Remember that fateful high school day when you and your fellow students could no longer look your gym teacher in the eye without remembering all the dirty words you’d said to each other in class? That was the old sex ed, where teachers lectured to their feet, students giggled behind their binders and no one ever slipped a condom over a cucumber. Those days have gone—welcome to Sex Ed 2.0, where teachers are students and students are lobbyists, and it’s getting harder to tell which is which.
“It’s Not Like Babies Are Flying Out of the Sky”
Alita McClendon, a 17-year-old senior at Riverview Gardens High School, marched into her principal’s office and handed him a package of condoms and other assorted preventive equipment. “These are for you,” she said. “I’ll come back in two weeks and tell you how to use them.”
As promised, McClendon returned to Marshall Peeples’ office with a presentation about her contraceptive goodies and quickly persuaded him to let her do the same for her peers. Then she made her way into study halls, dispensing contraceptives and information to juniors and seniors at Riverview Gardens. Her reputation spread through the school like rumors of a snow day, and she found herself a sage of all things sex.
“A lot of girls would be coming to me who I didn’t even know, saying, ‘I hear you know about this stuff—can I talk to you about my problems?’” she recalls. Some came with boy troubles; some came pregnant and confused. McClendon didn’t fancy herself a doctor, but thanks to her training in the Teen Advocates for Sexual Health program, she knew what many of her fellow students didn’t—and counseled them accordingly.
After joining the TASH team, led by Judy Lipsitz of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region, McClendon began thinking about her district’s policy of teaching abstinence, which, in her high-school health class, translated into a three-day tour of the reproductive system and a quick admonition about safe sex.
“There wasn’t anything in there that was useful for us,” she says. “Who doesn’t know that if you don’t have sex, you won’t get pregnant? It’s not like babies are flying out of the sky. It’s not like STDs are flying around in mosquitoes and if they bite you, you have one. Give students some credit.”
When the members of TASH heard that the St. Louis Public Schools were reviewing their health standards this year, they jumped at the chance to submit a plan. In the mean-time, McClendon concentrates on her college pre-med curriculum and plots a comeback. Principals, if you see a young woman marching down your hallway with a bag of condoms, prepare to be sex-educated.
Trading Places
Pssst—Kevin Hawkins pays his students to come to class. He pays them $5.15 an hour, to be exact. It’s not much, he says, but it’s enough to engage them until they get interested in the material.
Believe it or not, Hawkins pays teenage boys to get interested in sex. Not just sex, he explains, but also body image, media messages, sexism, abuse, contraceptives and disease. When it’s a sunny Friday afternoon and you’re trying to get a particularly contrary bunch of boys to imagine what it’s like to be a heavy woman who hates herself, a little cash can’t hurt.
Hawkins, an educator with Planned Parenthood’s Boys2Men program, spends his days in junior and senior high schools, balancing giggles with insights about human sexuality. The pay is part of the program, and the goal is to turn students into peer educators who will spread their newfound smarts in the community.
Listen in on Hawkins’ class at Curtis Bishop Middle School while students rattle off a list of female labels: “Bitch. Ho. Nurse. Secretary. Slut. Teacher. Prostitute ...”
“Sex worker,” Hawkins interrupts. “It’s more respectful.”
He asks a group of eighth-graders to think of female stereotypes and scribble responses as they come, without editing or scolding.
Then he asks them to relate.
This being a prodigiously manly group, the students struggle to think of anything they might do that’s “feminine.”
“Say you’re watching a particularly sad movie,” Hawkins persists.
“On Lifetime!” comes a shout from the back of the room.
“On Lifetime,” Hawkins agrees, “and your boy notices there’s a tear in your eye.”
The class bursts into laughter.
“C’mon, you’re telling me you’ve never had a tear in your eye from a movie?” he prods.
In the privacy of their own homes, maybe, but in front of a guy friend?
“They’d say you’re gay,” one student blurts. And if there’s one thing that terrifies all of his students, Hawkins says later, it isn’t that they’re stereotyped as thugs and hustlers on TV. No, they’re worried that someone in school or on the street might peg them as a homosexual.
And so, for Hawkins, sex ed is not just about condoms and mechanical babies, but also about reflecting on the experiences, urges and fears of a sexual person. That means dissecting rap lyrics and writing a wish list of the attributes of an ideal parent. It also means confronting homophobia in the black community, as uncomfortable as it may be for his students or for Hawkins, a gay black man. But that’s part of the reason he’s here.
Hawkins got involved in this cause in the early ’90s, when, as a club kid, he saw the black gay community ravaged by AIDS. He began volunteering for the Red Cross, educating people about prevention. Now he hits the club circuit with pamphlets. He always irks a few patrons, but he’s had tougher audiences. After all, $5.15 or no $5.15, teens have a way of doing what they want. He’s there to make sure that what they want doesn’t hurt them.
“Teens Are Having Sex”
When Ellen Alper’s daughters were 10, 7 and 5, she brought home what the girls now refer to as “the book.” It was like “the talk,” but with pictures. She sat them down, flipped through the pages and pointed to breasts and vaginas and penises. Each new organ drew a round of giggles, and, after leaving the room, Alper could hear her daughters laughing for hours. Good, she thought—it means they’re still looking.
Alper’s daughters are like compartments of their mother. There’s Emily, 20, the motherly psych major; Melissa, 17, blunt and boisterous; and Andi, 15, the pensive one. It’s difficult to picture one outside the context of the other three, even though the Alpers are the kind of strong, independent women you’d expect to see at a women’s-rights rally. When the foursome took to the halls of the Missouri Capitol in March to lobby for comprehensive sex education, it was a postcard image.
They came to protest a bill sponsored by Reps. Cynthia Davis (R-O’Fallon) and Jane Cunningham (R-Chesterfield). The legislators sought to bar Planned Parenthood from schools and require parental permission slips for students to be present during sex ed.
“Since all forms of contraception have a failure rate, the more students who are sexually active, the more business they get,” Davis wrote on her website.
She worries that schools and teachers overstep their boundaries in helping rear today’s youth; she insists that good parents can handle the birds and the bees without a legislative push. By that measure, Ellen Alper is a model parent. There’s not much that doesn’t get talked about at her dinner table, but she’s the first to recognize the influence of other sources.
Just as girls once dog-eared the sex scenes in Judy Blume books and read them in schoolyard huddles, the Alper girls eavesdropped on their older sisters’ phone conversations, read CosmoGIRL! and watched Sex and the City and Friends.
“I still remember the episode where Rachel got pregnant because the condom failed,” Melissa says. At that moment, she realized it could happen—and she knew she could ask her mother to explain. Many of her friends went to Ellen Alper instead of their own mothers. And when one of Melissa’s friends feared that she had become pregnant as a result of unprotected sex, Ellen counseled her about symptoms and options.
“She didn’t even know who her doctor was,” Melissa marvels. “She’d never been to a gynecologist.”
Her friend in mind, Melissa and her sisters walked into Cunningham’s office at the Capitol and asked their representative to reconsider her stance. Abstinence is great, they said, but it’s far from ubiquitous.
“Teens are having sex,” Ellen said.
“We don’t know that,” Cunningham swiftly replied.
It took the Alpers some time to recover their power of speech, and on the way home they brimmed with comebacks. “We wanted to scream, ‘Yes we do!’” Melissa says.
They did scream a bit—but left wondering whether anyone had heard them.
On the last day of the legislative session, the Alpers and fellow lobbyists McClendon and Hawkins found an e-mail from Planned Parenthood in their inboxes. The subject: “Victory! YOU stopped the bill.”
