genitalia.
South Carolina is, in fact, one of only 22 states that requires sex education, which is a significant mark in our favor. However, said education doesn’t have to be medically accurate. While this doesn’t prohibit responsible teachers from providing accurate information, it does mean that there’s no reason irresponsible teachers have to adhere to the confines of sexual reality.
Unfortunately, that’s not the only concerning thing about South Carolina sex ed. Under our Comprehensive Health Education Act, sex ed may not discuss “sexual practices outside marriage or practices unrelated to reproduction.” It also repeatedly stresses that sex ed must emphasize abstinence.
This presents a few problems.
First, abstinence education is essentially useless. Teens who have abstinence-based sex ed don't have any less sex than other teens, which runs directly counter to the express purpose of abstinence-only education: to make sure teens don’t have sex before marriage.
To be fair, learning that it’s OK to say no is valuable information for everyone. But since you can include that information in a more comprehensive sex ed class, abstinence-only education isn’t worth it when it not only fails to produce its intended result, but also could leave the 97 percent of people who do not wait for marriage to have sex high and dry when it comes to contraceptives.
Luckily, we live in an age where you can Google how to use a condom, and many kids are smart enough to do just that. But when you don’t teach something — or, in some states, even bother to mention it — you can’t be surprised when teenagers don’t execute it perfectly. Using condoms properly isn’t rocket science, but in a situation where pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease can be on the line if a 15-year-old makes a mistake, it might be worth it to help them out a little.
And there are other forms of contraception — some more complicated than condoms, such as the sponge, NuvaRing and diaphragms, and some that are much more effective and reliable, like the pill, implants and Depo-Provera shots — that sexually active people could do with knowing more about.
Here in South Carolina, while educators are allowed to provide information about contraceptives, they must frame that information within the context of “future family planning.” This rule, while initially puzzling, makes sense when you take into account the argument that providing information about contraception will encourage premarital sex. So, if you really must teach it, you should be certain that no one could possibly take it that way. If contraception is for the purposes of making sure you and your heterosexual spouse don’t have too many babies, then no one will think it’s an invitation to sleep around.
Leaving aside the fact that this school of thought is effectively an attempt to paint premarital sex as some sort of dirty, forbidden activity — despite the fact that you would never be prosecuted as long as the sex was between consenting adults — this leads us to our second problem.
Assuming that sex happens purely between two partners who are capable of reproduction leaves a significant portion of the population behind. Lesbian, gay and bisexual teens may be having sex with a partner with whom pregnancy is not a risk, but STDs still are. And if they have only ever been presented with contraceptive information in the context of preventing pregnancy, they may choose to forgo it because, in that context, it would not be useful to them.
Not to mention that South Carolina is one of eight states whose sex ed laws contain so-called “No Promo Homo” language. “Alternative lifestyles” can’t be mentioned except when discussing STDs — presumably HIV/AIDS, which has been considered something of a “gay disease” since it was discovered.
As much as legislators such as state Sen. Lee Bright would probably like to pretend LGBT people don’t exist, that is simply not true. It wasn’t true in 1988 when the bill was passed. And failing to provide contraceptive information — or even mention “alternate lifestyles” — can be truly and powerfully harmful not only to LGBT teens, but to straight teens’ ability to relate to and be respectful of LGBT teens.
I’m not suggesting that we need educators in schools to lube up and teach the Kama Sutra with same- and other-sex partners. But sex education that doesn’t prepare kids for life after school is useful the same way a self-defense class that doesn’t teach you to defend yourself is. Marriage-framed, heterosexual-exclusive, abstinence-emphasis sex ed is too narrow to do the job it’s supposed to, and it's too afraid of the material it’s teaching to do as much good as it could.
Whether or not we like it, kids are going to have sex before marriage. We might as well teach them how to do it responsibly.