Mississippi Sex Ed Class Compares Women to Dirty Pieces of Chocolate [View all]
By Amanda Hess
In Mississippi, 76 percent of teenagers will have sex before they leave high school. But until this year—when the state finally implemented a policy requiring schools to teach sexual education in class—many teachers refused to discuss the topic with students. Now, some parents are worried that Mississippi’s new sex ed curriculum is more damaging than just not saying anything at all.
According to the Los Angeles Times, teachers in Oxford, Miss., are asking “students to unwrap a piece of chocolate, pass it around class and observe how dirty it became.” Says Marie Barnard, a public health worker and parent: “They're using the Peppermint Pattie to show that a girl is no longer clean or valuable after she's had sex—that she's been used. … That shouldn't be the lesson we send kids about sex.”
Comparing women to disposable foods or personal hygiene items is an old abstinence-only scare tactic that’s still occasionally passed off as education in schools around the country. Last year, a school district in Texas instructed teachers to compare people who have had sex to dirty toothbrushes and sticks of gum. “People want to marry a virgin, just like they want a virgin toothbrush or stick of gum,” the guide read. Kidnapping victim turned advocate Elizabeth Smart spoke out against this damaging analogy last year, saying:
I remember in school one time, I had a teacher who was talking about abstinence. And she said, ‘Imagine you’re a stick of gum. When you engage in sex, that’s like getting chewed. And if you do that lots of times, you’re going to become an old piece of gum, and who is going to want you after that?’ Well, that’s terrible. No one should ever say that. But for me, I thought, ‘I’m that chewed-up piece of gum.’ Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away. And that’s how easy it is to feel you no longer have worth. Your life no longer has value.
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/04/03/mississippi_sex_ed_class_compares_women_to_dirty_peppermint_patties.html?
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