I remember screaming at my parents after school that day. “What is a clitorous and why have you never told me what it is? All the kids in my class know what it is and I look like a total idiot because I’m the only one who doesn’t know!” I was furious. In hindsight, I highly doubt all of the other kids knew. It’s always easier to laugh along with the crowd rather than stick with the outlier and admit that you don’t know either.
The jury’s still out on at what age a child should know what a clitorous is and be able to spell it, however one thing is all too clear: we don’t talk about sex enough, in the sense of meaningful discussion.
From what I remember, sex ed classes began in middle school, but the discussion in class never went beyond what happens when girls get their period and then of course there’s the charming “abstinence is the only truly effective form of birth control” message that’s rampant in our society’s messaging towards kids.
Never did health or sex ed classes get into anatomy or things like how to use a condom until much later in high school, and I can’t imagine myself being the only person who thinks this might be a little too late. Many kids were sexually active in some way before the “hard” topics hit the syllabus.
For me I know I grew up in a pretty open and liberal household. Sex wasn’t a hush-hush topic. If I ever went to my parents with questions, they didn’t dance around the topic or avoid answering. And they certainly weren’t shy about sharing the consequences of having unprotected sex. But even then, it’s not like we ever slapped a diagram down on the dining room table, and got into the nitty gritty details. [Obviously, otherwise I would have nailed that damn game of hangman.]
There’s a pattern here and I know it’s not isolated to my personal experience. Even when we talk about sex from an early age, it’s taboo. We’re focusing on the consequences, the negatives, and the ‘do you know what will happen if…’