Scarleteen Blog Carnival: Standing up for 'Sex Ed for the Real World'

My first experience with any kind of formal sex education -- more formal than late-night channel surfing on Cinemax after my parents went to bed, that is, or flipping through my friend's father's not-so-secret stash of adult magazines -- was in a middle school science class in 7th grade.

I remember clinical-looking drawings of male and female anatomy. I remember that timeless demonstration, my teacher rolling a condom onto a banana. And, perhaps less conventional, I remember that my science teacher kept a "rubber tree" in her office, a small pine tree decorated with colorful and useful ornamanents, ours for the taking, no questions asked. But what I remember most, and what I now recognize in retrospect as an educator's stroke of genius, was the anonymous question box.

We used it. We abused it (we were 7th graders, after all, juvenile by definition). We made our teacher blush. She made me giggle like the schoolgirl I was. But you know what? It worked. We'd dutifully fill out our index cards on the way out of class one day and stuff them in the box, knowing that the last 15 minutes of class the next day would be filled with frank discussion sparked by whatever was on those cards in the box. The teacher would read each card aloud and we'd all laugh uproariously at the audacity of some anonymous classmate to ask such a question, all the while thinking, "I was wondering the same thing." What did any of us know, except that we didn't know much of anything?

Most importantly, after our sillies had subsided... Our teacher would answer our questions -- every last one of them -- to the very best of her ability. And she managed what I now understand to be a very difficult thing to manage as a sex educator facing a room full of 7th graders: She got us talking amongst ourselves about sex. About relationships and responsibilities. About pregnancy and abortion and adoption. About heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. About tampons and training bras, menstrual cycles and masturbation, and about how waiting for the right time or abstaining altogether were entirely different from not bothering to prepare for the eventuality (the critical distinction our most recent generation of sex education policy-makers seems to have been unable to comprehend).

I remember some of my classmates' questions vividly, twenty years after the fact. For example: "What would happen to Lois Lane's uterus if Superman ejaculated into her?" Like I said: We were 7th graders, not quite mature enough for the topic but needing to acquire that maturity sooner than some of us might have known. "What do I do if I'm pregnant and can't bring myself to tell anybody?" Some of those hypotheticals hung in the air with the weight of not being hypothetical at all, the lessons in sex education already coming too late for somebody, and I remember looking around the room for the protruding belly none of us would notice for another couple of months, the bullet-proof appeal of the anonymous box finally finding its kryptonite.

Or this one: "I think I might be gay but I could never tell my parents. What do I do?" I wonder now: Was a teen suicide prevented that day, thanks to a single index card and a teacher willing to give a tough question her best shot? I think I can guess at who asked it: He's the single most successful person out of any of my classmates from my graduating class, an Army veteran who apparently wasn't asked and didn't tell, then went on to make millions in the private sector as an openly gay adult. Who is your kid submitting their most personal questions about sex education to? If they don't have a teacher like mine in their corner, do them a favor and point them towards Scarleteen.com.

I mention all of this because this month I'm participating in a month-long blog carnival in support of Scarleteen.com and its Sex Ed For The Real World mission. Scarleteen founder Heather Corinna's been on the job since 1998, and the website is not unlike my teacher's anonymous comment box: It's a place for young people to ask questions, find answers, seek out resources, talk amongst themselves about the one thing front and center on all of their minds, and it's a place to ask for help. Sadly, most young people don't have a sex education teacher like the one I had, if they have one at all.

In September the National Survey of Family Growth found that 97 percent of American teens are receiving at least some formal sex education, but that the gaps in that education are glaring: More than one third of them aren't getting any information about preventing unplanned pregnancy or using condoms to protect against sexually transmitted infection, yet the National Center for Health Statistics reported in June that 43 percent of American teens between 15 and 19 are sexually experienced. Wondering why the teen pregnancy rate is on the rise after decades of decline? It turns out the abstinence-only until marriage rhetoric coming from the religious right and Bush-era politicos doesn't really fly with nearly half of all teens, and if they're not getting sex ed info from their school you might be surprised about where they are getting it from:  In August the American Academy of Pediatrics declared that the media have become one of the leading sex educators in the U.S. In lieu of access to comprehensive information from the schools, teens are turning to the media and the Internet for answers. In fact, a lot of teens these days know most of what they think they know about sex from watching porn online. Is this what the right-wingers were hoping for as they've been making their very public stands against comprehensive sex education in our schools?

Here's where the love-it or hate-it magic of the Internet can be turned around and put to good use: Using a tiny, tiny annual budget, Scarleteen.com serves more that 25,000 unique visitors every day, reaching millions of young people every year. It's an awfully big anonymous comment box, presided over by one extremely wonderful sex educator, panels of experts, and -- better still -- a community of engaged young people ready and eager to sort out answers to some of the most difficult questions for themselves. And this community needs your help: Help lift sex ed to a higher plane today by supporting Scarleteen. Your support will help keep the website going strong and help support new initiatives for 2011 including a Find-a-Doc database to help young people find sexual and reproductive healthcare and counseling, and integration of the It's All One sex education curriculum developed by the Population Council.

For more on sex education and the impact Scarleteen.com has had on a new generation of young people and sex educators, check out all of the Scarleteen Blog Carnival posts here.