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The Rabbit Hole: Sex Education
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posted Saturday, 12 March 2005
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| With the possible exceptions of
evolution and home economics, there are few subjects in
the world’s schools that are as contentious as , or are as
heavily debated, sex education, and China is no
exception though, as usually, things in China are
slightly different form the rest of the world. When discussing the teaching of sex in school, and how best to go about it, people often ask how young is too young? How much information is too much? And, if you live in Chiba, where can I get some of what she’s getting on page 42 of this buru-sera magazine? And like many things in life, the simple answer to all of these questions is that there is no right answer. There are however a lot of wrong answers, and most of them can be found in high schools the world over. How much Information? Though some countries, most notably Britain, prefer the ‘catch ‘m young’ approach to sex education, and offer detailed instructions to pre pubescent children in the vain hope that they will use what they have been taught to make an educated decision, instead of using their new found knowledge to fill the three and a half minutes between the end of Pokemon and the beginning of Sailor Moon, and others, including America, prefer to stick their head in the sand and pretend that, if they say NO often enough, teenagers will actually listen to them, China prefers to follow its own route and utilizes the ‘what they don’t know won’t raise out population’ system for teaching sex education classes Under China’s system, teenagers are not told about sex, conception, or contraception on the understanding that there is little chance of them finding out about it from anywhere else. OK, so maybe this is an exaggeration; Chinese teenagers are actually told quite a bit about sex in schools. They are told • That it is a filthy foreign habit • That Chinese people don’t do it • That Japanese people do it for money in Thailand • That they shouldn’t do it with Japanese people (I was once given this very same instruction while in a school in China, and I’m sure that if you look up the words confused and irony in a dictionary, you will find a picture of me standing in a school office, wondering vaguely how many options this left me with). They are however not told • What it is that they are not supposed to do • How they are not supposed to do • That it can cause pregnancy and Herpes • That it can be a fun and profitable enterprise for otherwise unskilled women who find themselves in the region of a bar in Thailand • That, unless they are wearing a school uniform, most people in Japan wouldn’t want to do it with them anyway What is the right age? All joking aside, most sex education teachers in China tend to follow the ancient tradition of waiting until the last possible moment to mention something important, thus most Chinese students don’t find out about sex until some time after their American counterparts have either discovered what morning sickness is, or that Herpes is not the given name of the Germany national basketball coach. Unlike most countries, which tend to teach sex education to children during the early years of puberty (Or in the case of Britain, during the early years of pre school), sex education classes in China largely take place in college, and are given to students who are 18 years of age or older, which is considered to about three years after the last possible moment in Europe, and about five years after it in Japan. It might seem slightly odd to tell students about sex long after the age that people in most other countries have figured things out for themselves but, strangely enough, this principle actually seems to work in China because, while every boy in my high school was telling his first girlfriend that he’s had sex with every other girl in school, and every girl in school was telling her fifth boyfriend that she hadn’t had sex with anybody, especially not his elder brother or the new math teacher gives higher grades to girls who bring in panties for him to sniff, students in China still consider it a form of punishment to be made to sit in boy-girl pairs. Now, I remember my high school years well. I remember exactly how much sex I was having before the age of 18, and I remember knowing what went where long before they taught me in school, which was significantly before I reached 18. I also remember that my school’s uniform included pert navy blue blazers, short skirts, and a funny necktie thing whose English name I can’t quite grasp, all of which might have a lot to do with the amount of sex that was coming into my high school, and the amount of it that was brought in by men who were over 18 years of age. This is however distinctly different from the way that it is in China. Chinese sex education works on 4 basic principles • All information comes from the party • Independent thought does not happen • If in doubt, blame America • Herpes comes from Japan There is also a hidden fifth principle that says that whatever we don’t tell them, they’re unlikely to find out on their own, because Chinese students often lack that creative spark that pushes their foreign counterparts to experiment a bit. Their crippling burden of homework also means that they often lack the time as well. This fifth principle is helped a along a great deal by the restricted nature of information in China (See the first principle), which conveniently serves to hamper any efforts that students might make to find out about sex on their own, by cutting down on their possible sources of information. The fifth principle is further helped by the fourth principle, which is commonly used to tell people that, anybody who appears to be Chinese that they might see having sex in a magazine or on a pornographic video, is actually Japanese (with their second head and fangs photoshopped out). Sources of information Due to the nature of their societies, many foreigners are more far more fortunate when it comes to learning about sex than their Chinese counterparts, and most have multiple sources of information to turn to which remain unavailable in China because, in the same was that China ‘Didn’t have SARS’ in February 2003 and ‘didn’t have rural unrest’ in 2004, China ‘doesn’t have pornography’ and Chinese people 'don’t think about sex’. At least that’s what the government wants people to believe. Learning about sex is easy if you live in Japan where you can simply pick up mom’s pornographic Manga, taking care to avoid her 少年愛 (Shounenai) books, unless you're into special interest reading, you can also wade through pop’s ブルセラ(buru-sera) collection and, in the absence of either of these useful supplies of sexually ‘educational’ material, you can always travel to Chiba on Japan Rail to see what they’re selling in vending machines these days. If you have the dubious pleasure of being British (I send my comiserations), your best bet is to wait until the government tells you, but if you can’t wait until you're 10; your best bet is to swing your satellite dish towards Europe, where graphic porn is considered a cultural asset, or to visit Downing street and see what the paper boy is brining Euan Blair to read with his morning cocoa. Americans are far more fortunate