Hey guys!  One of my favorite YouTubers, Emma Blackery, made a video called "What They Don't Teach About Sex" a few months ago that I just got around to watching. (I'll put the video at the top.) I left a comment on the video just complaining about the American school system and the way they teach us about sex, but I'm going to elaborate a bit more in this rant.

(I'm going to try and touch on the things Emma talked about in her video, so if you're wondering where I'm getting everything, watch the video!)

One of the things touched on in the video was sexual orientation.  Personally, I'm straight.  In school, we never even talked about people's sexual orientation.  When we learned about sex, it was always between a man and a woman.  They basically just assumed that everyone was straight and was very heteronormative.  The closest my school got was establishing a Gay-Straight Alliance my senior year (which was actually very awesome!  I went to a meeting and it was very informative.  It's also only the third GSA to be started in Arkansas.), but that was it.  I learned about sexualities from Tumblr.  Tumblr taught me there was more than LGBT.  There are so many on such a broad spectrum, but we never touched on it in school.

In the video, Emma talks about learning about the reproductive organs in her biology class.  We talked about sex in my health class, and we didn't even look at the organs.  All we really talked about was that sex could lead to pregnancy and STDs.  Honestly, most of our health class was talking about drugs and why we shouldn't do them, and then at the end they taught us CPR and the Heimlich.  The big project, though, was bringing home a "baby".  It wasn't a real baby, thank God.  It was sort of a baby doll, but it could cry.  When it cried, you had to get it to stop by either feeding it, rocking it, or changing its diaper.  It had a thing in its back that let the teacher keep track of how long the baby cried.  It was the worst project ever.  My sister actually asked if she had to do it since she doesn't even want kids, but they made her.

Sex education at my school began in eight grade.  We had a class called Career Orientation, where we basically researched careers to figure out what we wanted to do (researched stuff like salaries, where to go to college, etc).  That part of the class was informative (although, in eight grade I wanted to be a pediatrician, but now I'm majoring in social studies, so I don't know how much it helped), but every Friday, my class would go to the other CO classroom (which was bigger), and we would have a guest speaker from "Choosing to Excel."  This group had multiple people who would come and tell middle schoolers, basically, how to excel.  While a few speakers were actually helpful (Ex: one guy came and told us about banks, money, and how to write a check; another guy came and talked to us about railroads and why we shouldn't go near them), most of them told us the same thing: DON'T HAVE SEX.  They didn't say, "Okay, if you have sex, here's what you should do..." They said, "Don't have sex because I did and my life sucked." Like, I'm sorry that your life sucked after you had unprotected sex, but instead of preaching abstinence, maybe you could tell us about way to have protected sex to prevent against pregnancies and STDs.  It was just like in Mean Girls when the health teacher said, "Don't have sex because you will get pregnant.  And die."

I saw a few people in the comments who either lived in Canada or went to a private school and got a great sex education.

I just wish the American public school system would get their act together and instead of preaching abstinence, tell us ways to have protected sex, and instead of just assuming everyone is straight, teach everyone about different sexualities.  I'm currently in college, so I no longer have to deal with this.

(And just a disclaimer: My state - Arkansas - has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation, so this might have been their way to lower it, but it sucks.  That was eighth grade, and now as a freshman in college, I'm pretty sure we still have the highest rate, so it's obviously not working.)