Vagina E-Book

Lynn Enright

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 316

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Winner of the Hearst Big Book Awards, 2019 - Women's Health's Book of the Year _____________ Shocking, brilliant, important. A fine addition to the feminist canon. - Emma Jane Unsworth For the first time I feel like I PROPERLY understand my vagina! I wish I had read this 23 years ago! - Scarlett Curtis _____________ From earliest childhood, girls are misled about their bodies, encouraged to describe their genitalia with cute and silly names rather than anatomically correct terms. In our schools and in our culture, we are coy about women while putting straight men's sexuality front and centre. Girls grow up feeling ashamed about their periods, about the appearance of their vulvas, about their own desires. They grow up without a full and honest sex education, and this lack of knowledge has serious consequences: the number of women attending cervical screening appointments in the UK is at a 20-year low while labiaplasty is the fastest growing type of plastic surgery in the world. Vagina provides girls and women with information they need about their own bodies - about the vagina, the hymen, the clitoris, the orgasm; about conditions like endometriosis and vulvodynia. It confronts taboos, such as abortion, miscarriage, infertility and masturbation. It tackles vital social issues like period poverty, female genital mutilation and the rights of transgender women. It is honest and moving as Lynn Enright shares her personal stories but this is about more than one woman - this is a book that will provoke thousands of conversations. We urgently need to talk about women's sexual and reproductive health, about our experiences of sex and pregnancy and pain and pleasure. Vagina: A Re-Education will help us do just that.

Leseprobe

VAGINA

Vagina

A RE-EDUCATION

Lynn Enright

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Allen & Unwin

Copyright © Lynn Enright, 2019

The moral right of Lynn Enright to be identified asthe author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders.The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

The extract from Dance Nation by Clare Barron(Oberon Books, 2018) which appears on p.88 is reproduced bykind permission of Oberon Books.

The extract from ‘Metaphors’, taken from Collected Poems bySylvia Plath (Faber and Faber Ltd, 2002) which appears on p.158 is reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

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Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 91163 001 2E-Book ISBN 978 1 76063 655 5

Printed and bound byCPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For my mother, Ann,and my sisters, Ailbhe and Daire

CONTENTS

Introduction

  1   A Sex Re-education

  2  The Facts (If We Can Call Them That)

  3  The Hymen, a Useless Symbol

  4  The Clitoris, and How It’s Ignored

  5  The Orgasm, and Why Everything’s Normal

  6  Appearances, and Looking in the Mirror

  7  Periods, and What Makes Them So Awful

  8  Pain, As It Applies to Women

  9  Fertility, Teaching It and Talking About It

10  Getting Pregnant, and What Comes Next

11  The Vagina and Menopause

12  Does My Vagina Define Me?

Acknowledgements

Resources

References

Introduction

I think it’s the worst thing we do to each other as women, not share the truth about our bodies and how they work.

Michelle Obama, Good Morning America,ABC News, 2018

Its very underneathness means the vagina can be overlooked. Not by the individual, of course: the pulsing of arousal, the monthly arrival of blood, the sticky discharge, the changing smells, the unarguable fact that it is the site of new life – all that means that a woman is never unaware of her vagina. But – perhaps due to its position, discreetly tucked away; or perhaps due to hundreds of years of society controlling women’s bodies; or, most likely, due to a combination of factors – there is a secrecy surrounding the vagina that afflicts women generally.

As girls we are told, sensibly of course, that it is a private place; we are urged, really, to ignore it. We call it a ‘front bottom’, a chirpy if deceitfully vague moniker, and we talk no more of it until it’s time for periods and pregnancy prevention.

There is a fear, it seems, that by presenting a girl with the facts, she will be empowered. And there is sometimes a sense, felt by girls or young women, that they should not be allowed access to that power. I remember as a twelve-year-old hearing that it would be useful to look at my own vagina with a hand mirror. The suggestion came from a representative of Tampax who had come to give a talk at school, and all through the assembly hall echoed murmurs of disgust and ridicule, girls displaying an aversion to the suggestion, signalling to each other that they were horrified at the thought of being so intimate with their own bodies. That night, though, initially compelled because I was the type of studious child who always did her homework, I took a hand mirror – the one that usually sat on the windowsill of my parents’ en suite bathroom – and I looked ‘down there’. The jolt of arousal was too much; I retreated almost immediately, throwing the mirror aside and pulling up my knickers, depriving myself.

