This Fashion / For Passion / Turns Us Into Nervous Wrecks

Over on his blog, Ewarwoowar has used the controversy over barbaric Tory Scum MP Nadine Dorries' attempt to abolish all sex education in favour of abstinence indoctrination to wax lyrical over his own sex education. The strategy seemed to be mix equal parts mystification and humiliation to produce mortified and ignorant children. and its result - a stampede towards the internet.

The web might be enlightening in physical terms but isn't - I'm told - a paradise of liberal and caring attitudes towards burgeoning consciousnesses in this most delicate of areas.

My own sex education was even more minimal - though possible less embarrassing - than Ewar's. My parents are doctors, but their Catholicism trumped that, so there was certainly no mention of sexuality or body parts at home, and never will be. Although my brother did receive a Catholic pamphlet on marital relations once his engagement was announced. It was posted with no covering note, but I suspect my mother.

School was no better. I attended 3 secondary schools: a Christian Brothers boys' school (left after achieving a magnificent 4% in a maths exam), a Catholic mixed comprehensive at which I thrived and was very happy, and a Benedictine monastery boarding school (closed down shortly after I left because it was awful). I can't remember anything about biology lessons in the first place but don't suppose anything was mentioned - all that school taught was fear.

The comprehensive ran biology classes but I think I left before the sex education. Either that or I wasn't listening. One teacher's report went 'Vole's exam results do not reflect the standard of his work this year' - not because I'd done badly, but because I'd done very well, despite never doing any homework and reading novels throughout the lessons. My interests then were football stickers and books. Much like now, come to think of it. Virtually all my friends there were girls but sexual attraction didn't come into it. At least for me - presumably they were prisoners of my pheromones rather than my magnetic personality.

By the time the hormones did start to kick in, I was imprisoned in a dormitory at the boarding school. Sex was a subject of shameful gossip or abuse. Nobody actually knew any girls except for sisters other than the day pupils, and the more outspoken boys simply lied prodigiously on the subject. Actual facts were very hard to come by. Being a boys' boarding school, there was an undercurrent of homosexual activity but it was largely a function of power and bullying - the actual homosexual boys didn't engage, not that it helped them: they were still targets of the most vicious types.

None of this, naturally, was mentioned in class. Biology was taught by a monk, qualified in chemistry. The nearest we got to reproduction was naming the parts of flowers. Somewhere along the way I picked up a vague idea of human reproduction, but it was sketchy and largely inaccurate. The rest was largely impressionistic: if one of my many sisters managed to sneak a copy of their teen magazines into the house, I'd read it with increasing fear and mystification, but that was about it, other than the occasional Channel 4 foreign film and fragments of porn encountered on verges during country walks (did the internet kill this too?). The unspoken rules at home and school were the 3 Don'ts: Don't Think About It, Don't Talk About It, and Don't Do It (whatever that meant).

So I left school in a state of nervous ignorance, physical, cultural, emotional. If I'd given a moment's thought to it, I'd have been able to say that I was heterosexual, but that's about it. The only girls I actually knew were my sisters. Given that we existed in a state of permanent warfare, that wasn't exactly a useful guide to relating to the objects of my desire. And so there I was launched into an unsuspecting world… without a clue.

So what's my answer to the great Sex Education Conundrum? Simple: copy the Scandinavians and Dutch. Parents and teachers need to grow up. It's them who replicate the culture of shame, giggling and embarrassment for the children. Give the kids age-appropriate knowledge and always, always, stress the emotional component. Any 5 year old should be able to say 'penis' with the same dispassionate tones with which s/he'd refer to an elbow or hip. Once you start marking off body parts as un-nameable, you're generating shame and negative curiosity. Conversely, a matter-of-fact attitude can only be healthy, and can lead on to the far more complex cultural and social aspects of sexuality.

