What can be learned from the Dutch about sex-ed
By her own account, Bonnie J. Rough was an unlikely candidate to write a book about sex.
“Despite commendable efforts by my parents and teachers, I was expecting a punctuation mark for my first period,” she confesses. “I thought my breast buds were tumours.”
When her first daughter was a baby, Rough and her husband moved temporarily to Holland for her husband’s job. She was immediately struck by the shame-free way Dutch parents approach discussing sex and anatomy with their kids: young kids swam naked in public pools, preschool teachers used anatomically correct terms for body parts, sex education began in kindergarten.
When they returned to the United States a year and a half later, she was struck by the lengths American parents and schools go to dodge such topics.
Beyond Birds and Bees: Bringing Home a New Message to Our Kids about Sex, Love, and Equal- ity (Seal), on sale now, is the result of her observations, plus five more years of research.
It helps that the book is hilarious and humble and not the least bit sanctimonious.
She tells the story of visiting NEMO, Amsterdam’s science museum, where she and her family learned about kinetics, DNA, brain function ... and orgasms.
“With their usual composure, the Dutch families milling around seemed to barely register the sex-and-puberty extravaganza, a permanent feature of the museum,” she writes. “To them, it was apparently no more remarkable than the brain-science display upstairs or the engineering experiments on the mezzanine. But after reading how many orgasms a woman can have in 60 minutes (134) compared to a man (16 — oh, well), watching two giggling women arm wrestling with giant tongue puppets in a French-kissing diorama and taking a computerized quiz that revealed my abysmal ‘sexual as- sertiveness’ score, I was admittedly a bit red in the face. There I stood, a married American mother in her mid-30s, learning all manner of new sex facts from an exhibit designed for children.” A couple of take-aways: —Words matter: “Teaching freedom from shame also meant using accurate, non-dra- matic terminology,” Rough writes. “As often as possible, we should teach medically correct terms first, just as we teach ‘nose’ before ‘schnoz.’”
—Don’t live in fear of teen sex: “I no longer fixate on the question of how long my children will wait before their first sexual experiences,” Rough writes. “Instead I think it’s more im- portant to consider how positive, healthy and gainful those first experiences can be.” That means, she writes, talking to her daughters about birth control, the risks of intoxicated sex, pornography and other leave-your-comfort-zone topics.
“Knowing what I didn’t want had been easy all along,” Rough writes, “but now I knew what I did want for my children in their sexual lives.
“In their bodies, I wanted them to have health, safety and reproductive control, of course, but also sovereignty, confidence, desire and pleasure,” she writes. “In their relationships, I wanted them to enjoy harmony, affection, trust, equality and authentic love. In their wider lives as adults, I hoped they would know their full worth, meet their deepest potential and contribute to society in ways that would fulfil them.”
All of which begin, she decided, with teaching them to be unashamedly at home in their own skin.
Count me in.