I had been seeking out a biological understanding and, instead of that, or certainly alongside that, I had happened upon a deeply erotic experience. Rather than enjoying that undeniable and pleasurable arousal, I was scared: scared of the end of childhood; scared of the new sensation; scared of the possibility of enjoying my sexuality. To masturbate was shameful, something that boys did, not girls, and so I didn’t. Not that evening.

Of course, this is just my experience; other girls probably have different memories of the day that they were urged to look at themselves with a hand mirror. Maybe some were able to appraise their vaginas with a dispassionate and scientific eye; maybe others were able to just get on with masturbating, unperturbed by squeamishness, ignorance and the echoing murmurs of disgust. Each girl and woman has a personal and subjective relationship with her vagina – and her sexuality. However, what I think is common is that she exists in a society that discourages her from looking underneath too often; she exists in a society where misinformation about the vagina is rife, where women’s sexuality is discouraged and shamed.

It starts early, with the sex education that most of us receive, where there is an emphasis on men’s orgasms and male ejaculation. Obviously, when educating teenagers, preventing pregnancy is key, but I remember learning a lot about wet dreams – and wet dreams are about as useless as it gets in terms of procreation. As a young teenager, I was under the impression that boys woke up in sodden sheets each and every morning with dream bubbles featuring topless women floating above their heads. Meanwhile, girls’ orgasms or pleasure were never discussed. Basically, in a lot of sex education, the male orgasm is pretty much framed as the point of sex and vaginas are there as a sort of receptacle. And that focus on the male orgasm leads to a situation where girls – and boys – see male sexuality as more important, more dominant than female sexuality.

This misinformation isn’t just about attitudes or the way we talk to young people about sex, it’s actually right there in the biology too; it’s present in the ‘facts’ we tell people about sex. Close your eyes and conjure up a vagina. Imagine the vagina as represented in one of those anatomical diagrams you once saw in a science or sex ed book. Have you done it? Yes, well that’s not what a vagina looks like. Those drawings are inaccurate. They misinform us. They tell us that the labia are symmetrical, when they very rarely are; they depict the vagina – the inner passage – as a sort of open tube (just waiting for a penis perhaps?) when actually the walls touch each other; they illustrate the clitoris as a button without including the crucial clitoral shaft and crura (‘legs’) that extend beyond the visible nub. They have it wrong.

And that’s not where the misinformation ends. Rarely seen in diagrams, but often discussed in relation to young women’s vaginas, is the hymen. There is a reason it is not included in diagrams: the hymen – that supposed cling film-like covering that is broken when a girl or woman has sex for the first time – doesn’t actually exist in the way we have been told it does. The notion of the hymen isn’t erroneous, but it is usually a crescent or ring consisting of folds of membrane that sits slightly inside the vagina. What it looks like and how thick it is differs greatly from woman to woman, vagina to vagina; and for a small minority, it could make intercourse painful or impossible. Crucially, however, it does not – contrary to common belief – act as a kind of seal and it is not ‘broken’. Those descriptions of the hymen are nothing more than a misogynistic desire to control young women’s sexuality by making their virginity a sort of countable, testable commodity.

So, it’s clear that in biology lessons, in sex education classes and in the media, girls are repeatedly handed down inaccurate information. Twenty years on from my own adolescence, girls and young women are still being served up lies about their own bodies, fallacies that serve to obfuscate their understanding of their own vaginas. And this misinformation has consequences.

When information is obscured, harmful myths fill the gaps in knowledge and stigma flourishes. And stigma leads to a situation where a whole lot of girls and women feel bad about their vaginas. Stigma leads to women seeking labiaplasty – the fastest-growing type of cosmetic surgery in the world – to ‘correct’ asymmetrical labia even though it’s perfectly normal to have asymmetrical labia. Stigma leads to women forgoing orgasms because they have never been encouraged to seek them out. Stigma leads to women experiencing health problems because they’re too embarrassed to talk to a doctor or healthcare professional. Stigma leads to doctors failing to diagnose and treat endometriosis. Stigma leads to the president of the United States boasting about grabbing women by the pussy before cutting funding for family planning clinics and abortion providers. Stigma leads to the vagina – and people with a vagina – being undervalued.

