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Opinion|Our Kids Cannot Learn About Sex Just From Squeamish Gym Teachers
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/opinion/sex-education-consent-middle-school.html
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Guest Essay
Jan. 26, 2025, 6:00 a.m. ET
By Hillary Frank
Ms. Frank is a writer who this month restarted “The Longest Shortest Time,” her podcast about parenting.
Almost two years ago, when my daughter was in the seventh grade, I took her to see the movie adaptation of Judy Blume’s classic novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”
In one scene, Margaret sits in the auditorium of her New Jersey school while the girls in her class watch a filmstrip called “What Every Girl Should Know.” Over a warbly guitar track, a woman with a singsongy voice describes menstruation. “Once a month, a velvety lining of blood and tissue forms in her uterus to make a warm, nutritious place for a baby to grow,” she says. “If a baby is not conceived, the lining is not needed, and so the blood is released.” Margaret and her classmates are grossed out, and in the theater, grown women laughed out loud. “Oh, how far we’ve come since the ’70s!” I thought. But my daughter did not laugh. Instead, she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “This is so much more than we’ve gotten!”
As it turns out, my daughter hadn’t just received less sex ed in 2023 than the fictional Margaret had in 1970; she had gotten none. At the beginning of my daughter’s eighth grade year at her own New Jersey school, I went to the vice principal to ask why they hadn’t been teaching sex ed. The answer he came back with: Health classes at the school are taught by P.E. teachers. And gym teachers are not exactly known for being comfortable discussing sex with middle schoolers.
This discomfort, in part, comes from lack of training. Many gym teachers do not receive the professional development needed to confidently and accurately teach sex ed. And many of them would rather be teaching gym.
Gym teachers aren’t supposed to be who decides whether students learn sex ed, at least not in New Jersey. Sex education here is a state mandate. So while parents can opt their kids out of sex ed, schools are not supposed to be able to opt out of teaching it.
On the list of supposedly mandatory topics is consent. I was in my 40s before I fully grasped the concept of consent. The sex ed I got growing up in Connecticut was fairly comprehensive, but I had only one word for nonconsensual acts: rape. I thought of rape as a very specific type of attack: visibly violent, with a victim audibly saying no.
