Talking About Global Sex Education (Part 1)
[Introduction]: More and more media and audiences are telling a point of view: With the development of e-commerce and the change in people’s ideas, the American sex products industry is booming and facing a bright future.
There is also a voice that has been emphasized: just like China and India, two populous countries, today, with increasingly open education and concepts, sex toy products are not at the forefront of global sales, and they bear a large proportion of global production and manufacturing. A small share of sales.
However, the data over the years shows that even if the world looks at it, gender sex toys are not a leading, front-end industry type in any country, but a “small category”. So in the final analysis, sex education as the source of power, in every country, has its limitations such as history and human factors, as well as the shackles formed over the years.
01
In fact, the matter of sex education,
It’s not easy in any country.
Sex education is a big or small thing, what do countries think?
Sex education, as the name suggests, is education about sex-related issues. However, the connotation and extension of sex education are very extensive, involving multiple levels from sexual cognition, emotion, and body to society. As for its classification, the most common ones are that scholars from all over the world are used to dividing sex education into school sex education, family sex education, community sex education, and social sex education. Teenagers and children are the main ones, but countries have different attitudes toward children’s sex education.
United States: Beginning to learn about sex in primary schools
The United States began to teach knowledge about fertility, gender differences, and sexual morality from the first grade of elementary school. In junior high school, the process of childbearing, sexual maturity, and sexual restraint were taught. In high school, marriage, family, sexual charm, homosexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, and sexual positions were taught. And distribute condoms to students.
In the past 10 years, one-third of schools in the United States have increased abstinence education, advocated delaying sexual behavior until after marriage, and told students to practice safe sex.
UK: Mandatory sex education at age 5
The UK sex education system is generally referred to as “sex and relationship education”. In 2000, the British Department of Education and Employment issued the Sex and Relationships Education Guidance (Se Sex and Relationships Education Guidance), which clearly stipulates that the coverage of sex education should be for all students in all public schools. British law states that compulsory education must begin for children as young as five years old. According to the specific provisions of the “National Compulsory Curriculum”, all public primary and secondary schools in the UK divide students into 4 stages according to different age levels to carry out sex education with different contents.
Japan: Sex knowledge is taught from elementary school to high school
On the cover of the first elementary school textbook “Health” published by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan, there are pictures of female and male bodies and sexual organs. Elementary schools have 1-2 hours of special lectures each year, which cover the physical differences between men and women, the principles of menstruation and pregnancy, etc.; junior high schools also have 1-2 hours of special lectures every year, calling on students not to engage in dangerous sexual behaviors.
It can be found that the sex education of teenagers and children varies from country to country, and the more developed the country, the more complete the sex education is, and the more prominent the sex education results are. However, it is undeniable that the implementation of sex education in each country has a lot to do with the differences in culture and religious beliefs of the country.
Finland: Learning about sex from kindergarten
In the 1970s, sex education entered the syllabus of Finnish primary and secondary schools. Even kindergartens have positive sex education books. Finland’s special sex education book “Our Body” uses pictures and stories so that parents can tell stories to their children every day. learned knowledge. Sex education in Finland has made remarkable achievements. Between 1975 and 1994, the abortion rate among Finnish girls aged 15-19 dropped from 21.2% to 9%. And at the World Conference on Population and Development, Finnish sex education was praised by all countries as a successful experience.
Sweden: Start learning about sex at the age of 7
Sweden is a country that launched sex education earlier and is a model of sex education in the world. Its early school sex education is one of the internationally recognized successful models of adolescent education.
Sweden began to implement compulsory education in 1955, and public schools have carried out comprehensive sex education projects, including physiological education for children over 7 years old, the content is to teach pregnancy and childbearing knowledge in primary schools, and to teach physiology and sexuality in middle schools. For the knowledge of body functions, when you go to college, you will focus on love and interpersonal relationships. In 1966, Sweden tried to implement sex education through television, which broke the situation where it was difficult for parents to talk about sex. This education model has achieved remarkable results: the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases is extremely low, there are almost no cases of pregnancy and childbirth for girls under the age of 20, the HIV-positive rate is only 5132 cases in the country, the birth rate has dropped significantly, the abortion rate is extremely low, sexually transmitted diseases and sex Crime rates are also falling.
The Netherlands: The Netherlands makes sex education mandatory
Sex education in the Netherlands has been mandatory in the national health promotion program since 1993, but there is no mandatory national curriculum or textbooks for sex education. In reality, 97% of middle schools and 50% of primary schools incorporate sex education information into their school curricula. The form, teaching methods, teaching materials, and course schedules of specific courses can be decided by schools independently. Most schools’ Sexuality education will be integrated into existing related subject areas such as biology. The Dutch government stipulates that schools are obliged to cover topics such as “pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, sexual orientation, and homophobia, value clarification, respect for differences, and skills for healthy sexual behavior” in sex education. In addition, the Netherlands Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention provided teacher training on sex and sexuality
The status quo of the development of sex education in China: gradually improving
Since 2020, laws and plans such as the “Law on the Protection of Minors” and “China Children’s Development Program (2021-2030)” have put sex education on the agenda.
