(This is a post entailling my own personal experience with adstinence only education.
It is very triggering - please do not read this if you're triggered by abortion, rape, religious-inducted patriarchy or violence.
This is not an attack on anyone's beliefs - only those forced on me. Please be respectful when/if commenting, as it is a very personal topic.)
I was given abstinence only education. I was given abstinence only education and this is the first time I've written about it - and it terrifies me to do so. I still struggle with the reprecussions of this - but letting it go and writing about it is a big step to healing - so here goes...
Our teacher writes the words “SEX”
in big, ugly green letters on the board. Her chalk squeaks as her
hands scrawl it across the board – angry. She stands at the front
of the class posed like some sort of policewoman – far more tall
and proud than she has been the whole school year (she was awful,
regardless of what she was teaching – but that's another story).
“Do you know what this word means?”
Not really. We were in grade 5. But we learned more and more about
this vague, taboo word every year we had the same discussion. Same
big ugly green word. Same phrases and platitudes carved in to our
brains. “It's a sacred act that God only wants you to have between
your husband or wife, and you.”
We learned about masturbation – it
was wrong. But definitely more wrong for girls than for boys because
– well, we all know, boys can't help it. God likes boys better. God
is more lenient with boys because the patriarchy is backed by God.
We learned that sex before marriage
made you feel dirty. Made you feel used.
We had an activity where the teacher
picked one girl, and set her at the front of the class. She had the
rest of us form a circle – girls in the middle, boys on the
outside. We shook hands with everyone in the circle, going around and
giggling, while the girl sat lonely, pouty and a bit bitter at
missing the fun activity at the front.
The teacher then sat us all down and
asked the boys “Who would you rather be with? The girls who were in
the circle, or the girl who was left out?” We were silent – we
didn't quite get how hand-shaking was the classroom equivalent of
down and dirty sex. The teacher walked us through “most men would
want the girl who was left out because she was pure. God wants all
girls to stay pure until their husbands touch them.”
This is where the guys education stopped, for the most part. But the girls? No – we were just beginning.
For a weekend, the school backed the girls in the upper grades going on a 'camping trip'. That's what the permission slip said. What we
were really going to was what's called a 'Purity Retreat' – but
nobody was really told that, or had any idea what it meant.
Let me tell you what it was –
Viginity Camp.
At Virginity camp we watched videos of
'abortions' being performed. Where mangled-looking piles of spaghetti
hung from sobbing women's uteri. We watched videos explaining how
condoms DON'T WORK. And how sperm and HIV and every other STI can get
through them. They had diagrams. They had “Facts”*. We learned
about how God will punish all 'the sluts' – and that whatever
happened to them, even if it was rape or death or anything else, was
their fault because they chose to have sex before marriage. We were
given worksheets on how we can prevent rape – because it's not the
guy's fault that they find women SO ATTRACTIVE that they just cannot
help themselves.
We were given lessons on how to
properly cover up. Any girl who was wearing a shirt that came any
lower than three fingers placed at the tip of her throat was given a
paper that they had to keep taped there for the whole weekend.
The camp minister – the ONLY guy
allowed on the campsite, came up one day with his wife in tow. He
began his speach with “God only wants marriages between a pure
woman and a man,” and ended with having his wife kneel in front of
him, head down, saying “This is the kind of marriage God loves to
see.”
They coddled us, gave us manicures and
hair-dos. We chatted and giggled and connected as a group. We gained
the trust of the young women who were running the camp. In turn, they
gave us rubber fetuses that were the 'size of a fetus when a woman
usually gets an abortion'. We were told to keep them somewhere safe –
treat them like the children we were going to have one day. Ironically, after that retreat, my best friend and I discovered they made great bouncy balls (imagine a schoolyard full of young girls bouncing rubber fetuses around...I don't think that's the message they were intending to give...)
At the end, we all sat in a circle. A
hush fell over the group – a sort of reverence gained from
bombarding young teenage girls with too many 'facts' (not real facts, but overwhelming fear-mongering). They passed out
cards – the kind you get from banks, or from stores as gift cards - my body - a swipeable commodity.
They were decorated all flowery, pink and pretty. “True love waits”
the front said. On the back was a pledge, explaining how we were to
pledge to stay PURE until our wedding night, when we could present
this card to our husband and cut it up.
We were all forced to sign them, carry
them out with us. The leaders inspected our cards as we left to our
parents vehicles – to make sure we signed them, and tucked them in
our pockets with a hug.
Virginity camp and the lessons I
learned there still haunt me. I have felt scared, guilty and
disassociated from my own body since that day. Only these last few
years am I beginning to untangle the lessons that were forced in to
me that weekend. Before that I have felt that my body and my worth as
a human being, as a person under God's eyes, was determined by
whether I stayed pure and followed the rules and anxieties set out at
Virginity camp.
Up until I was 19, I firmly believed
that condoms did not work. That rape victims deserved what they had
done to them. That abortions resembled a serving of spaghetti with a
few hands poking out. That my body was simply a means to an end to
get a child out of it. That taking birth control led to cancer and
birth defects. That even in conception, a fetus has a FACE (yes. I
was taught that the moment that sperm penetrates the egg, there is a
face. I picture the teletubby baby sun, floating around in women's
uteri...). I had no idea how sex actually worked – at all. All I
knew was that it happened.
This is why we can't have
abstinence-only education. This is why young adults need to learn the
real facts about sex, sexuality and everything that fits in between
them. This is why parents cannot avoid talking to their kids about
sex – because someone else will.