Your testimony in the comments section…

PS. Post title quotes from Victoria Wood's song 'Let's Do It', which beautifully captures the bourgeois British approach with an interesting twist on traditional stereotypes of male/female attitudes:



And if that's not enough of an eye-opener into British sexuality, try this clip or this one from No Sex Please, We're British ("No, I work in a bank").

Vacuous, intellectually bankrupt government: a case study

A silly rumour has swept the world of conservative tabloids and local newspapers that the coloured bracelets currently being worn by children signify the achievement of particular sexual activities, according to the colour. Or, as The Sun puts it, 'BRACELET which means YOUR KIDS are HAVING SEX!', which in this jurisdiction, is admissible evidence in a court of law.

Now a moment's thought should demonstrate the stupidity of such a claim. Is there a company marketing Blowjob Bands? A club? A Fellatio Federation solemnly awarding these things? Ridiculous. Even if there was once a link, it's surely broken once the bracelets are being worn on a mass scale: all cultural items are appropriated and hollowed out. The bracelets are signifiers without a signified.

Now, normally, I'd just sigh at the desperation and stupidity of the press, but now a minor government whip has got involved, calling on the government to ban the bracelets. What an utter, utter moron Mary Creagh is. Seriously, the only way to associate these bracelets with forbidden activity is to demand they be banned. They're just bits of plastic - and meaning can be transferred to any other item. Should the kids start wearing odd shoelaces to denote what they've been up to, will she demand they be banned?

This country has the highest teen pregnancy and teen STD rate in the world. Not coincidentally, we have the worst sex education (it wasn't mentioned at my schools) and most prurient media. Perhaps Creagh, a minister in the department of health, should ask herself why these facts are so, and why her government, despite trying hard, hasn't done much to improve these things.

She's out of a job in a year or so, and in any case, New Labour is obsessed with a) bashing the poor, b) grovelling to the rich, even now and c) pleasing the Daily Mail, so I'm afraid we're not likely to have a serious, considered, enlightened policy any time soon. Instead, we'll have silly, petty, headlines like this, dreamed up by a policy adviser to please an MP hooked on hits of publicity without regard for logic, rationality or simple humanity.

We expect this rubbish from the rightwing and local newspapers: they abandoned news in favour or scaremongering and conspiracy theories long ago (cheaper, more profitable): regrettably, we expect it from MPs. But ministers, even at the fag end of a failing government (and I'm a member of the Labour Party, by the way), have a higher duty, which this idiot has utterly failed to uphold. She's actually proud of her idiocy - her website features links to radio shows on which she's demonstrated her vacuity.

Her record is appalling: only moderately for open parliament, strongly in favour of new, improved, more-millions-of-child-deaths-per-warhead-nuclear-onslaught-from-above, very strongly in favour of government legislation to imprison anyone not smiling while wearing shalwar kameez (i.e.the terrorist until proven innocent bill), very strongly against an inquiry into how our Messianic leader managed to get the UK into an illegal war on faked evidence, and swings back and forth on climate change - great Zarquon, I'm stunned this puppet has the synapse coordination to blink regularly, let alone consider the great issues of the day. Poor, poor Wakefield. Still, at least she's on the case with Shag Bands. We can all rest easy.

Taxi for Mary Creagh.

We are a charitable lot

In the middle of another story, here's an astonishing statistic, if true:

The number of students prevented by their parents from attending sex education classes increased during the Iraq war, when many Muslim families immigrated to Sweden. The Scandinavian country, with 10 million inhabitants, granted full refugee status to 24,799 Iraqis between 2003 and 2007, compared with 260 by Britain.

How astonishingly mean-spirited. The UK invades a country on a false pretext, having previously armed and encouraged its dictator, wreaking havoc and a concomitant civil war, then found room to accept only 260 individuals, despite the immense hardship. Meanwhile a much smaller country with no global pretensions and no responsibility for the war opens its doors to a much greater proportion of refugees.

Förlåt, Sweden!