I went to Catholic school for thirteen long years of my life. Within the last four of those thirteen years while attending an all-girls school, I truly became more and more aware that Catholic schools needed, and still need, a more open outlook on sex. At my schools, sex was “taught” during religion class. In those religion classes, for me at least, many of the teachers only spoke of abstinence, which does not teach the students about sex at all.
For those who do not know, abstinence is when one refrains from having sex, usually until marriage. In teaching abstinence though, we as students do not learn about sex at all. Many of us may end up engaging in unsafe sex and suffer from various STIs due to this lack of sex education, as with some of my classmates. In fact, anytime sex was brought up, some of my teachers would squirm and completely ignore the topic all together. There was another instance in which one teacher focused on sex for one day by watching a video of some guy who insisted that we save ourselves for marriage and not show men our belly buttons because we, as women, should respect ourselves enough to not show off our bodies. One teacher showed us a video of an abortion as a way of scaring us from having sex. From experiences like these in school and many conversations with friends, one of them made a very good point:
“Catholic schools don’t teach sex education because they do not want us to have sex, so why bother teaching it?”
However, there’s a problem in this logic. Our school may have not wanted us to have sex yet, but that does not mean that we were not. We are teenagers. As teenagers, we are discovering ourselves and learning that we may have certain needs, ie. sexual needs. But because we are not educated about sex, we have no clue what we are getting ourselves into when we do start having sex. This is also due to the fact that because we were only taught abstinence, we were sheltered from the real world. Many of my friends and I didn’t know a thing about sex, other than what was portrayed on TV shows and movies. Yes, we knew about protection, but we didn’t know how to use it. We didn’t even know about the various types of protection. Also, after many of my friends’ first times, I got the “I think I’m pregnant” text, because none of us really knew much about how sex works, other than from a biological standpoint. I, personally, didn’t even know what happens, realistically, during sex until my friends shared their experiences with me. I thought it was a “alright, you’re in and you’re out” type of situation, when it is not, and the only reason why I thought like this was because I was not given the proper sex education.
Although abstinence is a cool ideal for some people, it should not be the standard for everyone, which is how it seemed to be portrayed in my religion classes. I think that Catholic schools should have a more open view of sex. It should not be taught that sex only happens in marriage to make babies, because that’s not true at all. We shouldn’t be told that we’re going to go to hell if we have sex before getting married nor should we be scared into thinking that sex is this bad thing that only people without morals engage in. I hope one day that the way sex is taught in Catholic schools changes to educate students rather than it being brushed under a rug.
Comments are closed.