We have to smash that stigma. We have to grab that hand mirror and take a long, hard look at what’s in our knickers. You can take that literally or metaphorically – it’s really up to you. But, either way, what’s imperative, what can’t be ignored, is the fact that we need to educate, and re-educate, ourselves about our vaginas.

I am cisgender, meaning that my gender identity corresponds with the assumed gender assigned to me at birth. I am a non-disabled neurotypical white woman from Ireland, educated in a Catholic school, currently in a monogamous long-term relationship with a cisgender man. All of that obviously influences how I relate to my own vagina but, throughout the research for this book, I have spoken to a variety of women and people with vaginas, as well as scientists, doctors and experts so that I can represent a broad experience, as well as my own story. I know, however, that I will not be able to tell everyone’s story. It is my sincere hope, though, that this book will make it easier for all of us to share our stories. I want to tell my story and I want for you to be able to tell your story.

I know that not everyone who has a vagina is a woman. I know that there are women who do not have a vagina. I recognize that we are living in a time when there is, especially among young people, an increased reluctance to see sexuality and gender as fixed and binary. I think that will only be a good thing for vaginas and people who have them. I know that we are coming up with words and terms to reflect this changing outlook but, as I write this, in late 2018, we are limited. This book generally refers to cisgender girls and women when it says girls and women, largely because I am constrained by the currently available data and research. Similarly, I do not have the data required to consistently include the experiences of trans men and non-binary people in discussions about menstruation, orgasm and pregnancy. I will discuss the trans and intersex experience in Chapter 12 (page 195).

And a quick note on the use of the term ‘queer’. Once derogatory, queer has been reclaimed and become standard, especially among young people who don’t identify with traditional categories around gender identity and sexual orientation. I use queer when the interviewee or subject identifies as queer. Elsewhere, I use lesbian, gay, bi or LGBTQ+.

In their highly influential 1973 pamphlet ‘Witches, Midwives, and Nurses’, the feminist authors Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English pointed out that many of the tens of thousands of women who were killed in the witch trials in Europe, the UK and the US in the Middle Ages were midwives.1

The medical profession, which was then completely male-dominated (things weren’t much better when Ehrenreich and English were writing in the early 1970s), worked alongside the church to target women they saw as competition.

During the three centuries when witch-hunting was commonplace, Ehrenreich and English noted that:

First, witches are accused of every conceivable sexual crime against men. Quite simply, they are ‘accused’ of female sexuality. Second, they are accused of being organized. Third, they are accused of having magical powers affecting health – of harming, but also of healing. They were often charged specifically with possessing medical and obstetrical skills.

Female healers were accused of providing contraception and abortion; they threatened to imperil and disrupt patriarchal systems of church and medicine – and, for that, they were killed. To know too much about female sexual health has always been seen as an upset to a society that centres the straight male experience.

When Ehrenreich and English wrote the pamphlet, the US was changing – Roe vs Wade, the landmark supreme court ruling that legalized abortion in the US, occurred in the same year as publication. When the pair wrote a new introduction to the treatise in 2010, they reflected on the progress that had been made in the intervening forty years. They spoke about how the urgency to educate women about the menstrual cycle, pregnancy and menopause had perhaps passed, remarking that: ‘Today of course, anyone can learn about these things in high school courses, by reading women’s magazines, or just by googling.’2

Well, yes and no. Ehrenreich and English’s new 2010 introduction was written when Barack Obama was president. They didn’t know Donald Trump was coming – and with him, threats to abortion rights and the potential undermining of sex education.

And even now, as we approach 2020, googling might result in being served up lies about women’s health and sexuality: the Internet might show you Photoshopped images of vulvas; it might suggest that your menstrual cycle is linked to the moon; it might try to sell you a vaginal jade egg. (In fact, it will do all of these things.) For clear and unbiased information about women’s health, you can’t just google.

In the Middle Ages, it was transgressive and mortally dangerous to educate women about their bodies. During the Victorian era, gynaecology became a medical specialization, with male doctors medicalizing women’s sexuality, performing unnecessary, sometimes pernicious operations. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the health system remained wretchedly misogynistic, neglecting the safety, sexuality and autonomy of women. And in the late 2010s, we still have more to do: more to learn, more to teach, more to question. We must build on the hard-won gains made by pioneering women like Ehrenreich and English. We must acknowledge the progress that has been made while addressing new challenges posed by the Internet; by tech companies seeking to profit from our bodies; by the rise of the far right.

