WETZSTEIN: What’s missing in sex education

Part two of two

The massive health care reform bill in Congress contains a measure to spend $75 million a year on comprehensive sex education, under the heading of “adulthood training.”

This kind of education, which I am abbreviating as “sex ed,” enjoys broad support in the current administration and Congress, so if health care reform passes, sex ed should be part of it.

A warning shot across the bow, however, has been issued by Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist who spent 20 years counseling college students.

Her new book, “You’re Teaching My Children What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How They Harm Your Child,” is intended to challenge the “sex ed oligarchy.”

She specifically wants to smash the ideas that “sex trumps everything” in life, and “promiscuity, experimentation and fringe behaviors” are healthy.

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The pandemic of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in America — in which one in four teenage girls has an STD — is “a direct consequence” of such vision and ideals, Dr. Grossman writes.

Rather than rehash the entire sex-ed debate, I offer some of Dr. Grossman’s examples of information she says is missing or downplayed in sex-ed programs.

• Having multiple sex partners is a proven health hazard, especially for females.

• Anal sex is at least 20 times riskier than vaginal sex, because of infectious germs in fecal matter, lack of natural lubrication and cell composition that favors absorption of germs.

• Teenage girls’ cervixes are immature and more vulnerable to infection compared with cervixes of older women.

• Female brains are different from male brains beginning at eight weeks gestation; thus gender differences are innate.

• Both men and women are hard-wired for close, lasting attachments.

Story Continues →