Here’s a question: What would you think of an adult who came into your home to show your 13 year-old-daughter an instructional video on the techniques for female masturbation?
Assuming your answer to that is the same as mine, and most other people’s, then logically a follow-up question is required: Why would your reaction be any different to the Government coming into your 13-year old daughter’s school to show her an instructional video on the techniques for female masturbation?
The video in question is not theoretical, or hypothetical. It can be found at 2 minutes and 42 seconds into the interview below between activist Jana Lunden and SPHE teacher turned whistleblower Mary Creedon:
The point here, of course, is not that there is anything wrong or unhealthy or shameful about female masturbation or many other sexual activities – that is not a judgment for me or anyone else to definitively make. The point is instead about the fundamental relationship between families, children, and the state.
Most adults, through years of experience of life, dating, and relationships have an inherent feel for what is appropriate and what is not. Adult women, for example, will have learned through experience to tell the difference between a man who is innocently “touchy feely” and a man whose hands linger just a fraction too long on “incidental” or “accidental” touching. Men will come to know the difference between the friend who makes dirty jokes and the friend who just maybe isn’t joking at all, and needs to be watched. Most of us know that there’s a difference between the person who says that part of growing up is learning to explore and know your own body, and the person who is eager to talk through the details and techniques of that exploration with teenagers. By definition, many of these subtleties are unspoken, but they are nevertheless almost universally recognised. Some online communities of women have even developed a phrase to describe it: Red flags.
I write all of this because it is a thing that, in my experience, many parents have difficulty articulating. On the one hand, nobody wants to be that very worst thing in modern Irish society – a prude. All of us, I think, approve in principle of the idea that young people should be provided with sex education and equipped for the modern world into which they are shortly to emerge, which differs in many ways from the world into which their parents emerged. This instinct – which is understandable and correct – is copper fastened when parents are left with the effective options of going along with what the schools teach, or making a show of their child by pulling them from the relevant class.
At the same time, all of us who are now adults were once, by definition, 12 or 13 years of age, and recall the embarrassment and awkwardness that comes with being that age. Some of us, since we are all different, developed at a faster or slower pace than others, both physically and emotionally. In my own school, where the basic facts and processes of human reproduction were outlined in relatively cold scientific terms in biology class to a room that was male-only, that alone was enough to provoke shifty eyes and avoidance of looking at each other directly. I am not sure how many of us might have coped if our respected male teacher had been obliged by the state to instruct us in the techniques for male masturbation or walk us through various sex acts that we might encounter online.
There is a difference, in other words, between openness and pressurization. We have come from a society where young people may once have been told, in many schools, that masturbation (for example) was a one-way ticket to hell, or short of that, blindness. One can agree that this was inappropriate and unhealthy without thinking that the only possible alternative is detailed instruction in masturbatory techniques for children.
The whole thing is, I think, symbolic of the massive over-reaction to the past that characterises modern Irish society in general, where excessive moralising in one direction has been replaced lock, stock, and barrel with excessive and inappropriate moralising in the other.
Indeed, from an entirely liberal point of view, one of the things about sexuality is that it is a deeply personal thing, and a deeply personal journey for people to embark on and explore in their own lives. There is a reason most people remember their first kiss, for example. Many such kisses, Hollywood tells us (probably accurately) are awkward and fumbling – but no less special or memorable for it. The idea that children and young people – before even experiencing that moment for themselves – should already be state-instructed experts in the importance of lubrication before anal sex is not only wrong on the red-flag level: It is also to steal away an innocence and a magic that most human beings have enjoyed discovering for themselves.
Does this mean that we shouldn’t talk to kids about porn? Not necessarily: But it is hardly beyond the abilities of a parent or a teacher to simply tell children that the acts that they might see on a phone screen or a computer are neither normal, nor intended to be so. That they are instead a fantasy depiction of sexuality in the same way that Superman is a fantasy depiction of human physical strength or ability. And that anyone who pressurises them or demands that they engage in such acts against their will is a bad person, who should be avoided, not loved.
Such a conversation is, I fear, beyond the abilities of our politicians, who have instead turned the entirety of the SPHE curriculum over to radicals in Irish Universities who are convinced that they know how to talk to your children about sex better than you do. They will get away with it as well, until and unless Irish parents wake up and decide to have this conversation themselves, with politicians on the doorsteps.
When they come to your door, show them the video above. Make them squirm. Perhaps embarrassment, if nothing else, might make them act.