John Oliver takes on Sex Education

After a look into the state of sex education classes in America–which is both pretty depressing, and includes a look at some classic sex education videos from the 60s and 70s–John Oliver enlists the help of Laverne Cox, Jack McBrayer, Nick Offerman, Kristen Schaal, Kumail Nanjiani, Aisha Tyler, Megan Mullally, and… Jonathan Banks to create a sex-ed video I would have been very happy to see when I was in school.

There is no way we’d allow any other academic program to consistently fail to prepare students for life after school. And Human Sexuality, unlike Calculus, is something you actually need to know about for the rest of your life.

Ok, seriously, a video about menstruation that implies getting your period makes you better at bowling. Seriously?!

I vaguely remember being taught sex-ed in the Georgia public school system. We were taken to the Fernbank Science Center, divided up into groups by gender¹ and the boys were shown a film about becoming sexually mature. It wasn’t super old, but I’d still guess it was from the 70s. While it was educational, what most of us remembered that day was one of the “toughest” kids in our class passed out during the movie.

I remember getting better information about sexual health when I came out in college than I did in secondary schooling. My health teacher–who was mainly the PE/sports coach–seemed more concerned with trying to find out if I was cheating on my assignments² than what their contents were. It was just assumed that incoming freshmen hadn’t gotten enough–or any–sex-ed classes before getting to college.

I don’t recall there being any uproar as a kid about being taught sex-ed, but I didn’t get “the talk” at home, so my parents were probably happy to have that little task offloaded to the schools. And it’s common sense, while people might say a lack of sex-ed classes leads to promiscuity, it mostly just leads to ignorance and kids not knowing how to take care of themselves and more outrage stories about Bristol Palin. 🙄