Sex education as we know it is no longer enough

An overhaul of the existing sex education curriculum is long overdue.

- ANGEL MARTINEZ

I knew it as early as my sophomore year of high school, when my male religion teacher was tasked with educating me on my female anatomy. Rather than instill in our class fundamental knowledge about how our bodies worked, he taught us that we were temples of the Holy Spirit; that our transcendent purpose was procreation, and that failure to fulfill this duty would render us impure. In retrospect, I have learned more about consent, bodily autonomy and pleasure from haphazardly written One Direction fanfiction on Wattpad.

This is why it's endlessly frustrating to me that conservatives continue to resist any progressive reforms, when there were a staggering 142,276 adolescent mothers in 2023. Religious groups, lawmakers and even the President himself recently denounced and withdrew support for the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Bill, citing its provision on an "age and development-appropriate" comprehensive sexuality education (CSE). What would have been the youth's crucial first step to more informed decisions quickly became the target of misinformation, with the National Coalition for the Family and the Constitution alleging that CSE aims to teach zero to four-year-olds how to masturbate.

Such backlash is not only categorically untrue, but also a form of unnecessary fearmongering. "Aside from the fact that CSE was developed by experts on sexual and reproductive health, with an awareness of age-appropriate concepts for children, CSE only seeks to interrogate the existence of beliefs and practices surrounding sex. This is necessary to see how they've influenced our culture today," anthropologist and researcher Hanna May Rosario explained. While I do agree that our CSE curriculum shouldn't be merely lifted from international standards, I don't see any problem with the scope of topics it wishes to cover. In fact, I wish I got to experience them for myself.