Internet can teach kids sex education

The Supreme Court did the right thing the other day by saying it’s silly for Congress to try to control all the pornography that’s available to young people on the Internet.

The Internet is so huge that it’s not remotely possible, or legally possible, to control everything that comes into American Web sites from pornography producers around the world. Plus, there’s that pesky little problem with the First Amendment. Who wants legislators from Biloxi or Cincinnati deciding what we can access in New York City?

To keep our children safe from pornography, the Court seemed to be saying, we’ll have to rely on those Web filters — which can sometimes weed out the educational stuff as well — and we’ll have to keep a closer watch on our kids.

But the fuss over the Supreme Court decision has me wondering: Is a young person really going to be traumatized by catching a glimpse of a couple having sex online? A 2002 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 70 percent of 15- to 17-year-olds who used the Internet stumbled upon some pornography, but it suggested that most of them weren’t particularly upset by it.

I certainly don’t want to see 10-year-olds or 15-year-olds spending hours a day surfing Internet porn sites. But it would have been awfully helpful to me and my contemporaries when we were growing up if we’d been able to go to the Internet for answers to the questions we had about sex.

Our parents were useless on the subject. They said things like “Your body is your temple” and “Do it and you die.” But they were far too squeamish to answer our most basic questions, and we knew enough not to put them on the spot. There was no sex education in school, and in the occasional discussion groups we had at church, nobody talked about anything we wanted to know about. Such as how, exactly, did people have sex? How did it feel? And what did the other sex’s private parts look like? What information we got came from the boys, who got it from the male sex magazines or from older guys, and it portrayed sex as something that was dirty, shameful and primarily something that boys “did” to girls.

Now that kids are exposed to highly sexualized images all over the media, we adults still can’t seem to talk to them frankly about sex. In another 2002 study, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that while parents gave themselves high grades for talking to their kids about sexual topics, their kids mostly gave them Fs. Meanwhile, under pressure from the Bush administration, many public schools are promoting only sex education programs that stress abstinence.

There’s nothing wrong with encouraging kids to delay sex until marriage. But it is wrong to keep telling them that this is the norm, when it hasn’t been for generations. It’s also wrong to equate teenage sexual activity only with disease, unwanted pregnancy and death, and not also with pleasure and healthy intimacy, and with none of the aforementioned problems if one takes the proper precautions. When we give young people only half the story, we lose whatever credibility we had.

“Kids are desperate for accurate, helpful information that is not preaching to them about shame and fear and guilt, or some hyper-sensualized fantasy, like so many of the pornography sites,” says Michael McGee, vice president of education and social marketing for the Planned Parenthood Foundation of America.

“They want something to help them figure this stuff out. They want some real talk about real life.”

No, we don’t want our kids watching porn on the Internet, but if the Internet can educate them about sex in a healthy way, then I’m for it.