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Sex Ed Mandated in NYC Public Schools

Wed, 08/10/2011 - 20:13
Submitted by Carlin Ross

For the first time in two decades - yes two decades - New York City schools must teach sex ed to kids starting in 6th grade.  It's a legal requirement so there's no room for concerned parents to picket or take their kids out of the classes...every child in new york city public schools must receive sex ed in addition to the current HIV education.

No more abstinence only. It feels pretty sweet.  And they're finally going to focus on condoms. In the new sex-education classes, teachers will describe how to use them, and why, going where some schools have never gone before.

Wouldn't it be great if every young man got to try on a condom with instruction before attempting to put one on and not lose his erection his first time? We can hope.

Mandating sex education in public schools is part of the Bloomberg administration's $130 million initiative to improve the lives of young minority men in the city (blacks and latinos are more likely to have unplanned pregnancies and contract STDs). It's paternalistic but necessary:

“We have a responsibility to provide a variety of options to support our students, and sex education is one of them,” the chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, said in an interview on Monday.

Part of next year's curriculum: masturbation, sexual diversity, and orgasms *fingerscrossed*

Sex, Politics & More Sex

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Hooray, and it's about time.

Thu, 08/11/2011 - 03:00
writer245

I am the parent of an 11-yr-old girl who is entering 7th grade in the NYC Public School system this year, and I am whole-heartedly pleased with this announcement. 

Betty and Carlin have often commented on how pornography has been the poor stand-in for sex-ed in recent years, and I'm here to reaffirm that.  I've stumbled upon my own young daughter viewing videos on http://www.extremeporn.com, which has prompted me to have discussions with her about what she sees on that website as being truly "extreme" and outside the norm of what most people do most of the time.

I would vastly prefer to have sex education be above-board, and I would point out that the proposed curriculum (as I've read and understood it) ALSO includes advice on how to teach kids that it is OK to resist unwanted sexual advances.  

The objections that I've read about so far are typically based on religious grounds.  But, the number of teenage pregnancies is the only number I need to understand before I realize that above-board sex education, including the proper use of birth control and condoms, is the right way to go. 

My next goal is to include Dodson/Ross videos in the classrooms of NYC public schools. Seriously. 

Robert 

Bout time

Thu, 08/11/2011 - 11:29
Heylin

I think we've had 3 or 4 young boys come to the office newly diagnosed with HIV. Sex ed needs to include information for young gay men to protect themselves (safe sex for women having sex with women is important as well) because so many of these young boys (I have children older than some of these kids, so I think of them as boys) are coming to us to start a lifetime of antiretrovirals, vaccinations usually not given to people until they're in their 60's, and an acceleration of the aging process. God, I get so mad whenever a new person is referred to our practice!

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