Sex is sacred; hell when we were kids, a kissing scene had us searching for bacteria on the floor until it was over. In an ideal setting those days, sex was reserved for those conjugated in holy matrimony to make children and maybe have some fun.
Any pre-marital or extra-marital affair was met with public condemnation and in a village setting, the erring couple was ostracized. Sex was never talked about in public, even our genitals we’re given names like pee-pee, rat and so on. Our parents are guardians of this era and continue to keep sex education in the background because the holy book should teach us.
With the advent of social media and smartphones, sexual content is readily available with almost no regulations. Even in music videos and family movies, there’s an increase in sexual innuendos. The average 14-year-old has access to a smartphone with little guidance and no holy book to hold their minds. I often wonder whether our parents leave sex education to the churches or mosques because it’s unimaginable to picture a pastor or Imam educating the congregation on safe sex and abstinence. The vacuum is inadvertently occupied by an outside source- good or bad.
Parents must understand that children are now growing at unprecedented rates, maturing beyond their ages, far more than they did. In fact, many of us know more than our parents think we know. In the face of all these sexually explicit content available even when unsolicited, parents must begin to teach children about sex. The age of the first sexual activity, for the most part, is sliding down, meaning people are becoming sexually active at very tender ages. In most cases, we’ve perfected the art of playing the holy, untainted child at home. Increasing teenage pregnancy coupled with indiscriminate abortions are some effects of lack of sex education.
We know more at our age than we’d have known fifty years ago, thus, topics like sex is no longer sacred to many adolescents whatever the mentality of our parents are. It means parents must flow with the tide and teach children about sex, abstinence and effects of pre-marital and unsafe sexual intercourse. Sex is no longer as sacred and we must face this hard fact and act accordingly. In my time, pornography was, unfortunately, the prevalent way through which my friends learned about sex and how it even happened, I had thought sleeping on the same bed with a girl could get her pregnant. Now, those my age then probably have boyfriends and girlfriends and significantly more knowledge about sex.
Churches, Mosques and schools would not teach sex education and as a result, the onus falls on the primary unit of the society-the family. Our parents must decipher how to reduce the weight of the word ‘sex’ in their mouths for them to effectively educate our children and adolescents on sex education before the word teaches them in its unconventional way.
Written by Godson Onyeka