“Pioneering” is one word for it
Not for the squeamish.
https://twitter.com/museofwoolwich/status/1126634702822084608
Mandatory school sex ed that will include teaching the students how to masturbate. Er…really?
Really.
Teachers who have specialist training will do it
— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) May 10, 2019
Listen, you’re supposed to get that kind of sex ed on the street, behind the bike shed, from your first (or second or tenth) sex partner…anywhere but school.
Also, Tatchell has been known to defend “adult-child sexual relationships”, and people with expertise in the subject say that adults “teaching” children how to masturbate is grooming. Tatchell appears to be promoting mandatory, can’t opt out sex ed in school that will include grooming. Not his best idea.
Was he always this creepy? I don’t really recall so well, but I thought that at one time he wasn’t.
James, he first came to my attention in the 1980s when his ‘Out’ campaign started outing gay men (and if memory serves, more than one straight man by mistake) against their wishes, so he’s always been an arsehole, just not necessarily always a creepy one.
The only masturbation advice that kids need from teachers and even from parents is that masturbation is perfectly normal and there’s no shame in it. Anything else, kids are perfectly able to work out as they go.
Whatever next? Teaching them that boys with feminine traits are really girls and that girls can have peni…..oh, too late.
Pretty sure teens will find out how to masturbate all by themselves. This is not an area that needs undiscoverable technical advice! Nor is it within the purview of sex education at all; the whole point of the subject is biological knowledge for safety and prevention of unwanted pregnancy. But I’m sure this makes me some kind of sex negative kink shaming prude.
Also, the word is educator or teacher, not fucking educationist.
James – apparently he has, according to my UK friends.
I’ve heard many masturbation tales from friends and lovers, and they are incredibly diverse and imaginative. Formal education, besides being creepy, would impede on that imaginative self exploration.
Much like two-person sex, really – nobody wants how-to lessons in school!
Some of the program might be OK, but a big mistake is, if you’re going to push the boundaries like this, you should emphasize strongly to parents that they can always opt out. Instead they go the other way, guaranteeing outrage.
They ask why you can’t opt out of math, etc., but you can opt out of sex ed. Really? If you need that explained to you, you’re far too stupid to be proposing any changes to the curriculum.
Of course some of the program might be ok; it almost certainly is. But part of it is a ludicrously bad and creepy idea. I mean if you serve me a plate of food and some of it is quite good and there’s only a little rotten meat in shit sauce, I’m not really going to care much about the quite good part.
But yes, the combination of “we’re here from the government to teach your kids how to masturbate” and “you may not opt out” is…more idiotic than I can figure out how to say.
With tongue only partly in cheek, what the Hell does Tatchell think his edumacationalists can teach a generation of teenagers that can see more porn in an evening on the internet than I’ve seen in my entire life?
Holms, I suspect most of them learn that before they are teens.
I went down the rabbit-hole to actually look at the proposal, because I’m not as dead-set against the idea of kids learning about masturbation in class (within limits). I think a lot of the folks here have forgotten one immutable fact about teens–they’re foolish. Not stupid, necessarily, but possessing the necessary combination of ignorance, impulsiveness and naivete to do profoundly stupid things, despite their respective intelligence. I definitely recall tales of my peers managing to injure or humiliate themselves because they did something like, say, use a bottle inappropriately. Less dramatically, a lot of guys, especially, pick up the idea that masturbation is what you do when you’re a loser who can’t get laid–and thus, the notion of ‘mutual masturbation’ is nonsensical to them.
So trying to ward off that folly by at least giving the kids straightforward information isn’t a particularly offensive idea to me. And so I read the proposal. And honestly, most of the actual text is pretty solid–a large portion of it encourages stressing notions of consent, for instance. Likewise, the portion about being upfront about how completely inane pornography is, and why you shouldn’t expect sex to be anything like that, strikes me as a good counter. But then I got to this line:
And stopped in amazement at the strength of this reminder that folly is not limited to youth. It’s Ophelia’s hypothetical rancid meat in shitsauce. I can’t think of a worse possible way to get kids to deal with sex ed maturely than non-segregated lessons where the kids have to ask any awkward questions while in the presence of, for most of them, their preferred future dating pool.
Should guys learn what a period is? Yup–basic biology is a good idea, anyway, and maybe they can learn what it isn’t (ie, an excuse to dismiss a woman being pissed at you for being an asshole as ‘just her time of the month’) while they’re at it. But the girls in the classroom absolutely do not need to sit there and be forced to listen to the comments the guys make, or subject to mockery after class is over because they had to ask a pertinent question.
(The fact that the learned authors of the letter think girls know nothing about wet dreams was an added soupcon of WTFery.)
There was also this gem:
Setting aside the various issues of trans politics for a moment, that sentence made my inner editor weep. Without getting into the politics involved, it still should read:
(I know how folks here loathe the term cissexual, but at least here, it’s a useful term for “everyone not in those other two categories”, even if it is essentially a designation for a particular case of neurotypicality.
So, yeah, I give up–these people can’t even master their own fucking language, and they want to design a curriculum about sex? Nope.
I don’t think we can overestimate the disinformed ignorance of the young. Just look at the Republican idiocracy bloviating about pregnancy etc.
The exchange looks like Moran trolling with ‘eew sex-talk’ pearl-clutching…and Tatchell botching his reply by assuring all that ‘experts’ will handle it all.
I believe that under current practices, girls can be expected to develop their first eating disorder before they have their first orgasm.
Freemage, re. ‘the idea of kids learning about masturbation in class’: I recall an incident from my schooldays when a boy was seen to be doing just that! ‘Pocket billiards’, or ‘PB’ for short, was how he was thereafter known.