Sex education

 Hello everyone,

Welcome back to my blog my self parmod sharma and in this blog we will discuss about a very important topic

Growing up, my parents would either ask me to close my eyes or change to another channel whenever there was a kissing scene on the television. What was the reason, the 8 years old me had no idea – nobody had ever talked about it. Sex? That’s totally out of the question.

In fact, I only had a ‘formal introduction to sexual education’ when I was fifteen and that was from my science class. The infamous chapter four, they call it. And as much as we were excited about learning these new things, most of what was covered was purely biological. We were not taught about anything else outside of that.

But who are we kidding? It isn’t that simple. There will be so many changes once puberty hits adolescents, both physiological and psychological. This can be a bit overwhelming for them because schools only scraped the tip of the iceberg. At this stage, it is only natural that they are curious about sex and sexuality.

Precocious and resourceful, if they can’t get the information from you, they can always refer to the media. Nevertheless, merely depending on the internet, magazines, and television can be dangerous because many misrepresentations of gender and sex had been propagated by these same sources. Therefore, an alternative is that for us to create a comprehensive education plan that can keep our youth more informed about sex and gender-related issues.

Sadly enough, whenever the issue of sex education arises, it becomes a hot debate, especially in Malaysia. The negative social connotations that ring around this issue is so prominent, many think that advocating sex education (especially in school) equals to encouraging the youth to engage in more sexual acts and become more promiscuous when it actually does the opposite. That’s why countries with the lowest teen pregnancy like Italy, Germany, and Switzerland are adopting comprehensive sexual education with the United Nation recognising it as a basic human right.

It also teaches us about social issues, what to do after a rape, the myths about sex, how sexuality is being represented in the media, where to get support and etc., ultimately creating a safe sphere where they can ask questions about things related to sex.

Being in a conservative country, many of us adhere to the ‘abstinence-until-marriage’ view which promotes the idea that sex before marriage is a social problem because it is morally wrong. It resonates with the call of many major religions. Nonetheless, withholding information about contraceptive and sex, in general, does not solve the problem. Instead, it increases the risk of our young teens of getting sexually transmitted diseases, being sexually taken advantage of and having unplanned pregnancies. 

Thank you