In this book, I will interrogate the sex education that young people receive. I will address the taboos that continue to silence women and diminish their experiences – taboos around menstruation, female masturbation, miscarriage, menopause and more. I will seek out the information that has not been clear enough: the details of the hymen, the clitoris, the orgasm and the vagina.

Feminism has always, and must always, involve educating women about their own bodies.

CHAPTER ONE

A Sex Re-education

Rather than teaching young girls about pleasure, we teach them fear and self-hatred. And rather than teaching young boys about responsibility, we teach them suspicion and slut-shaming.

Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things:Sex, lies and revolution

I grew up in a home that was relaxed about nudity, a home that was safe and open, with parents who encouraged questioning and learning. But still, we didn’t speak of vulvas and vaginas – we spoke of front bottoms. When it came to our own genitalia, we were coy. We were taught to be coy.

My body, throughout childhood and into puberty, was a series of mysteries – some thrilling, some traumatic. I had been told about periods so when blood appeared in my swimsuit one summer at the end of childhood, I knew what it was. But when I saw a white discharge in my pants, I was worried that I was dirty, or sick, or abnormal. No one had ever told me that would happen.

When pubic hair grew, I was prepared, proud even. But when I felt aroused and sensed my clitoris becoming fuller, I was bewildered. I didn’t know I had a clitoris – or, more accurately, I didn’t know the name for it – until I was well into my teens. My awareness of my body, of my genitalia and my sexual and reproductive organs, was patchy.

I was a child before people had the Internet in their homes. When I was curious or confused, I resorted to looking things up in the big dictionary and the set of dusty encyclopaedias that were kept on a bottom shelf in my parents’ bedroom. There was a somewhat informative sex education book in the local library that I never had the courage to officially borrow – but would consult regularly.

By the time my mother sat me down for a sex education talk when I was ten or eleven, I was cognizant of the basics. I knew what menstruation was. I knew how babies were made. I had heard of wet dreams, which fascinated me, even though I had been told they did not apply to me.

I knew little about the intricacies of my own anatomy and almost nothing of the pleasures of which my body was capable. The twenty-minute discussion with my kind but slightly embarrassed mother did not illuminate me in that regard. I implicitly understood that the education pertaining to my own pleasure was more private, an education to be pursued alone.

In the final year of primary school, it was announced that a nurse would be visiting our class for a day. We would have no regular lessons – no long division, no history; there would be no reading aloud, no poems, no learning about mountain ranges. On this allocated day, the nurse would come and tell us about our bodies instead. Attending school on this day was at the discretion of our parents so, if they decided the content of this unusual lesson was unsavoury or unsuitable, we could stay at home and watch daytime TV or catch up on our homework. The nurse’s impending arrival was thrilling to me – a break from the monotony of lessons was always welcome and the prospect of talking about sex excited me – but I had a friend who felt differently. She was nervous, embarrassed; she didn’t want to sit among her classmates and talk about genitalia and menstruation. She begged her mother to excuse her from the lesson but her mother refused: not, I don’t think, because she was especially keen for her daughter to receive a good sex education, but just because of the extra trouble that having a child at home for the day would entail.

On the appointed day, the nurse arrived. My nervous friend coped adequately and all of us girls, even the usually jittery and badly behaved, listened raptly. It felt grown-up, an instruction in adulthood.

It has been more than two decades since that day and I have one particularly clear memory from it. I remember the nurse warning us against the use of tampons – it was healthier, she said, for blood to exit the body; it was wrong, she told us, to capture it inside of ourselves. This image, this propaganda, stayed with me. I even believed it for a while. The rest of the day offered nothing that I hadn’t already gleaned from the book in the library, from discussions with my friends or from my mother.

And that was that – we were deemed ready for secondary school. We were ready to turn twelve. We were ready for bras and sanitary towels. That was our sex education: a single day with a woman who planted mistruths among the facts.

It is more than twenty years since I sat in that classroom getting a sex education, and plenty has changed in those years. The Internet is now freely available – in homes and on children’s phones – and, with the Internet, has come an abundance of pornography. It is also clear to me that little girls growing up today are more likely to know the correct anatomical names for their own body parts. When I visited a friend recently, I told her what I was working on: a book about the vagina. Her curly-haired three-year-old daughter overheard me and ran away, into her room, emerging a minute or so later with a book almost as big as she was. She approached me and opened it, pointing to a page that featured an accurate anatomical diagram of the female genitals. This little girl knew the terms for her own anatomy: she knew about vulvas and vaginas. She felt proud of this knowledge – she wanted to share it with me.

