I'm going to come back to this again... In 1989, in a dusty second floor science room at what was Top Valley Comprehensive School I sat down with my then classmates and we had our first sex-education lesson. Mr Simpson the (unfortunately) body odour riddled and forever exacerbated physics teacher had to teach us young folk about masturbation and menstruation, and ultimately where babies arrive from.
Not one picture of a stalk was had, not one allusion to fact, not one sugar coating, we had a video of (admittedly a cartoon of) a boy holding his penis and the narrator saying it's okay for this to feel good. We had a young lady (again a cartoon) fondle herself and we were again told this was normal, we were shown putting condoms onto bananas to everyone's mirth as we'd mostly all seen and even used condoms before... This is Top Valley Estate bruv.
And the last part of this talk was about periods. We were all told all girls start to have periods, it is normal, we were taught about pads, tampons and even moon cups. We were told, point blank, about how much menstrual blood a girl should expect; and I remember a fair few of my female class mates blankly stating they would say that a vastly conservative estimate.
THIS IS 1989...
Let me make that clear, nineteen eighty-nine.
So, why the hell are articles like this appearing in 2018?
I am utterly baffled and confused by this... Was my school vastly a head of its time? I don't think we were, we were a daggy comprehensive intended to turn our plasterers, car mechanics and dust-bin men. It was not an Engineering specialist (read that as "turning out car mechanics") as it is now as an rebuilt academy.
What on Earth has happened in this time?
What has the Department of Education been up to? How can I go back and check the 1989 Personal and Social education syllabus I was enrolled upon against today's? Because I remember this episode.
I remember it as it made me vaguely uncomfortable, a period was something my mother had, with her big box of giant canoe like panty liners. The pretty girls in class with me, they didn't have them, "old women" had them. It was a genuine surprise, and it is one of the few times during my secondary education where I remember being taught something.
So why are kids today not being taught the same thing? Again, why this retrograde step?
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