Our friend Danielle narrated the experience of losing her virginity to us all on the bus.
Shedding oneself of the virginity burden had developed into a competition among our gang of spindly 16-year-old girls and there was now something of a ritual post-match analysis. Details were demanded to educate the uninitiated, as well as to provide a means of comparison for everyone else. “How did it feel?” enquired someone hanging over their bus seat, “what was it like?”
Danielle grimaced, in consideration. “Like pushing a bruise,” she concluded, finding a dark bruise on her thigh, and poking the tips of two fingers in it, wincing, to demonstrate.
More than 20 years later, the image of the bruise, the fingers and the wince yet sears. I recalled it when reading about a new sex education resource that’s being launched in Australia. Developed at La Trobe University, the resource for school teachers contains material for guided class discussions, quizzes, lots of information as well as wry animated videos as well as the revolutionary instruction that sexual intimacy should be ... pleasurable. How radical!
At school, I sat through many a sex-ed class rolling condoms on carrots, one awkward lunchtime watching two girls in my year do a clothed demonstration of what they got up to with some butchers’ apprentices and way too many bus-ride confessions with the likes of Danielle to have reasonable expectations that first-time sex could be pleasant.
My own first time resembled being staked to the ground by a falling piano with sharp elbows and drool. I don’t blame the boy for his sexual narcissism – if it had not been for SBS movies, I’d have had little to encourage me that the performance of the act, or its enjoyability, could be any different. The issue at the time was that I didn’t even have a language to articulate my own desires, let alone a context that encouraged any communication to take place beyond a “yes”.
My experience, of course, was many years ago, and yet it says much that it’s more than two entire decades later that the La Trobe resource is being praised in Australia for its fresh take on sex ed. The teaching of sexuality to young people by the culture beyond the classroom rarely clarifies the precise mechanics of pleasure – particularly the pleasure of young women – and its messages are confusing and archaic.
Films like the well-received Sexy Baby, from 2012, document the extraordinary contemporary cultural pressure applied to women to perform sexual attractiveness and availability. And last year sex researcher Emily Nagoski received due critical praise for her scientific claim that “stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it” in her book Come As You Are.
But the same time, only last July, students at a Melbourne high school were being handed “educational” material that claimed that girls who had sex were like stickytape that loses its stickiness.
Anyone trying to convince themselves that our society is maturing in its sexual conversation need only consider that it was only last week esteemed Australian sex educator Cyndi Darnell found herself suspended by Facebook for sharing a viral video explaining how sex education works in Norway because – shock horror – the video depicted an actual penis in order to talk about one.
It sounds ridiculous to insist that the derivation of mutual pleasure should be the central message of sex education, but it’s a message that, unheeded, has outcomes among young people that are both painful and dispiriting.
Fairfax reported on Thursday widespread research findings that show “a quarter of all young people say they have ‘unwanted sex’, due to feeling pressure frightened or being drunk.” Another report featured in the Conversation that surveyed kids 16-18 discovered “women were repeatedly asked for anal sex by their male partners, and men’s and women’s accounts also raise the real possibility of of unwanted penetration for young women – who are sometimes put in situations where they are penetrated anally without their consent.”
There’s an excellent line in the book Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley, in which the protagonist opines that, “Sexuality itself was sometimes understood, by the women in my family, as a kind of violence that must be submitted to, buried deep in the privacy of domestic life.” It’s a tradition that informed much of my own generation’s fumbling. Thank god for the La Trobe education initiative, so that future generations may be spared.
I remember watching Danielle in that bus, talking about sex, pushing her bruise, and reflecting on my own early experiences and thinking: “It should all be a lot more fun than this.”
Write a comment
...
