The United States of Unequal Sex Education

T hirteen girls sat in a circle talking about sex. It was called a "purity retreat," a weekend where every eighth-grade girl in my very small, Christian school would discuss the importance of remaining a virgin until marriage. What the hormone-fueled, eighth-grade boys in our class were doing while us girls were learning to "respect ourselves" remains a mystery.

Looking back, I was excited about the retreat. I was looking forward to spending the weekend with my friends in a hotel, and I was excited to be treated like the grown-up that I certainly thought I was. Someone who was responsible for her decision to have sex — or in my case — not to have sex.

That weekend, as I walked to the front door to leave for the retreat, my dad handed me a small velvet pouch. Inside of which was a set of silver purity rings (rings that symbolized a commitment to remain abstinent until marriage), one with the word 'wisdom' engraved on it and the other with the Christian fish.

The rings weren't a surprise. In fact, I had picked them out weeks earlier with my mom, but I remember wanting my dad to be the one to give them to me. I believed that he would be the one to give me away in marriage, so he should be the one to give me the symbolic promise I was making my future husband: a promise to remain pure.

Fast forward three years to my dad announcing his six-year affair on Christmas morning and the twisted irony of him giving me purity rings settles in.

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While a lot of what we learned that weekend has faded from memory, one lesson stands out above the rest. All of us gathered in a hotel room and took seats around a large wooden table. There were three cups: a styrofoam cup, a plastic cup, and a teacup.

Our instructor (a classmate's mom) asked which cup we thought had more value and was, in turn, more desirable. We all answered that the china teacup was the most expensive of the three. The teacher proceeded to quote 1 Corinthians 6:19, "Don't you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself."

She went on to explain that if we had sex before marriage, we would be treating our bodies as less valuable than God intended them to be. Our bodies were meant to be treated as teacups, not styrofoam cups.

While I believe there's merit to being cautious with your body and your heart, the idea that a woman's worth is dependent on her body, on the status of her virginity, has always unsettled me.

Years later, a classmate, who has asked to remain anonymous, told me, "When I was raped as a teenager, in turn, losing my virginity, I had to battle the feeling that it was my fault. But I also had to battle the idea that I was worth less as a human being because I had had sex."

While it can be challenging to remember the specifics of what we learned that weekend, it's easy to recall what we did not.

We didn't learn how to be safe if, or when, we decided to have sex. We didn't learn what to do when someone doesn't listen to the word "no." We didn't learn how to deal with the tight-rope girls are expected to walk between being a prude or being a slut and the judgment that will undoubtedly come with either. We didn't learn about what is and what is not a healthy relationship. We didn't learn how to make an educated decision about sex.

We learned to "just say no." That was the only option and the only sex education we were given.

When I got to high school, I tested out of health, and my purity ring broke during cheerleading practice. While I have remained a virgin, the ring has yet to be replaced, and I have yet to have a formal sex education.

Although sex education has existed within the United States for more than a century, it has long been considered one of the worst systems in the industrialized world, with the country averaging the highest rate of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STD).

In fact, only 22 states require sex education within their schools, with just 13 of those 22 mandating that education to be "medically accurate." To make matters even more uneven, the definition of what is deemed to be medically accurate sex education varies from state to state.

Teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. dropped significantly in 2010, a change many within the field credited to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPP), launched under the Obama administration. Yet in July, under the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services cut more than $200 million in federal grants to 81 organizations working to decrease teen pregnancy rates.

Many are concerned the cut signals a substantial move in the wrong direction for U.S. healthcare. "We were on a better track under the Obama administration because the funding was for comprehensive sex ed," says Wendy Sellers, author of the new sex education curriculum implemented in multiple counties including Los Angeles. "We've seen our teen pregnancy rates go down down down; they're lower than they've been in decades. Now under the new administration, that funding has been cut, and millions more have been put into abstinence-only education. Which has not been proven to be effective."

In August, more than a dozen leading experts in adolescent sexuality research and policy, including Guttmacher Institute researcher Laura Lindberg, reviewed the scientific evidence accumulated over several decades of abstinence-based curriculums. They concluded Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage (AOUM) programs to be "ineffective, stigmatizing and unethical."

"The only sex education my school offered revolved around practicing abstinence," says 24-year-old Corey Williams. "I think that led to somewhat of a misunderstanding of human sexuality for me. There are logical reasons to wait to have sex, but adults don't often talk with kids about them. In my experience, just telling them 'don't do it' doesn't work."

Yet the current administration has proven to be a strong supporter of abstinence-only education; two of Trump's top executives in the Department of Health and Human Services are known for their powerful ties to AOUM education. In turn, their roles may have contributed to Congress's recent allotment of $90 million to abstinence-only programs, an increase of $5 million over the previous year's funding.

Aside from the preference for abstinence-based sex education, the sexualization of media is cause for growing concern, with studies indicating that teenagers encounter, on average, 15,000 references to sex on TV per year. In addition to mainstream media outlets, with the rise of the internet, pornography has become more accessible to young people than ever before.

"Pornography is an epidemic," says Sellers, "and we need to address that when we teach young people. When adults don't teach them what they want to know about sex, they go looking for answers in places that aren't educational. Young people often can't differentiate between the fantasy portrayed in porn and the reality of human sexuality. "We can either be a louder, clearer voice in that conversation, or we can be silent."

Others within the field express a similar concern when it comes to the growing silence they witness surrounding sex education; especially when dealing with parent involvement.

"Kids are full of questions that often don't deal directly with sex," says Emmalinda MacLean, co-founder of 'More Than Sex Ed,' a self-proclaimed fact-based sexuality education. "Most of the time they're interested about the changes taking place with their bodies, concerns I have come to categorize as 'Am I normal?' questions. Such as, 'What age do most girls start their period?' and 'Is it unhealthy to have a lot of wet dreams?' I've come to find that usually, kids would like to have these types of conversations with a parent, but often parents don't know where to begin."

More Than Sex Ed argues, "Knowledge is power and kids have the right to have their questions answered." MacLean stresses that in her classes, all questions are answered factually and respectfully.

"Kids know when adults are hiding things from them," says MacLean. "More often than not, if a kid is asking you outrageous questions about sex, they're testing to see how honest you're going to be with them. It's after they've figured that out that they decide whether to trust you with what's concerning them."

MacLean says if she could, she would market her classes as suicide prevention; bullying due to sexual and developmental matters can contribute substantially to a young person choosing to end their life.

When it comes down to it, the type of sex education a child will receive in the United States is reliant on the state, and often the county that they live within. While a child born in California will get one of the best sex educations in the U.S., a child born in Kansas may never hear a word on sex education.

"Kids are humans, and they develop," says Tim Kordic, project advisor within Los Angeles Unified School District's HIV/AIDS Prevention Unit. "So it's a constant need of information, every single year it's the same. It's just a matter of how we deliver that information to them. We're lucky enough that we're in a district and a state that has laws that make sure that happens in the right way."

Furthermore, some states operate with a strict "no-homo" policy, where schools are not allowed to recognize homosexuality. Other states require that if a school is to teach anything that is LGBTQ related, it must be portrayed in a negative light.

All too often poor sex education can be found in deprived areas, and with teen pregnancy the leading reason girls drop out of school (and daughters of teen mothers more likely to be teen mothers themselves), the cycle is challenging to break.

"If we were to put sex education under the umbrella of health education," Sellers says, "we would see a lot of these issues go away. There would be higher and more uniform standards across the board, and kids throughout the country would have access to equal and increasingly better sex education."