“Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die” is an iconic line from Mean Girls. It is also a devastatingly accurate portrayal of American high school sex education in the decade or so leading up to its 2004 release—a moment when society was still reeling from the twin epidemics of AIDS and teen pregnancy, and a plurality of people still held to the now-quaint opinion that sex outside of marriage was the purview of sinners and sluts.
As an elder millennial who attended high school in the 1990s, I remember these classes well. There was one of those infamous demonstrations in which people who had sex were equated to lint-covered pieces of Scotch tape, and another in which we all spent an afternoon “exchanging fluids”—in the form of cups containing a sodium hydroxide solution—at the end of which everyone, save the “abstinent” kids who had kept their cups unadulterated, was revealed to have metaphorical chlamydia. There was the pervasive sense, reinforced by every adult authority figure, that just looking at a penis without protection—for the penis, for your eyeballs, or both—would be enough to get you pregnant and give you AIDS. And the sexism! Oh, the sexism: Boys, we were told, wanted to have sex because they enjoyed it; for girls, on the other hand, sex was something they did because they didn’t respect themselves and just wanted guys to like them.
Clearly, things have changed. This week, I found myself perusing the YouTube offerings of a nonprofit called Fact Forward, a youth health organization in South Carolina which partners with school districts, healthcare providers, and the juvenile justice system to offer sex education classes for young people. The video that caught my eye is called Burn, which tells the story of two teenagers, James and Melissa, who meet at a movie night hosted by a mutual friend. Both have been thoroughly evangelized-to about the importance of using protection (“You last so much longer!” says one of James’s friends), and there are condoms literally everywhere; Melissa, apparently a notorious slut, has been warned by her friends that James is a jerk and a cad, and gifted a box of Trojans specifically for this occasion. But nevertheless, and despite having met five minutes ago, the pair have unprotected sex on their friend’s kitchen counter (rude!), after which James flees into the night, leaving Melissa devastated, even though she was explicitly warned of this exact outcome less than 24 hours ago.
