The missing chapter

Camille Paglia points out that for all the obsessive public school interest in sexually indoctrinating young boys and girls, the one thing they don't see fit to teach the girls is the basic realities of fertility:

Fertility is the missing chapter in sex education. Sobering facts about women’s declining fertility after their 20s are being withheld from ambitious young women, who are propelled along a career track devised for men.

The refusal by public schools’ sex-education programs to acknowledge gender differences is betraying both boys and girls. The genders should be separated for sex counseling. It is absurd to avoid the harsh reality that boys have less to lose from casual serial sex than do girls, who risk pregnancy and whose future fertility can be compromised by disease. Boys need lessons in basic ethics and moral reasoning about sex (for example, not taking advantage of intoxicated dates), while girls must learn to distinguish sexual compliance from popularity.

Above all, girls need life-planning advice. Too often, sex education defines pregnancy as a pathology, for which the cure is abortion. Adolescent girls must think deeply about their ultimate aims and desires. If they want both children and a career, they should decide whether to have children early or late. There are pros, cons and trade-offs for each choice.

Of course, teaching girls the facts about fertility and the demand curve for their sexual attractiveness flies directly in the face of both feminist ideology and the Female Imperative. So, young women are deliberately being kept in the dark in order to ensure that their choices are uninformed.

How very empowering! Empowering for whom, exactly?

Posted in: Female Imperative