Thursday, March 10, 2011

Fury at "Elves Only" Sex Education Lessons

7 comments:

Sam Dodsworth said...

Interesting that they confuse "sexualisation" with "knowing what sex is". Implicitly, what this is about is the false dichotomy of "innocent" or "slutty" - the assumption is if you're no longer innocent then you're at risk.

I can link this back to fear of social change (because slut-shaming is a way of denying women control of their sexuality) and class-anxiety (because sexualisation is associated with the undisciplined poor), too. Not in a reductive way but because any topic that causes "fury" in the Mail is going to be at the intersection of several areas of anxiety, and those are classics.

Sam Dodsworth said...

I should have said... There's homophobia in there too, obviously, but that's almost the least interesting part.

Iain said...

I think it's about bloody time the Daily Mail and the "Christian Institute" grew up! This sort of knee-jerk reaction (and of many of the commenters) comes from an outdated and wrong notion that sex is something dirty and shameful.

Sam Dodsworth said...

@Iain - I disagree. I think the assumption in the article is that sex is dangerous.

Rich Puchalsky said...

Deceptive headline, though I guess that's in keeping with mocking a tabloid. I clicked on this expecting to read about elves. Where are the elves? From the last post, in which you write about declaring your race as elvish in the census, I'd imagined people in the woods doing it, um, F*ck For Forest style, holding sex-ed classes, and the local non-elvish parents being angry that their Muggle kids weren't permitted to attend. Instead, all I get is another bog-standard article about people being offended at sex-ed materials.

Helen Louise said...

There's a link entitled "Primary school pupils as young as FIVE to be taught 'no means no' in sex education lessons on importance of consent"

I'm guessing from the article that I'm not meant to say, "Hurrah, excellent idea"...

Helen Louise said...

Also...

‘As they cuddled, your dad’s penis moved gently inside your mum’s vagina and the sperms flowed out.’

That is certainly shocking, and I wouldn't show that to a child. The plural of sperm is sperm. English grammar is complicated enough and deliberately introducing mistakes will only confuse young children.