My friend explained that she taught her daughter the correct terms – vulva and vagina – so that she is safer, so that she can tell her parents if she is ever touched there, or if she is ever in pain there. This little girl understands that her vulva is a private place, that it is off limits to others – but the fact that it is private does not mean that it has to remain unknown or private to herself.

And yet, not as much has changed as I had presumed. I had assumed that sex education must have advanced; I had thought that in the era of the smartphone and sexting and Internet porn, the information we give our children about their bodies and their health and their sexuality would be clearer and more sophisticated. I had thought that the sex education I received in Ireland – a place where the education system was still tethered to the Catholic Church – was an anomaly. I had thought that the UK would have a liberal and sensible approach to sex education that ensured every child and teenager would feel prepared for puberty and knowledgeable about their own body. I was, it turns out, wrong.

In 2017, the children’s charity Plan found that one in four girls in the UK felt unprepared for the start of their periods and one in seven did not know what was happening when they began bleeding.1

In 2012, the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) carried out a series of inspections relating to the standard of sex education in English schools – the resulting report was titled ‘Not yet good enough’.2 The report stated that:

Sex and relationships education required improvement in over a third of schools. In primary schools this was because too much emphasis was placed on friendships and relationships, leaving pupils ill-prepared for physical and emotional changes during puberty, which many begin to experience before they reach secondary school. In secondary schools it was because too much emphasis was placed on ‘the mechanics’ of reproduction and too little on relationships, sexuality, the influence of pornography on students’ understanding of healthy sexual relationships, dealing with emotions and staying safe.

When I speak to Lucy Emmerson, director of the UK’s Sex Education Forum, a group that works to achieve good relationships and sex education (RSE) for British children and teenagers, she confirms that the standard is patchy: ‘I think you would find some examples of schools, where they’re teaching RSE in a sex positive way, where they have good lessons on anatomy, where they are talking about pleasure, female as much as male,’ she says. But those classrooms are rare. Pushed to guess at the proportion of schools providing an excellent standard of sex education, she hesitates: ‘One in ten or one in twenty.’

A new RSE curriculum will be made compulsory in UK schools in September 2020 but, presently, the standard of sex education is random – a lottery. Academies – and schools run by charitable trusts – can, at the time of writing, opt out of teaching sex education completely.

A child who receives a comprehensive and compassionate education about sex and relationships is likely to have done so because of the work and vision of one individual – a teacher, a head teacher, a health worker or someone working in the local council – rather than a joined-up set of countrywide policies. ‘It’s really going to be a teacher who’s made this a specialism, who is confident, who has built up resources for teaching about it, who has looked out for training of their own initiative. It’s not going to be a routine thing,’ says Lucy Emmerson.

Some children might be lucky; they might have a teacher who believes it’s important for them to learn about menstruation, about what a healthy vulva looks like, about masturbation and pleasure. Others might have a teacher who feels awkward or unclear or embarrassed, a teacher who never uses the word ‘vagina’, who never says ‘vulva’ or ‘clitoris’. ‘There are teachers who are unable to utter those words, because they have possibly, in their adult life, never spoken those words out loud,’ points out Emmerson. ‘Because they got rubbish sex education, they don’t use those words in their own personal relationships.’

In Ireland, where I grew up, the Catholic Church is deemed responsible for the dire state of sex education in schools. In Britain, where I live now, there is a sense that some essential Britishness might be to blame. ‘We’re British; we’re not good at talking about sex’ is a received outlook, and one that contributes to depriving children of information pertaining to their health and sexuality. The fact that RSE is set to become compulsory in British schools is a hugely important shift – and there are some vital changes being made to the curriculum guidelines to better reflect the reality of life for children and teenagers today. The recommendations that children and teenagers are taught about consent – what it is and what it is not – is significant, as is the increased focus on non-heterosexual relationships and sex.

For too long, sex education in the UK (like in most of the rest of the world) has ignored LGBTQ+ sexuality. With so much of the focus on explaining – and preventing – pregnancy, the ‘when a man and a woman love each other…’ line has been the most consistent. This is set to change with schools being recommended to include ‘LGBT-specific content’. This move is especially important given the highly controversial Section 28 clause, introduced as part of the Local Government Act in 1988,3 which prohibited local authorities and schools from ‘promoting’ homosexuality. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher told the Conservative party conference: ‘Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life. Yes, cheated.’4 The next year, teachers were banned from talking about same-sex relationships in schools.

