If this gets 50 notes I’ll tell you guys how I ran an underground sex ed class and helped put a pedophile in jail during second grade
Okay, so my mom has always been super open about health stuff and when I was just starting elementary school she got me a bunch of those American Girl books about your body and your feelings and they were really informative and truthful and I really liked them. One day I was talking to a friend about one of them and we started reading it and she was asking a ton if questions and seemed really excited and interested by it and I answered questions and explained stuff. We talked about the books during recess and eventually more girls joined in until we were a group of about 10-15 seven year-olds talking about puberty and sex and a lot of things that most adults don’t The thing about those books is that they look really innocent with cute drawings and there are chapters about brushing your teeth and stuff; but what most people don’t expect is that there’s a lot of health stuff about puberty and mental illness and drugs and a lot of really important stuff that everyone should know. The teachers didn’t care because the books looked super innocent and they thought were talking about proper brushing habits or something. We’d go sit down and read a chapter and I’d add some other stuff that my mom had told me and then we’d just talk and ask questions. It was kind of like group therapy but with sex ed. This was all okay until one of the boys saw a page with a ton of boobs on it (the page was demonstrating a breast exam) and he told the teacher. So they found and I got suspended and I wasn’t allowed to bring any more of those books into school.
Closer to the end of the year, one of the second grade teachers was revealed to be a pedophile when one of his students said that he tried to touch her inappropriately and then three other girls came forward with the same story. After he was arrested, the girl told me that she said what he did because we had talked about what to do in that exact situation. Because of our group she knew that she probably wasn’t the only one and she knew that it was wrong for him to do that and that she wouldn’t get in trouble if she told someone and that she probably wouldn’t have said anything if she hadn’t read those books.
I started doing it again the next year. No one stopped me.
Bless.
Reblogging again in hope someone could give me those books’ names
I believe it’s this one! Fits the description and the back cover even has the brushing girl.
There’s a series of books! ^^
The American Girl books are really, really good. They talk about things honestly but simply, and cover a lot of important stuff. 11/10 for those books.
These books were the only sex ed I had as a young girl. These were a door to reading bigger, badder texts and getting involved in activism…
100% recommend you buy these for sisters, daughters, nieces. 110%
holy shit literal children should not be taught abt sex and preteens that do experience sexual attraction have no privilege over their peers who might experience it later or not at all
ok but leaving the discourse behind, sex education is actually really important though??? i mean, my elementary school taught that so sex wouldn’t be a stigmatized thing for in the future
literal children are already taught about sex, i don’t understand. in my elementary school, in 4th grade we were taught about “”“male and female”“” development and “urges” we would feel. in 5th grade, we saw actual pictures of naked adult bodies, and in 6th grade we were taught about “types” of sex and protection and pregnancy.
my parents gave me a book targeted at 7-12 year olds that also taught about sex and the body and sex organs and shit like that, like. this post is objectively bad. education from a young age is good and important for the destigmatization of sex in society. i don’t understand, is there a point you hadn’t made clear that i’m misunderstanding, maybe?
let’s not show nudes to ten year olds what fucking school did you go to
learning abt puberty =/= learning about how to fuck and 110 versions of asexuality
I… wha… where the hell were you raised that you think there’s something wrong with kids knowing what a naked body looks like? What century is this?
Sex education isn’t just learning about puberty; it’s learning about sex, relationships and consent, and it’s goddamn important even for children.
I started having sexual fantasies when I was 4 years old; I just didn’t know what they were at the time, or why they made me feel strangely good. My Mum gave me my first book on sex and sexual health when I was 8, but by that time I’d already heard years’ worth of playground rumours about “sex” ranging from the improbable to the downright terrifying, and had at least one inappropriate physical encounter with another child. It’s much better for kids to be taught healthy and safe attitudes to their own sexual development – physiological and mental – than for them run off fifth-hand misconceptions they pick up from equally clueless kids.
I’m not saying we should be teaching five-year-olds about reverse cowgirl. I’m saying it’s never too early to teach kids messages like, “If she’s not having fun you have to stop.” I’m saying most kids have some awareness that sex and sexuality exist, even if they don’t fully understand what those things are. I’m saying some kids have feelings about getting physical with other people from a very early age. I was particularly precocious, but the average age people start experiencing sexual attraction is 10 years old.
And I’m saying that all of these things are why it’s crucially important to give kids the tools and information they need to contextualise and process their understanding of sex and sexuality, both in terms of their own possible sexual identities (all possible sexual identities), and of course in terms of consent and bodily autonomy.
Apart from anything else, we’ve seen proof that this makes kids safer in terms of identifying and reporting sexual abuse. The puritan myth that kids live in some magical fairyland isolated from any conception of sex or sexuality literally causes harm to children. You’re not protecting them from dangerous information, you’re depriving them of information and support they need to safely contextualise their experiences and feelings.
Teaching kids about sex is not the same thing as encouraging kids to have sex. That is literally the exact same bullshit argument that religious fundamentalists use to try to justify abstinence-only sex ed.
Studies show that teaching kids about sex actually delays their sexual debut as well as reduces the risk of STDs and unwanted pregnancy. The more you teach kids about sex, the less they actually have it.
Children live in a sexualised world. All 10-year-olds have already been exposed to sex in advertisements, on TV, and on the internet. If they don’t know what sex is, only that it’s this secret, shameful, dangerous thing they’re supposed to want and which will make them cool and successful people if they have it, they’ll explore their own sexuality in ignorant, harmful ways. This is why the USA have the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the developed world:
The only way to keep children safe is to empower them with the knowledge to make informed decisions about their own sexuality. No one was ever protected from something by keeping them ignorant of it! And no information is actually harmful if presented in age-appropriate ways – which, by the way, also doesn’t mean what antis and Americans think it means.
My school showed us a video of what was essentially softcore porn at age
10. I mean full on nudity, an erect penis, how to roll on a condom, a
man and a woman having gentle sex, and then how to remove the condom and
tie it off. It completely undid the ~mystery~ of sex and made us go
‘huh, that’s it? nah, not really interested actually.’
You can watch the sex ed video here on the Danish National TV’s web archive; it’s in Danish, but you can jump to 10:10 for the sex scene, although honestly I think you’d find the whole video fascinating even if you can’t understand what they’re saying.
just moving along like everyone else 