I remember quite vividly being led into the darkened classroom at primary school in the Seventies, where a teacher in Mary Whitehouse spectacles said that we were going to watch a film about “the facts of life”. It would be showing childbirth. The boys couldn’t believe their luck — a chance to see women’s rudey bits!
We snickered and snorted until the black and white Rediffusion TV set came to life, then we sniggered no more. On a bed was a nearly-naked woman — Mrs Shell, as I dimly recall — with a pudding-bowl haircut. Upon her chest sat two giant, misshapen water balloons. These, I realised with absolute horror, were her breasts. After that it’s a bit of a haze. I recollect some groaning, and Mrs Shell being handed a skinned rabbit, but those elephantine norks with the blackened nipples had the biggest effect on me. Any notion that getting knocked up was cool or glamorous ended that day. And this is one of the many reasons that I believe fervently in sex education.
I have a five-year-old daughter and I don’t advocate shattering childhood innocence for fun or filling ten-year-olds with dread (“They cut your front bottom with scissors, you know”). I say it because, aside from those sad, aimless teenage girls for whom a baby and a free council flat is the summit of ambition, the fact is that a great many kids truly believe that having sex is cool. They think this because it is sold to them thus by the global marketing machine that puts a come-hither Britney Spears in a school uniform, Bratz dolls in fishnet tights and shag bands in Poundworld, and sells push-up bras to girls of 9. Celebrities make pregnancy seem little more taxing than a facial, snapping back to a size 8 and never missing a night’s clubbing. An excellent way of negating this is to tell it as it is, with the gore, the ungainliness, the squelches. It’ll make them run a mile.
Actually, there I was being flip. It’s important to tell teenagers that eventually, when they are older and in a loving relationship, sex is to be highly recommended; just not yet. But I defy anyone who has watched a mortified teacher place a condom on a cucumber or gazed at a picture of a syphilitic penis to think, “Cor, can’t wait to get started on this sex lark”.
It is not the end of the world that Ed Balls has made sex education compulsory for 15-year-olds. Indeed, the idea of a biology syllabus requiring children to learn about the reproductive systems of flowers and frogs but permitting them to look away whistling when it comes to the same process in their own body is ludicrous.
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Neither should we overreact to the news that five-year-olds will be taught about “parts of the body” and “relationships”. What is wrong with that? Children may be sweet and innocent, but they are not stupid. It’s not as though they are blind to the differences in boys and girls. It’s not as if they aren’t already wondering. “Do you have to be married to have a baby?” my daughter asked a few months ago. Given her tender age, I obfuscated. “Well, sort of,” I said. She thought for a minute, and said, “Then how come, when I was 2, I was a flower girl at yours and Daddy’s wedding?”
I know that it’s a parent’s place to explain such things to the kids when they’re ready. But I don’t mind my daughter’s school backing up that knowledge with anatomical facts, provided that it’s done responsibly in an appropriate context. It might one day help her to dismiss stupid playground myths such as “you can’t get pregnant if you do it standing up”.
Mrs Shell’s labour throes didn’t scar me (that I didn’t end up getting pregnant until age 38 is unrelated — honest). On the contrary, they armed me with something useful: the certain knowledge that babymaking was for grown-ups.