than most when it comes to finding out about sex, as porn appears to be a mandatory part of most cable packages, If your parents are members of the Republican part, and have installed a nanny filter on your computer that stops you seeing the billion and one pornographic websites run by your fellow Americans, you can always can tootle off to your local library, where a court victory by freedom of speech activists means that you can now download hard core bestiality videos in the computer section of the children’s library. However, if hard core pornography isn’t your thing, just take your library card with and checkout former president Clinton’s biography for a few tips. If you live in France, Germany, or the Netherlands, the chances are that you will know about sex long before you are old enough to read this article anyway, and if you come from the latter, the chances are that you will known a few things that would make even the 猥本(waihon) Barons of Chiba blush. For everybody else, there are of course our ever reliable friends, the internet and the dodgy hair dresser’s shop with the pink light in the window. Experimentation For those bereft of the usual sources of information, and lacking either the resource or the initiative to search for more obscure tomes, there usually remains the old fashioned method of trial and error experimentation. Nominally, trial and error mating can be described as being remarkably similar to trying to assembling a flat pack bookcase when the instruction are written in a foreign language, except that if you push tab A into slot B by mistake, you become a felon in several countries. Trial and error mating should also be considered a mildly interesting activity that can be used to fill otherwise dull commercial breaks during televised baseball games. Sadly though, not only have the Chinese political and education systems left many in China lacking in the creative flair necessary to experiment in sex, but have also stifled the one thing guaranteed to bring it about; Student dating. Student Dating While student dating is considered to be acceptable in the west, just so long as it isn’t done on a homework night, many schools and colleges in China forbid the practice, declaring it to be a distraction from studying (Conversely, in the west, many in students consider studying to be a distraction from having sex). And while interfering with students personal lives is largely frowned upon outside of China, people in China don’t get personal lives unless the government says so, and are less concerned when their schools try to interfere with it (In most other countries, interfering in teenagers personal lives is the preserve of parents, the police, and people whose houses overlook makeout areas). A few foreigners have been known to voice that, by forbidding teenage dating, students are not able to properly follow an adequate path of self discovery and development, and that the years in between leaving college and being pressured into marriage by their parents are often insufficient for them to find out what kind of partner they actually want, leading to unhappy marriages, poor family cohesion, and a booming trade in hair dressers. Ironically, despite the occasionally despotic educational regime that I grew up in, student dating was permitted in my high school, though writing with your left hand was not. Then again, I have had rather a strange and confusing life, which has probably warped me in many curious ways, one of which was probably to infuse me with the desire to come to China. Condoms While condoms do exist in China, and the government is perfectly happy for people to know about them, a certain element of confusion still exists about this marginally controversial contraceptive, not least of all because most condom packets sold in China seem to have pictures of white people on them. While one hypothesis as to why packets of Chinese brand condoms, sold in China, have pictures of white people on them is that it is to further the myth that sex is filthy foreign import brought in from America, along with Britney Spears and chewing gum, another hypothesis is that all of the Chinese models who were asked to pose for the pictures were too embarrassed to have their picture put on a condom packet, though the most convincing hypothesis still remains, that it was cheaper for the package designers to photoshop in a picture taken from a pirated American porn movie than it was to pay a Chinese woman to pose in a tight Another item of confusion in China is that many condom packets have the word ‘condom’ written on them in English but not in Chinese, thus prompting many to look up the word in their ever present dictionaries. Unfortunately, as we all know, English-Chinese dictionaries published in China are, for want of a less insulting word, ‘inaccurate’. Of course, the exact definition that a dictionary owner will end up with will depend on which counterfeited English-Chinese dictionary they are using. For example, the counterfeit of one popular dictionary provides this explanation. Condom: Vultur gryphus (Andes) or Gymnogyps californianus, (California). A flighted bird from the raptor family with a bare head and neck, and dull black plumage marked with white flecks, and having a wingspan of approximately three meters While the counterfeit of another popular English-Chinese dictionary throws up this Condom: A ground beef patty served in a savory bun. Popular in America. However, if the particular Chinese person happens to have an electronic dictionary counterfeited during the life of the Bush administrations, they might just see this. [Condom] [Error] Word not found in dictionary [Error] Word not found in English language [Error] Word does not exist [Loading Program] Abstinence only ………………….. [Loading Complete] [Initiating Uplink] Linking to Skynet defense network [Uplink established] [Initiating GPS Link] Uploading GPS co-ordinates … [Upload Complete] [Termination Cycle Beginning] ………………………. [Initiating Targeting] …………………………………… [Target Acquired] [Satellite Laser primed] [Fire] Sex Education Policies at Work, or Not As I have already said, there are no right answers when it comes to sex education, but there are a lot of wrong answers. For your reading pleasure, here are a few of them.
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View Comments/Add a Comment (3)
1. a reader left...
Sunday, 13 March 2005 5:19 am
Most brilliant analysis ever.
And in case you're curious, Canada is like the UK, except we get our porn through cable, not Euro satellite networks.
And oh, abstinence is a crazy idea conjured up by those evil Americans, thus it's legal to f*ck when you're 14 years old.
2. a reader left...
Sunday, 3 April 2005 8:51 am
Frickin' brilliant. Although I might add that for some reason in the
States much of the sex ed still happens through friends - that is to say
that much theory had been discussed by the time I was... oh say 7?
Although this might be due to socio-economic factors - I was raised in a
relatively working class area of New England. We had lots of pregnancies
in my class by mid-high school. Rich people don't seem to have sex as
early. Or if they do, they use condoms or abort.
Laowai 19790204
3. The Angry Chinese Blogger left...
Friday, 13 May 2005 12:27 pm
Laowai 19790204
Rich people have less social skills, would you want to have sex with some guy who has the personality of a brick.