Sex Education for Kids

Finally, school kids are going to learn about sex. I had been ‘advocating’ sex education in school since the 1990s. I believed kids needed to know something about sex if they were going to be told about sex predators and how to keep away from potentially dangerous situations. I believed that education could reduce sex crimes committed on children and might also prevent the loss of some young lives.

However, people were not receptive to the idea. One shocked man even said: What? Teach students in the classroom what’s done behind locked doors?

How stupid could one get?

I thought kids should have a fair idea of the subject. They should know that babies don’t just arrive from nowhere in the middle of the night. (Better they learn the correct information from a responsible adult than pick weird stuff from other sources, don’t you think?) They should know the proper names for body parts. It is imperative they learnt what is accepted touching and what is immoral behaviour. They should learn how to avoid suspicious people and know who to go to for help.

For various reasons, many parents don’t teach their kids the proper words for sex organs but instead give them non-sexual names. People outside the family could be forgiven if they wondered why all the fuss when little Johnny complained some fellow touched his golf set—you know, two balls, a bag and a stick. With a proper vocabulary, no extra explanation is needed.

That reminds me of the Dusun parents of the good old days. They were never squeamish about teaching their kids names of body parts. In my parents’ house, balabak and tontolou (testis), tolih (penis) and totoh (vagina) were everyday words like eye or grass. In fact, I had always thought that the common boy’s name ‘Ontolu’ came from ‘tontolu’ the Dusun word for egg. And you can guess the origin of ‘Otoh’, the common pet name for girls! Incidentally, these were never derogatory terms. The Dusuns didn’t have four-letter words—those had to be borrowed from other cultures by the ‘modern’ Dusun.

Now let’s skip back to our main subject…

The problem is/was when we talk about teaching students sex education, people get hot under the collar because they assume that you’re teaching kids how to make babies, coital positions included!

Narrow-minded nincompoops.

Had these people listened to our voices a dozen years ago maybe, just maybe, many innocent kids could have been saved from sex predators.

Now it is okay to teach sex education in schools. It took the rising number of teenage pregnancies and countless newborns left in toilets and abandoned in dumpsters to make Malaysia think that sex education should be in the curriculum after all.

 I have a feeling that if trashing babies has not become a problem, there’d be no sex education for our young. What do you think?

Pictures from Google Images

The Joys of Sex

I’m no sex therapist and this is not what you think. I saw the headline screaming: ‘Malaysia urges elderly couples to recall the joys of sex’. Just happens that sex is one of my pet subjects so I thought I’d share something with you, my readers.

The Terengganu state government is holding weekend seminars for elderly people ‘to show long-married couples how to get their partner’s libido going again’ so they’d sleep in the same bed instead of in separate rooms. It is assumed that lack of sex is the cause of  the rising divorce rate. The government is trying to curb this because today three out of ten marriages in the state end in divorce.

I’m not sure if many women share my opinion but I honestly feel that the ‘joys of sex’ is never the glue that holds a marriage together. To assume that good sexual relations will keep divorce at bay, to me, is ignoring relationship problems and giving sex way too much  importance. After all, how many people have cited ‘lack of sex’ as a reason for wanting to end their marriages?

I’m also wondering if the state leaders think that a husband and his wife will hold on to their marriage if they enjoy good sex despite huge marital problems in other areas. I don’t know about you but I don’t think taking care of the sex part is going to save a doomed marriage. Women avoid sex for various reasons. Maybe men, too? Just because the partner smells nice or washes regularly are not enough reasons for sex, folks!

Like it or not, foreplay doesn’t begin five minutes before the act but maybe hours or even days before! When the husband helps his wife with the breakfast, with the kids and other chores commonly considered women’s job (even if the wife works outside the home) he is acknowledging her as an equal and not an underling. She feels appreciated and valued. She feels loved when he does little things for her. Sex is just one of the avenues through which she expresses her love toward the husband.

Now consider this. You are married to this man—you found out too late—who never lifts a finger in the house except to press the TV remote or shake it in your face. The house you’ve turned into a home is his castle and during the day you are maid, mother, nanny, driver, nurse, etc. It is a good day when he drives you to the market without complaining. On a bad day he tells you the dinner you’ve prepared is fit only for the dog.

And at night he expects you to be a vamp. And feels rejected if you complained of fatigue.

Consider the following, too. Exact words from people I used to know.

 I knew this man who said to his wife: You don’t know what’s the name of this fish? You better go hang yourself.

 A friend thought she’d look prettier if she used some lip colour but all the comment she got from her husband was: You look like a dog.

 Incidentally, that was the very first time I learnt that dogs, too, wore lipstick.

Another friend restyled her hair but on reaching home, had to return to the salon immediately. The husband said: You look like a hooker.

My point is, if you had husbands like these would you even want to be in the same room with them. Sex? Think again, brother!

Maybe someone should study the statistics and gather more info to find out the 'hidden' causes of divorce among elderly couples. Could it be that the marriage has broken down years before but divorce had been postponed because of the children? Could it be one spouse had been at the receiving end of some obnoxious habits and finally called it a day. (In some countries snoring could be a reason for divorce, you know.)

I’ll just list some common causes for divorce in Malaysia:

Unrealistic expectations

For example, the man may want the wife to ‘mother’ him and expects her to do things exactly like Mommy had done. The wife, on the other hand, may expect him to be able to use the washing machine as well as flush the toilet when he’s done. She is, after all, a wife and not a maid! (Same applies to the wife who may have thought she married a superman who’d wait on her.)

Lack of communication

The spouses don’t talk but each expects the other to be a mind-reader. Or when they do talk, people can hear them all the way in Pulau Gaya across the South China Sea and they live on the mainland.

Lack of commitment to the ‘partnership’

Some people want to have their cake and eat it as well. They’re married but the marriage is not as important as other things in their lives. They continue to act as though they were still single—nights out with their friends and maybe even with MBA written on their foreheads: Married But Available.

Infidelity

Now how many times have we heard about this one? So-and-so went out with you-know-who and now both are getting what they deserved… a divorce from their respective spouses. These days one needn’t even go out to be guilty of infidelity. One could do it over the internet!

Physical abuse

You must be insane to want to live with a spouse who treats you like you’re his punching bag.

Sexual abuse

There must be something terribly wrong with a person who’d continue to live with someone who is a sexual pervert.

There you are. Lack of sex—or humdrum sex—doesn’t seem to enter the picture. So going back to our original discussion, I believe when one addresses the thorny issues in the marriage, when there’s mutual respect between man and wife, the likelihood of elderly couples divorcing would decrease.

Last word: I’m sure you join me in sincerely hoping that the oldsters had fun during the seminar—and more fun practicing at home! Cheers!

All pictures from Google Images