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August 10, 2015

John Oliver Takes On Schools' Insane Approach to Sex Ed

NEW YORK CITY—Comedian cum investigative reporter John Oliver may have polished his craft on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, but Oliver's series on HBO, Last Week Tonight, long ago left its progenitor in the dust when it comes to insightful takes on American politics and culture—as evidenced by this weekend's edition, where Oliver devoted more than 20 minutes to the state of sex education in America. Beginning by noting that mainstream news media are full of stories about the outrage some parents feel at the knowledge that their kids will be exposed in their public schools to pretty much anything having to do with sex, Oliver observed, "Parental anger over sex ed is as much a staple of the school year as square pizza and one kid coming back from summer vacation with a mustache he's way too proud of. ... So we tried this week to find out what sex ed looks like in America right now, but that turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer." Tracing the evolution of sex education, Oliver played excerpts from two "classic" sex ed films, Parent To Child About Sex from 1966, and Linda's Film on Menstruation from 1974, the latter featuring possibly the first screen appearance of popular character actor Jonathan Banks, perhaps best known for his long-running role on Breaking Bad. The Linda's film is particularly humorous, since it gives the incredible (though mistaken) impression, according to Oliver, that "menstrual blood is ... some sort of uterine HGH that makes you amazing at bowling." But then Oliver cut to the heart of the problem: "Teaching sex ed in schools is really important for obvious reasons: No parent wants to talk to their kids about sex, and no kid wants to talk about sex with their parents. That is why, when you're watching a movie together and there's a sex scene, everyone becomes motionless and silently begs for the merciful release of death." Oliver then noted that some kids recently wrote some insightful questitons about sex to a sex educator, one of which was whether sex education would go well for him/her. "After looking into sex ed programs this week, the answer depends quite a bit on where you live," adding, shockingly, that, "There is no required standard for sex ed in this country. In fact, only 22 states mandate that kids receive it, and only 13 require that the information presented by medically accurate—which is crazy. You wouldn't accept a history class not being historically accurate. ... We essentially have a weird patchwork system that varies wildly, and not just from state to state but from district to district and even from school to school." Oliver revealed that in Mississippi, a state with the second highest teen birth rate in the country, while teachers can talk about contraceptives, they aren't allowed to give condom demonstrations in class—leading one imaginative teacher to sidestep the prohibition by showing kids how to roll a tube sock onto his foot, then slip it into a shoe. Worse, in eight states—Utah, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina—teachers can say virtually nothing about homosexuality, "and Utah's law prohibits any instruction in the 'intricacies of intercourse,' for reasons that one state legislator [Sen. John Valentine] explained: 'Those are the things we do not want to be taught in our schools; social things that should be taught in your home.' "Wait: 'taught in your home'?" Oliver queried. "Here is an exchange that has never happened: 'How are you so good at sex?' 'I was home-schooled.' " Oliver then got into the problem of abstinence education, which he described as "a relic of the past," and reported that Congress recently increased funding for abstinence education from $50 million to $75 million per year—and that doesn't even include matching funds from the states themselves. But while Oliver noted that he could see the reasons for abstinence, "it should not be the only thing you teach. ... The fact is, according to the CDC, most Americans have more than one sexual partner in their lifetime, and the average age at which people begin having sex is around 17, so just saying 'Don't do it' is not practical." During the course of the episode, Oliver played some clips featuring abstinence "educator" Pam Stenzel of the group No Screwin' Around, who he reported "speaks to half a million young people each year," and whose loud, bombastic style overshadowed the incredibly bad advice she was giving the students in the audience. "Here is the line over which you can't step," Stenzel is shown saying. "Absolutely no ... genital ... contact ... of any kind. That's hand to genital, mouth to genital, genital to genital. Oral sex, which is mouth to genital, is sex, and if you have ever stepped over this line, you've risked disease and you need to get tested and don't you dare, don't you dare tell anyone you're a virgin!!!" "Programs like hers are so relentlessly anti-sex, you could easily come away thinking the adult world is just an endless barrage of unwanted dicks," he responded, adding, "which, incidentally, was the original slogan for Tinder." Further clips of similar "educators" compare girls who have sex early to used pieces of tape, a used toothbrush, a chewed-up gum and even a heavily worn pair of sneakers. "This idea that sex is something which devalues those who've had it, particularly women, crops up again and again," he noted, then showed a segment featuring Elizabeth Smart, the 14-year-old who was kidnapped from her home in 2002 and sexually abused for nine months, and who told her audience that one of her teachers had compared a girl who has had sex to "a stick of gum, and when you engage in sex, that's like getting chewed, and then if you do that lots of times, you become an old piece of gum, and who's going to want you after that? That's terrible, but—nobody should ever say that, but for me, I thought, 'Ohmigosh, I'm that chewed-up piece of gum!'" "Learning nothing would have been better than learning that," Oliver commented. "It's not a great reflection on her teacher that kids who were sick that day got a better education than she did." (Interestingly, most of the teens featured in these pro-abstinence films are black. No social commentary there, of course!) Toward the end of the segment, Oliver got into the question of consent to sex, what that means—and how many current sex ed courses screw up explaining it.For instance, in a video from a pro-abstinence organization called Sex Smart, even after a teen guy gets a "no" reply from a girl with whom he's asked to have sex, he's shown thinking, "Does that mean 'no' ... or 'yes'?" Also depicted are a number of Yale fraternity members marching around campus yelling, "No means yes! Yes means anal!" Finally, Oliver got to the nub of the problem. "There is no way we'd allow any other academic program to consistently fail to prepare for life after school, and human sexuality, unlike calculus, is something you actually need to know about for the rest of your life," he intoned. "And maybe you and your family live somewhere that has good sex ed, in which case, congratulations. But if you don't, this video is for you." The segment concludes with a funny but good/accurate sex ed video featuring some of today's top stars, many of them comedy actors, including Laverne Cox of Orange Is The New Black, Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally from Parks and Recreation, Jack McBrayer from 30 Rock, Kristin Schall of The Daily Show, and Kumail Nanjiani of Franklin & Bash. All in all, if you're concerned at all about sex education in this country, this week's Last Week Tonight is a must-see—and if you're not concerned about sex ed, it's even more of a must-see!

 
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