Let’s talk about sex

No, I’m not gonna be takin’ dirty. I just want to ask you a personal question. If you don’t mind.

When was the first time anyone talked to you about sex?

Was it with your friends at school, behind the bike shed? Was it when she said “I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours’? (Nobody ever asked me to show them mine…and this at a time when the whole playground seemed to be showing each other various parts of their anatomy in an orgy of infantile exhibitionism. After a couple of years on the sidelines, I got a bit of a complex about it).

Was it your parents? Did your mum and dad sit you down one day after tea and, red faced and uncomfortable, try and tell you that, well, ‘You know, son, er, well, those noises you occasionally here on a Sunday morning when mummy and daddy are having a lie-in are not fighting – like you thought – it was, er, um, you know…’ And all the time you just wanted to get back to playing with your Scalextric (this was back in the pre-history, Jurassic days before Playstation).

Or was it when the teacher finally, and after much playground pre-publicity (‘he’s gonna be talking about Doing It’ snigger, snigger) strode into biology class with a couple of rabbits, and tried to persuade you that, on the night of your honeymoon, you and your wife will indeed be acting like rabbits, fortified with champagne, carrots and lettuce leaves.

Sex education in Poland

Yes, I have finally got the point of this post. According to the annual, international survey by Durex (adobe), the average age Poles hear about the ‘birds and the bees’ is when they are 13 years old (‘birds and bees’ is a rather strange euphemism, when you think about it – male birds and bees don’t even have dicks, and most bees never actually ‘do it’ at all – never: they are as celibate as a priest on bromide. Bee communities have special ‘gigolo’ bees, whose main purpose in life is to service the Queen – a bit like the UK’s Prince Phillip, in fact, but let’s not go there).

Thirteen years old. If they waited that late in London, these days, then kids would be hearing about the ‘facts of life’ about two years after they had first indulged in them – if, that is, they can find enough time for it, in-between binge drinking, breaking into the next door neighbor’s, and scoring the latest joint, or maybe something stronger. Modern day, twenty-first century kids are truly the devil incarnate.

But if they did first talk about sex at 13, then who talked to them about it? It certainly wasn’t their teacher at school.

Four years ago, during the election campaign, politicians could talk about nothing else but sex, sex and more sex. Should sex education be put on the syllabus, Polish moral guardians asked themselves over and over? In the election last year, the subject had disappeared. Perhaps they were too busy talking about gays – the new Polish Satin in satin pants.

Four years ago, however, sex was at the top of the list for politicians seeking to get elected, alongside inflation, unemployment, corruption, the usual…

The ex-communist SLD, which won the election in 2001, came to office armed with proposals for compulsory sex education in schools. .

In 2005, when they got unceremoniously kicked out of office, compulsory sex education was still not on the school curricular.

The problem was: what should be taught in schools? Should we teach kids ‘natural methods’ of ‘family planning’? (crossing your fingers and hoping for the best!); should we teach that sex should only be indulged between married couples? And what about sexual diseases? And so on…

For arch-Catholics, textbooks by well-known sexologists such as Zbigniew Lew-Starowicz – which are much like the old Masters and Johnson, ‘Joy of Sex’ books – are full of dangerous western liberal ideas and moral and sexual promiscuity. Catholics would much prefer books by people like Teresa Krol, with its lecturers on the dangers of sex, and the ‘sin’ of abortion.

The sex education debate is part of the Polish ‘culture wars’.

So, due to the politicization of sex education, politicians have found themselves at an impasse, and sex education has been left to those embarrassed parents.

Unfortunately, as we all know, the red faced parent is the last person who wants to tackle this thorny subject. A poll by CBOS found that though 57% of kids said they could confide in their mothers, only 20% said dad was as approachable.

“The level of knowledge about sexuality is embarrassingly low in Poland,” Wanda Nowacka of the Women and Family Planning NGO, told Trybuna. She presented the newspaper with a series of letters she had received from Polish teenagers. One said: “Is it possible to get pregnant in ways other than sex?” Or another wrote: “I have the symptoms of being pregnant, but I have never had sex.”

But kids are still having sex, even though some of them might not actually know that they are. Another poll in 2002 found that the average age of ‘loosing your cherry’ in Poland was 18 years and four months. This is relatively late by British standards (I lost my ‘cherry’ years when I was 16 years and three months! It was a major disappointment, but I can’t blame my rabbit assisted biology teacher for that, alas) but more and more kids are starting earlier here. Nineteen percent of 15-16 year old kids have already had sex in Poland.

Sex education is taught in some schools, usually at 7 a.m. before the main school day starts. But most kids are left to find out stuff for themselves, from embarrassed parents, or back behind the bike shed.

And with the new PiS government, with its arch-catholic political support, sex education will not be appearing on the formal school curriculum anytime soon.

But isn’t it time – the 21st century, no less - that kids got the facts? Until they do Polish youth will simply be fumbling in the dark.