How many of you reading this had some sort of sex education in high school? We called it “health,” and it was a required course in my high school, one marking period (quarter) per year. We didn’t learn only about sex, obviously; I learned all about drinking and how much it sucks for your body, and the different classes of drugs, and smoking cigarettes and what they do. I also learned all the major organ systems, different bone and muscle groups, and other stuff that might qualify as a very rudimentary anatomy & physiology class.

But most of all, I learned about sex, and every possible thing a high schooler wants to know about sex. We learned about how pregnancy happens. We learned about methods of safe sex (yes, including abstinence), including but not limited to the rhythm method, condoms, the IUD, Depo, the Pill, the Patch, and withdrawal. I learned how to draw the female and male reproductive systems. I learned about every STD, including how they are treated and/or unable to be treated/cured. I learned about the three different abortion methods given during different trimesters. I learned about RU-486 and the morning after pill. And we even discussed stem cell research and the controversy surrounding it (though, at the time, it wasn’t actually that big of a deal yet - I graduated high school in 2000.)

But I learned all this because I went to a fancy schmancy private school, right? Nope, I went to a large public school (450 in my graduating class) in suburban Connecticut. Granted, my high school and the high schools in surrounding towns have been cited as being better than even some private schools around the country, but we were funded with state money, same as high schools in the giant ghetto city I grew up next to.

I know as much about the debate over abstinence-only education in this country’s public schools as any casual observer, but it had never quite hit home for me until today. I’m finishing my post-bacc (one achingly long week left) at a Jesuit university in the same town where I went to high school. Most of the faculty are normal people (i.e. professors with beliefs that are real), but a few of the professors and all of the governing board are Jesuit priests. Monks. Whatever. I’ve never come into contact in any of my classes with Father So-and-So, though a few of my friends have a Father for their organic chem lab instructor (though I’m told he’s more like Gregor Mendel than anything else.) Today in my general biology class we started a discussion on animal reproduction. In an earlier class, the professor had handed out index cards and asked the students to write down, anonymously, any questions they might have relating to animal reproduction, which he would address, again anonymously, in future lectures.

I was immediately struck by this. He didn’t hand out index cards for the lectures on animal nutrition, or chemical signaling, or mechanisms of gas exchange, though I certainly have some more detailed questions about how the GI tract works that the textbook didn’t address. Clearly this exercise was meant to satisfy people’s questions about animal reproduction…right?

Here was my question: “I’ve read recent literature that suggests that human females actually are NOT born with all the ova they’ll ever have; that, in fact, stem cells exist in the ovary that very slowly (as relates to sperm production) continue to make new eggs over the course of a female’s lifetime. I’ve heard that the reason for this is actually because menopause is an evolutionary leftover from when human life expectancy was only about 50 years. Do you have any more info on this topic?”

And here was the first question that he addressed: “Is it bad if it burns when I pee?”

Okay, so maybe that one was a joke. Some idiot freshman who was embarrassed to be talking about sex in class so thought he’d write something sort of irreverent. A possibility, I thought, until he started addressing more and more of the questions:

“How does the birth control pill work?”

“Is there sperm in the pre-ejaculatory fluid?”

“How many days after you get your period do you ovulate?”

“Can you get pregnant if you have sex during your period?”

and the most horrifying of all, “What exactly is chlamydia?”

I was stunned. My general biology class - a required class to be a doctor - was being used as a high school health class. And though I complain about how stupid my classmates are a lot of the time, I don’t think this was the case this time. I think a lot of these students genuinely did not know the answers to these questions because they had never been taught. We’re not talking mid-Western Bible-belt kids here - most of the students at this school come from private or parochial schools in the tri-state area. Upper-middle-class white New Englanders and Jersey kids who had never had sexual education. Maybe this exposes my own naivete, but This. Blows. My. Mind. I told this to Ryan on the phone, and what he said in response I think sums it up best: these kids are STARVING for these answers.

But the weirdest part of all wasn’t these questions. It was what the professor did right before he started answering them. He prefaced this Q&A session with a scientific paper written several years ago regarding human penis size and sperm competition. (Without digressing too much, in the animal world, where most animal societies are polygamous [many females to one male], females can store sperm from several individuals in her body at a given time, which makes it advantageous to have organs that are good at displacing other males’ sperm and replacing it with their own.) This paper proposed that a similar mechanism was at work in humans, back in an era when monogamy as made normal by a civilized society didn’t exist. He didn’t say much about the study, just wanted to to introduce it as a means of comparing humans and animals. But before he started this, and even before launching into student questions, he went over to the door of the lecture hall, peeked out, and then closed it, saying, “Just in case Father [someone] happens to walk by!”

Adults. That’s what we all technically are, right? At least in the eyes of the law? Not minors. And here we were, a room full of adults being led by an even older adult, speaking behind a forcefully closed door about our bodies, about the idea of humans having non-monogamous sexual relations, for fear of discovery (and reprimand? Job termination?) by a religious figure. In an institution of higher learning. In a science class.

Um…

P.S. I know you guys read this, so can one of you crazy religious nutters who believe in the power of abstinence-only education please leave a comment and explain to me why that’s a better option than learning the truth about our bodies? I’m completely serious, and if you do I promise to only level reason at you and not ad hominem attacks (unless you set yourself up for it by misspelling a bunch of shit, etc). Thanks!