Reflections on the Absence of Sex-Education at Home and School
Content Warning:
Mention of sexual violence
Image: Pixabay
At Home
Remember sex scenes in Tamil movies? I'm talking about the close-ups of raindrops on petals, the montage of random outdoor sceneries, and everyone's favourite: the immediate cut to a colourful song and dance number. The absence of, or rather "creative" censorship, of intimacy and pleasure in Tamil movies left me terribly confused about sex.
The Tamil movie Boys, which had come out around the same time I started learning about sexual health in school, vaguely touched on issues surrounding sex and sexuality. The movie received some criticism for the aforementioned topics the film tried to explore. My mom made it clear that I wasn't allowed to watch it. I, of course, watched it anyway. Tamil movies, especially through songs, consistently hinted at sex. For example, Sakkara Inikkira Sakkara, sung by the late S. P. Balasubramaniam from the movie New, is 6 minutes of sexual innuendos. But all of these allusions were utterly lost on me until I re-watched them when I was older or if it came up in conversation among friends. In fact, I found out two weeks ago that Padayappa’s Suthi Suthi Vanthigal is probably about clitoral stimulation. (Yes you read that right.) Youtuber rakshhh has a four part series on Tamil songs you didn’t know were dirty which I highly recommend, as they make for great conversation starters.
“The absence of, or rather “creative” censorship, of intimacy and pleasure in Tamil movies left me terribly confused about sex.”
However, there is a flip side to all the hidden messaging. Tamil movies indisputably shape societal thinking and practices. Like Boys, many Tamil movies are told through the male gaze and often miss the mark in their attempt to discuss issues around intimacy. Additionally, the Tamil movie industry's recent pivot to incorporating "women's issues" disappointingly falls short. Someone asked me what I thought of "Bigil," and I gave them my review in one short sentence: "I rolled my eyes so many times that I missed half the movie." Unfortunately, centring men in conversations around issues that disproportionately impact women is ineffective and further pushes back against education around the notions of agency and bodily autonomy. As consumers of this media, it's imperative that the miseducation propelled into our social spaces are appropriately addressed.
Despite almost always missing the metaphors of sex in movie scenes and songs, when I did catch them I would turn to my parents wide-eyed expecting a reaction. There was none. They almost always ignored me. Like most Tamil parents, mine avoided the topic at all costs and never gave me “the Talk.” I vividly remember my parents getting up and leaving the room when Leonardo Dicaprio's character drew Kate Winslet's character like "a French girl" in the 1996 movie "Titanic." All of these moments of awkwardness and failure to speak openly about sex resulted in my further confusion around consent culture, especially when I experienced sexual violence for the first time. I held on to anger and resentment for years until I realized the deeply entangled history of colonization and sexuality, especially pertaining to shame. This education, and continued unlearning and relearning, informs all of my work today. Addressing the roots of any issue is how we take concrete steps towards collective healing and liberation.
At School
Sexual health class, now that I think back to it, was contingent upon covertly pushing abstinence as a solution. Teachers resorting to the stigmatization of sexually transmitted diseases and infections as a way to fear-monger us into practising safe sex doesn’t seem like the best possible approach. The only emotion I continue to go back to is that of embarrassment. It was the exact feeling my classmates and I felt in grade seven while trying our best to avoid looking directly at the drawings of human genitalia projected on the screen in front of us. The curriculum I learned made no mention of the fluidity of sexuality and gender or consent culture. Many of us unlearned the notions of cis- heteropatriarchy on our own, years after our first exposure to sexual health education. Others did not.
“The only emotion I continue to go back to is that of embarrassment and shame. ”
Soon after taking office in 2018, Doug Ford’s government scraped the previous Liberal government’s updated health and physical education curriculum and instead implemented the teaching of a curriculum that heavily reflected the 1998 version. This decision garnered widespread opposition from parents, teachers, and students across Ontario. The Ford Government later introduced the new curriculum that contains elements of the 2015 version with some changes, including when students will learn about specific topics such as gender identity and sexual orientation. This version also allows parents the choice to exempt their children from learning curriculum.
In a recent article titled "The Appropriation of Sex Education by Conservative Populism," scholars at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto (U of T) share that "repealing the curriculum helped to exacerbate antipathy toward teachers and create a chill in the school system, which may have facilitated the larger neoliberal project of cutting public education." Political performances to attract votes and garner support for violent ideologies is cause for concern. Moreover, I find the attempt by conservative populism to court support from racialized communities based on harmful policy positions particularly troubling. In addition to nominating several racialized MPPs, who subsequently won their elections, the Ford Government continues to pedal damaging political messaging into our communities that renders our families and children unsafe and further exposed to violence. I contend that our community will benefit enormously from a comprehensive sexual education curriculum that utilizes a trauma-informed lens while covering sex, sexuality, gender identity and consent culture.
Finally, lifting the stigma around sex in our community relies upon conversation. If these conversations move toward a harmful direction at home and as the performance of electoral politics continues to let marginalized people down: we must build community safety action plans. Our collective resistance must include a politics and culture of care and compassion.