Section 28 was repealed in 2000 in Scotland; it took three more years before the Labour government repealed it in the rest of the UK. In the intervening years, some teachers had flouted the rules and taught their students about LGBTQ+ relationships and sex. Many others, however, had given in to the bigotry, with LGBTQ+ children, or those growing up in LGBTQ+ households, feeling alienated and ashamed and confused. Section 28 undoubtedly hampered the progress of gay and trans rights in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s and denied a generation of children access to a compassionate sex education, and so the recommendations that children are given information about LGBTQ+ relationships in all schools after 2020 is an important marker of change and hope.

And yet I don’t find myself overly impressed – because, to be frank, the new guidelines are woefully overdue. And they hardly feel radical. They are catching up with a reality that children and young people live every day, rather than presenting a future where teachers and adults truly lead discussions. There is also a worrying vagueness about the training that will be provided to teachers and a lack of clarity on how it will be funded.

And, tellingly, there is a coyness still present. In some respects, the new guidelines are admirable in their ambition – it is vital that we educate our young people about consent, for example – but the advice on how basic facts about bodies and genitals should be taught still feels hazy. In the guidelines I’ve seen (and it’s possible they will change before the 2020 deadline), there isn’t clear instruction on whether teachers should use anatomically correct terms – so whether a young child hears words like vulva, vagina and clitoris is probably still going to depend on individual teachers and their individual histories and outlooks.

Even after 2020, parents will be able to withdraw their children from sex education in British schools; and I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to presume that the parents who opt their kids out of sex education at school are also the parents who will be too embarrassed or disapproving to face the subject head-on at home. That means that after the curriculum has been overhauled, there will still be children attending British schools who will remain ignorant of the correct names for their own genitalia. Children who will be unclear about how sexually transmitted infections are contracted. Children who will be more vulnerable to abuse.

*

Beyond the UK and Ireland, sex education remains patchy and inconsistent, bound up in fears about promiscuity, particularly female or non-heterosexual promiscuity. The South Korean Ministry of Education released sex education guidelines in 2015 that appeared to blame sexual violence on women not going Dutch on dates, suggesting ‘women do not pay dating expenses and men want something in return’.5 Those guidelines have since been revised but gender inequality is still implicit in the country’s sex education curriculum, with feminist campaigners working hard to address the problem.

The basics of sex remain a mystery to too many Koreans, even in adulthood, with sex educators in the country pointing out that rudimentary information – like how to put on a condom or how to prevent a pregnancy – is not properly understood by many.6

In the United States, meanwhile, only thirteen states actually require that sex education be medically accurate, a bar that seems horrifyingly – almost comically – low. Like in the UK, sex education is a political football in the US and, since Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, Republicans have generally advocated for sex education that focuses on abstaining from sex until marriage, an approach that leaves teenagers without basic information such as how to use a condom, while enforcing tired and harmful gender stereotypes like female passivity and male sexual aggression.

Under Barack Obama, the Department of Health and Human Services funded comprehensive sex education, which included lessons on contraception, disease prevention, healthy relationships and abstinence. Funding for the abstinence-only programmes that proliferated under the George W. Bush administration was cut, and teenage pregnancies declined.7

Since Donald Trump was elected president, however, there have been indications that funding for abstinence-only sex education will be significantly increased.8 The move to promote and fund abstinence-only sex ed might seem at odds with Trump’s own sex life – the boasting about pussy-grabbing; the alleged affair with a porn actress – but his vice president Mike Pence is a long-time advocate for abstinence-based sex ed. As far back as 2002, Pence was claiming that condoms offer ‘very, very poor protection against sexually transmitted diseases’ – a statement that was fake news before the term fake news had even been invented.9

In her 2016 book, Girls & Sex, the American journalist Peggy Orenstein addressed the issue of sex education in the US. In a chapter titled ‘What If We Told Them The Truth?’, she examined the half-truths and flat-out lies teenagers are told in US schools (that latex condoms cause cancer; that the pill is only 20 per cent effective), noting that: ‘All together, the US federal government has spent $1.7 billion plus on abstinence-only programs since 1982; that money might as well have been set on fire.’10

Orenstein then turned her attention to the Netherlands, a country that has become an international leader in sex education. The Dutch, Orenstein says, ‘seem to have it all figured out’ – certainly, their teen pregnancy rate is eight times less than that of the US. The UK compares unfavourably to the Dutch too, with roughly five times as many teenage pregnancies.11 And, beyond the black-and-white of statistics, the Dutch appear to have created a sex education that has love and pleasure and equality at its core: in the Netherlands, sex education is sex-positive.

