Sex Education Paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Sex Education Paper - Essay Example I have personally felt the need to re-evaluate our cultural and traditional understandings of these issues and how they affect our understanding as we continue to grow up. I got a lot of information about sex and sexuality from very different sources. My family, both my parents and aunts, were at hand to provide me with a wide range of information about myself and my body and how to act and keep myself amidst all the changes that were taking place in my body during my teenage years. The media were also very instrumental in giving me information through various TV shows, music and movies. I also got to read magazines and journals about sexual health, some of which were very erotic. School was also a very important environment for me to learn more about sex, both informally through my friends and formally through the school curriculum. In the later stages of my teenage years, I mostly relied on my peers and the internet for information since we had a common consensus that our parents d id not provide us with helpful information and that they did not want us to participate in sexual activities for unknown or unqualified reasons at the time. A recent study about reproductive health among youths and adolescents conducted by Stanford University, however, points out that the sources that I relied upon such as the internet are to a large extent erratic. The study found out that some of the information contained on various websites across the internet contain outdated advice, omissions and are riddled with errors, therefore, making them possible channels of misinformation and myths associated with sex and sexuality (Knox and Schacht 58). Given this wide range of informational sources regarding this subject, I must admit that my sexual life as a teenager was based on a lot of misinformation and myths which at the time, I believed to be the absolute truth. Some of them, especially the ones I got from school my parents, were in fact true although I did not regard them as su ch during the that time. My parents and close family relatives told me a lot of lies about sex in a bid to protect me from knowing the truth at such a tender age for fear that I would be interested in trying out. They, therefore, sought to present sex as a negative and an unpleasant thing, most especially if done outside marriage. One of the biggest myths that I gathered at from this is that marital sex is the only safe, desired and enjoyable sexual activity. Over the year, however, as I have grown up and gathered more information, both from experience and from reliable research studies, I have come to the conclusion that it is not true. Marital sex, despite being legitimate, is coupled up with so many issues involving consensus. I was stunned to discover that rape can also occur in a marriage set up in cases where one of the partners does not consent to the sexual activity (Knox and Schacht 67). This proved to me that marital sex is not that much enjoyable as it was portrayed to me by my family. It was only a myth to help me avoid being involved in sexual activities at a young age and before marriage. Among my peers, we believed that having multiple sexual partners before would help one to be more experienced