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‘No Means Yes’ Sex Ed Class Canceled Thanks To Student’s Epic Facebook Takedown
A teenage student in Singapore posted to Facebook about the amazingly terrible sex education her school is teaching last week. To no one’s great surprise, the sexist, rape-culture-y so called “educational” materials were created by Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs-based bastion of archaic values. I’m not sure what they think is valuable about suggesting that no just might really mean yes.
Teenager Agatha Tan, who studies at Singapore’s Hwa Chong Institution, wrote an impressive take-down of her school’s awful approach to sex ed: impressive because of its maturity, its logic, and the level of calm Tan manages to maintain throughout it despite being directly subjected to this intellectually bankrupt, super-stereotyped excuse for education. Her post is complete with photographs of the oh-so-offending materials, which imply that girls can’t be trusted to say what they mean whereas guys are always straightforward and honest in return. Young women, the pamphlet indicates, need to feel loved, while young men need to feel respected; girls are “emotional” and boys are “visual”. (Teenage girls aren’t visual creatures? Someone tell that to the Indiana Jones poster that hung on my bedroom wall all four years I was in high school.)
As Tan wrote about the four-hour session that flogged threadbare gender stereotypes and dismissed student concerns about LGBTQIA issues:
By engaging the services of groups such as FotF to teach sexuality education in school, the management hence indirectly participates in promoting rape culture, tells students that we should conform to traditional gender roles instead of being our own persons, demonstrates that the acceptance of diversity in people is unimportant, and erases minority groups in the student population.
