China Daily, the largest English-language publication in the PRC, has an interesting if somewhat bizarre article about a new initiative to try to get effective sex education into Chinese schools. An English summary of an article from China Features, the article has some interesting facts, like so:
“At present, there is no structured curriculum or even appropriate teaching materials for sex education in primary and middle schools,” says Zhang Meimei, director of the Sex Education Research Center under Capital Normal University.
“It’s like fighting a fire. Only when there are some accidents or problems, a lecture or consultation is held in schools. But there is no regular class for sex education,” Zhang says.
[Link.]
But parts of it are bizarre. Take the second paragraph in the piece:
When Liu Yajun, a Beijing primary school teacher in her 40s, first tried to talk about reproductive organs with her 11-year-old students, she found she was just too embarrassed to speak. Traditionally, sex has been a taboo subject in China. One is not supposed to talk about it openly, especially with children. In fact, when children ask, “Where did I come from?”, many parents will say, “You were picked up from a trash can”.
[Link.]
Somewhat more credible and less general are the paragraphs that follow:
There are no specific sex education courses in Chinese public schools. Although a high school course called “physical hygiene” purports to educate youngsters about their reproductive organs, most students are simply left to read the textbooks on their own.
But a dozen primary schools in Beijing, including the one affiliated to Beijing Medical University where Liu teaches, are trying to make breakthroughs in sex education.
Liu, now armed with training in sex education, says, “We show videos about physiological changes in adolescence to our boys and girls separately. When we show the girls’ movie, the boys are curious and watch through a window. Children really want to know about it.” In a sex education class in Hepingli No 1 Primary School, a game is on in which boys, playing sperms, vie with each other to overcome obstacles to meet the girls, playing ova. Through the game, they are taught how a sperm meets and fertilizes an ovum.
[Link.]
…but that “sperm and egg game” seems pretty weird. I don’t know enough about Chinese culture to comment on whether such a game is age appropriate in primary school. But it certainly seems less direct than simply providing neutral physiological information. It’s also potentially less successful in communicating the teaching points. However, as one expert says in the article: “Every nation has its own cultural traits. Sex education videos from Western countries, that are very open and direct, are not suitable to be shown in China.”
That certainly seems reasonable, but in my view the one thing absolutely critical to sex ed in any culture is a directness that is well beyond what is typical for that culture. In the United States, it’s a little difficult to tease out exactly what treatment of sex is “typical,” since we have such wildly divergent messages about sex competing for kids’ attention. But in fact, in the US, the danger is trying to “talk around” sex, or to provide the information in a way that’s supposedly “age appropriate” but is in fact totally confusing, because it’s less direct than the covert messages kids are already getting. In my experience, not only are kids curious about sex; most of them are able to handle appropriate information with surprising maturity and responsibility, given a safe environment and peer pressure to do so. If you can teach kids about math in the classroom, why does sex ed need to be turned into a “Fertilize Her!” game?
Then again, I don’t live in China, so on some level I can’t fathom what cultural barriers such teachers are facing. Here in the US, the secret to age-appropriate but effective sex ed is not so much the kids, but the teachers. But so many adults are so incredibly uncomfortable about sex that sex ed becomes a far more loaded topic than it needs to be. Kids pick up on that discomfort, and get the message that there’s something wrong with sex — which, frankly, is absolutely and explicitly the message that many adults want to send. That’s another reason teaching sex ed can be anxiety-producing; in some jurisdictions, teachers who stray even slightly from an approved curriculum, even in answering direct questions from kids, may run afoul of parents who don’t approve of the approved curriculum in the first place. Sex ed for kids is always controversial, and those who oppose it — or oppose some ingredient in what ends up being taught — never seem to shy away from playing dirty. It’s good to know the parental freakout isn’t restricted to our Madonna-whore, crypto-Puritan nation:
[P]romoting sex education in primary schools has drawn protests from some parents. They think [primary school] is too early to talk about the subject with their children.
One textbook to be used in one of the city’s primary schools sparked much controversy. Parents criticized what they called its “pornographic” illustrations.
An online survey conducted by ifeng.com, a popular Chinese Web portal, showed that although about 47 percent of those surveyed thought the textbook was a sign of progress in China, more than 37 percent worried it could produce undesirable results.
[Link.]
As in the US, the debate always seems to come back to the rampant evil of providing someone — anyone, but in this case kids — of something that could indicate that sex is potentially pleasurable. Most people seem convinced that doing so will cause disastrous results, permanently damaging young minds. But take note that he PRC’s solution thus far has been no sex ed at all. And speaking of disastrous results:
A 2010 survey of 164 million unmarried people aged 15 to 24 in the country, by the Population Research Institute at Peking University, showed that 22.4 percent of respondents had sexual intercourse, but half of them did not use contraception the first time they had sex.
Of the sexually active girls, more than 20 percent had experienced unwanted pregnancies. And 91 percent of these had ended in abortions. Only 4.4 percent of those surveyed were found to be knowledgeable about sexual health, while 14.4 percent knew how to prevent the transmission of AIDS/HIV.
[Link.]
Oh, and our friends at San Francisco Sex Information (which starts interviews for its fall training soon, incidentally) will appreciate this:
Zong Chunshan, director of the Beijing Youth Law and Psychology Consultancy Center, says a third of the phone calls his center now receives are about sexual health, a 25 percent increase over the past two decades.
“Earlier, the questions used to concern things like masturbation. But in recent years, there have been more questions about sexual relations, pregnancy and abortion,” says Zong, who is also a council member of the Beijing Sex Education Association.
“About a sixth of the calls we receive on our hotline are actually obscene calls. The callers, mostly in their early 20s, are not trying to consult with us, but trying to satisfy abnormal fantasies, which are a typical outcome of poor sex education,” Zong says.
“The greatest impact of a lack of sex education is the belief that sex is a dirty thing. If sexual feelings are repressed and do not find a healthy outlet, they can lead to abnormal and morbid desires.”
[Link.]
(I’d like to point out that even at SFSI, we’re reluctant to refer to”unproductive callers” — those trying to use an information service to get what amounts to free phone sex — as having “abnormal fantasies.” The fantasies are not abnormal, though they may at times be unusual…it’s the method of satisfying them that is, while neither normal nor abnormal, all too common — but certainly unproductive, inappropriate and non-consensual.)
Why should you care, regardless of whether you have an interest in China specifically?
Because if you care about healthy sex, China is another example of a culture struggling to provide universal sex ed after not providing it in any meaningful way for way too many years. It’s another example of a culture battling to make any kind of headway in the public health arena, while squeamish parents try to divert the discussion away from public health and back to the aversion to pleasure. An evaluation of age-appropriate resources becomes impossible, not because children are limited in what they can understand but because adults are limited in what they can appropriately deliver.
If you ask me, the numbers on unwanted pregnancy and HIV prevention speak for themselves.
Whether or not comprehensive, age-appropriate and non-judgmental sex education will make the world a better place, it’s clear that continued lack of sex education spells disaster on every level.
Image: Hu Biantao of Yujian province, who would be reincarnated as Tu Er Shen, the rabbit god who protects male homosexuals. Via Queer Cult.
