Don't go too far in name of sex education

At the "Sex Culture Festival" recently held in Guangzhou, an official with the city's Family Planning Commission advised parents to include condoms in their 12-15-year-old kids' schoolbag to prevent unwanted pregnancy and other consequences.

The suggestion was proffered in the name of sex education as part of the "festival's" business to "promote civilized concepts of sex."

I wonder how much farther these "civilization" zealots will go in extending "sex education" among children. I assume these "experts" will urge parents to put condoms in their 10-year-old kids' schoolbag at next year's "Sex Culture Festival." I am not exaggerating things. A certain expert said that "sex education should start at the age of nine."

Chinese culture has been conservative in many aspects. Sex was - and still is in some places - a taboo in China. After decades of opening to the outside world, Chinese people have accepted the modern concepts and no longer shun a talk about sex.

It is a blessing for the Chinese nation, for it represents a significant progress in our drive for modernity.

However, some self-styled "experts" seem to be too infatuated with regarding themselves as forerunners of learning, accepting and promoting "modern concepts." Very often, they go too far. Suggesting the idea of giving condoms to 12-year-old kids is such an instance.

They defend their idea by arguing that the teenagers already have some knowledge about sexual behaviors and that giving them condoms in open acknowledgement of their sex awakening can prevent unwanted consequences.

The argument is erroneous.

Admittedly, children of today know much more about sex than their parents when they were young, given the kids' exposure to man-woman intimacies exhibited excessively in all media outlets. However, there is still no social endorsement, either explicit or implicit, of teenage sex in this country. There surely are facts of teenagers having sex but it is all done in secret and most do it with a sense of guilt.

Now if we let condom find its way into the children's schoolbags, it would amount to acquiescence to their puerile attempt at sexual life. Teenagers would try it without scruple. Some would even feel encouraged.

Defenders of "modern sex civilization" may retort: "Why do you want to keep that sense of guilt (about sex) in teenagers?"

I know that a major part in sex education is helping teenagers take sex as a normal human behavior which is nothing shameful and thus the kids are taught to be free from the sense of guilt when it comes to a thought or talk of sex or pubescent masturbation. I fully agree with such understanding but I also think that children should be told to put off their first attempt at sex intercourse until later years when they are fully grown-up both physiologically and psychologically, for instance, when they enter into their twenties.

We have to admit that it is just the remnant of the taboo on sex in traditional Chinese culture that protects the majority of our kids from surrendering to temptations nowadays when connotation of sex is ubiquitous - in movies and magazines, in cyber world and fashion shows and even on sports arenas.

Certainly, there should be no such taboo. But everything has its limit. Call it taboo, or sense of guilt, or scruple, whatever, there must be some limit in the relationship between sex awareness and children's education. The reason is simple: children are not mature, or old enough to voluntarily refrain from instant pleasure for their long-term good. The limit has to be compulsory. Putting condoms in schoolbags crosses that limit.

E-mail: liushinan@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/19/2008 page8)