Sex education is mandatory in Dutch schools, with one-third using resources produced by Rutgers, a non-governmental organization that promotes sexual and reproductive health and rights. (Some councils in England have recently started to use Rutgers materials in schools, too.) In 2018, Ton Coenen, the executive director of Rutgers, outlined the Dutch approach in the British Medical Journal:

In several countries, sexuality education primarily focuses on the negative side: how to avoid an unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. In the Netherlands we have evolved a broader approach. How do you engage in a relationship? What is the pleasure in sex?12

When I was growing up, the notion of a teacher or an educator explaining that sex was supposed to be pleasurable would have been laughable. It was, I think, sort of assumed that all teenagers desired sex – that was the message I got from TV and films and books, and from the disapproving tone in grown-ups’ voices – but nobody was going to help us figure out how to derive pleasure from sex.

The clitoris was never mentioned at school – when I first heard the word, I presumed that it was a slang term as I had never seen it printed in any textbook. For boys, however, it was different; their pleasure was integral to conception and so the male orgasm got a starring role in any discussion of sex. Girls, meanwhile, were tasked with managing its fallout: worrying about pregnancy and how to prevent it.

Lucy Emmerson calls this type of sex education the ‘periods, pills and pregnancy’ approach. Nobody wins, she says: ‘It leaves boys out of the conversation, which is damaging, and it’s burdensome to girls.’ Good sex education should, she says, challenge gender stereotypes; gender roles and gender inequality should be included in conversations about sex, the body and relationships. And those conversations should begin early. In fact, if we are having honest discussions about the body and anatomy early, it’s much more likely that children will feel empowered to ask questions about more complicated notions like gender and consent. That’s what good sex education should be: a process that facilitates learning and discussion.

In the Netherlands, sex education at school starts when children are four. This tender age is often seized upon as proof of iniquity by critics, their cheeks reddening: ‘Learning about sex at four, how obscene!’ But, obviously, four-year-olds are not learning how to put on a condom; they are not learning what sexting is; they are not even learning what sex is. They are learning about aspects of sex and relationships that are appropriate to their age: about the different kinds of relationships – friendships, teacher–pupil, family, romantic. They are learning about their bodies and how to keep them safe.

There are people who will be appalled by a four-year-old knowing the correct words for her anatomy; there are people who will baulk at a young child saying ‘vulva’ and ‘vagina’ rather than ‘front bottom’ or ‘girly bits’ or ‘Minnie’ or ‘Pookie’, or whatever.

There are adults who have a problem with the word ‘vagina’: a 2015 UK study found that two-thirds of women are embarrassed about saying the word ‘vagina’.13 There are adults who still think that the word ‘vagina’ is rude, somehow; inappropriate, vulgar, nasty. Advertisements for sanitary towels and tampons don’t use the words vagina and vulva, relying on euphemisms like ‘V-zone’ and ‘intimate area’ instead. When so many of us are uncomfortable with the word ‘vagina’, perhaps it’s unsurprising that we tend to discourage young children from using the correct terms. But when parents and educators are open and honest about bodies and what they are capable of, they establish a framework that allows for more complicated, more nuanced discussion to take place, too.

When people praise the Netherlands’ sex education provision, much is made of the fact that its teen pregnancy rates are so low. The rates are impressive and they make a neat point: being honest about sex with children and teenagers does not lead to increased sexual activity, or increased risky sexual activity, despite what critics of sex education might say. Actually, the opposite might be true: a 2017 survey found that Dutch teenagers were having sex for the first time later (aged 18.6) than they were in 2012 (17.1).14

Equally striking is how the Dutch model of sex education – with its focus on love and enjoyment and respect – leads to sex that is more pleasurable and enjoyable for teenage girls. A 2005 study found that four out of five Dutch young people described their first sexual experiences as well-timed, within their control and fun.15