But at present, there are still many deficiencies, such as family sex education can not keep up, because parents themselves have never had comprehensive sex education, and it is difficult to talk about it; schools have not set up special subjects, and systematically complete sex education or enlightenment for different ages; In terms of education and influence at the social level, excessive communication of gender dialectics leads to psychological neglect, and inability to objectively recognize and recognize oneself.
02
The Influence of Culture and Religious Belief on Sex Education
Sex education is difficult to implement in China. To a large extent, it has had an important relationship with our Confucian culture for thousands of years. In particular, Confucian culture emphasizes “clear morality”, that is, it requires people to cultivate their own morality, which to a certain extent has led to the development of asceticism, and gradually developed arguments such as “all evils and adultery are the first”, leading to the concept of “sex = evil” in social communication. At the same time, thousands of years of feudal society, with a strict hierarchy and strict boundaries between men and women, made “seven-year-old different seats” and “men and women’s defense” become subconscious cognitions of social groups, which made it difficult to transmit sexual knowledge and carry out sexual education. In the new era, this kind of group subconscious also plays a great potential role.
Traditional culture suppresses the development of sex education not only in China. In fact, in the West under the long-term influence of religion, “sex is sin” is also an important content of Christian teachings. However, unlike the slow development of Chinese sexual concepts, in Western countries that have experienced the Renaissance, women’s status has improved, and they have more understanding and thinking about sex. Sex takes a different approach. At the same time, the wave of “sexual revolution” carried out in the West in the 1960s and 1970s allowed people to get rid of their sense of mystery and guilt about sex, further opened the door to sexual culture, let more people feel the nature of sex, and stimulated After the sexual revolution, the development of sex research and sex education has brought people’s conceptual recognition, and more and more people are inclined to increase the sex knowledge of members of society through sex education.
However, it is undeniable that religion still has a greater influence on sex education. For example, Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers are written by Mark D. Regnerus, a young scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. This book systematically expounds on the influence of religious beliefs on the sexual concepts and activities of American teenagers. Through two large-scale surveys, he counted the impact of religion on adolescents’ sexual habits, sexual motivations, sexual risk awareness, and sexual attitudes, and came to the most basic conclusion: religious participation has a positive effect on adolescents’ sexual purity and sexual morality Yes, which has a greater impact on adolescents’ sexual attitudes than actual sexual behavior.
03
Sex education achievements and the impact of the epidemic on Chinese sex culture
Due to the different development experiences, systems, and even teaching methods of sex education in different countries, the results of sex education in different countries are also very different. Due to the lack of sex education in China, data shows that 20.3% of college couples have sex, and 10.1% of female college students are pregnant. At the same time, 6% of girls aged 20-29 in China have undergone abortions, which is more than seven times that of Western developed countries. Of course, the impact of the lack of sex education is not limited to this, but what is better is that as the new generation of Chinese youth has become the mainstream of the social economy, China has gradually begun to have a certain degree of sex education in cultural exchanges with the West. cognition.
In particular, under the influence of good material culture and open network culture, the Z generation population is obviously different from the post-80s and post-70s and is greatly influenced by global culture. One of the important manifestations is the younger age of sexual behavior. According to the blue paper “Shanghai Social Development Report (2019)” released by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, 8.7% of junior high school students have a kissing experience, 24.9% of high school students, and 40.6% of college students. And 8.3% of high school students have had sexual experience, compared with 13.7% of college students. The survey also shows that adolescents’ acceptance of premarital sex is increasing, and the proportions of men and women who agree that “relationships can be had without love” have reached 20.5% and 7.2%, compared with 4.8% and 0.9% 20 years ago. %.
At the same time, as the post-00s enter society as adults, and the aging population in China is affected by the imbalance in the ratio of men and women, this gender concept and the concept of marriage and love have begun to converge. The population living alone and the divorce rate are rising, which shows that modern people have a more natural concept of sex. Even if there is no marriage, with the help of other means, the sex life may be more satisfactory, and the inner joy and more and more problems exposed in marriage, Make people think more about marriage and sex.
This kind of thinking is subtle, and has been greatly reflected and exploded during the epidemic. On the one hand, the epidemic has caused people to postpone or cancel activities such as going out to communicate, reducing the frequency of sexual life. On the other hand, a study shows that, as the epidemic continues, the sex life of nearly 30% of young people around the world has decreased significantly, which may have something to do with economic pressure and the lack of mood due to the threat of life brought by the virus.
The United Nations Digital Sex Education Department mainly surveyed Chinese youth under the age of 34, and released “The Impact of the 2020 New Crown Epidemic on the Sexual and Reproductive Health of Chinese Youth”. The report shows that the frequency of sexual behavior of nearly half of young people has been affected by the epidemic, and the negative impact is more obvious than the positive impact.
But the good news is that despite the liberalization of the concept of sex, the scientific attitude towards sex is improving. In the context of education reform, family education began to be advocated again, and many insightful people began to introduce famous foreign picture books and sex education books to China. There are also more and more professionals starting to play their roles in the fields of sex education and sexual psychological counseling. In addition, the popularity of some family sex education picture books and books on the short video platform of social platforms is clear proof.
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