In certain private schools, sex education is provided in fourth grade.
The lessons are timed to coincide with mass circumcision for the boys, which the schools sponsor for free. The event gives teachers an opportunity to explain the male and female anatomy, the reproductive system and how babies are made.
Female fourth graders are typically nine or 10 years old, when some of them experience menarche or their first period, meaning they can already become pregnant, so the lessons on reproductive health are useful. There are children who are uncomfortable discussing sexual or reproductive matters with their parents.
In my youth we didn’t have sex education in my Catholic school. And there was no sex education even in the bastion of liberal ideas, the University of the Philippines.
Pre-internet, we instead learned about sex from novels such as D.M. Perkins’ “Deep Throat” and porn booklets with grainy black and white photos, which were sold along the sidewalks of Manila’s University Belt.
Sexual exploration was quite common among my classmates. In high school, two of them nearly died after getting abortions courtesy of midwives, one in Baguio City and another in Quiapo. A third found a real doctor in Tondo, Manila, where the patients’ waiting line was as long as the snaking lines for rice at the height of the rice crisis in 2008. But the abortion rendered her unable to bear children for life.
At UP, girls consulted each other on reliable abortionists and birth control pills.
Today, sex education remains out of the curriculum of public schools. But any child can watch all types of sexual materials online. What’s important is getting correct information about reproductive health and HIV transmission – which cannot be found in porn sites – and preventing children from having children.
I asked some young students in exclusive private schools – children of people I know – what they were taught in sex education. They detailed clinical lessons on reproductive health, with some rather hilarious gestures depicting the sexual act.
As far as I can tell, none of these kids became sexually promiscuous. In fact, by the standards of BBM’s Boomer generation, which gave the world the Pill, free love and hardcore porn (and in the Philippines, the X-rated “bomba” movies), they could even be considered sexually conservative.
Some of these kids, now all grown up of course, are in solid marriages and putting off having children until their salaries can ensure a comfortable income for baby formula, diapers and tuition for their kids’ formal education in a decent school.
Did the sex education make them masturbate? Who knows? In my youth, we were warned that masturbation caused deafness and blindness.
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I would normally not use the word “masturbate” in a newspaper article. But now the word is being freely tossed around in public by the President of the republic himself, plus the deputy minority leader of the Senate.
Fortunately, the four-year-olds BBM is trying to protect from school lessons on masturbation will likely be unable at that age to read such a word, much less understand what it means. It would be silly to introduce sex education to kids at age four.
In all my years as a journalist, I have never heard “masturbation” uttered so much in public by top government officials. It must be part of BBM’s liberal upbringing in Europe where he spent much of his student life.
As the only son of the Philippines’ conjugal dictators, BBM was painted as a hedonist in his youth. So it’s surprising to hear him rail against “woke absurdities” that he found “ridiculous… abhorrent” in the Senate bill mandating comprehensive sexuality education or CSE in public schools. I thought it would take something extreme to be described by BBM as a “woke absurdity.”
In his lengthy comment to reporters, he detailed two “woke” things in particular. One is the part about four-year-olds. The second is “that every child has the right to try different sexualities.”
“This is ridiculous. This is abhorrent. It is a travesty of what sex education should be to the children,” BBM said as he vowed to veto Senate Bill 1979 in its current form.
SB 1979 is the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Bill whose principal author, Senate Deputy Minority Leader Risa Hontiveros, has stressed that the measure does not contain the two issues that Marcos found “abhorrent.”
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There are reports that there is a fake version of SB 1979 being circulated by opponents of CSE, which contain those provisions that BBM has condemned.
If this is true, those circulating the fake version must be penalized for disinformation. And the person who fed BBM the fake version must be kicked out of any government post, or never be trusted again by the President.
On the other hand, if BBM read the bill correctly, he is expressing a popular sentiment in this predominantly Catholic country on matters of sexuality.
“Let me be very, very clear,” he said. “I still believe that sex education, in terms of teaching kids the anatomy of the reproductive systems of male and female, is extremely important. The consequences of early pregnancy, the prevalence of HIV, kelangan ituro lahat iyan para alam ng mga kabataan (these must all be taught so the youths will know).”
But if the “woke… absurdities” were included in the final bill, he vowed to veto the measure.
The United Nations has weighed in on the issue, calling for fighting misinformation on CSE and expressing support for it, but not touching the controversy over “woke absurdities.”
Hontiveros has expressed readiness for amendments to SB 1979, which will still have to be reconciled anyway with a House counterpart version.
While the adults bicker, children entering puberty won’t bother waiting for the bill to become law. There’s so much sexual material freely available on the internet.
Either they get sex education in school, or in real life. There will always be kids with newly raging hormones who will opt for the latter.