Let's talk about sex, bao bao

• Source: The Global Times
• [20:48 June 02 2009]
• Comments

Children watch in embarrassment as a couple kiss at a shopping mall for a kissing competition in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, on Valentine’s Day, 2006.

By Zhang Yuchen

No students appear on the footage, but their titters can be heard. Holding a pink stocking in one hand and an empty mineral water bottle in the other, the vice director of the Moral Education Office of Dongguan Experimental Middle School in Guangdong Province has racked up several million hits online with his vivid video, spoken in colorful Dongguan dialect.

But the middle school teacher’s three-minute correct condom-use video has been derided by some bloggers as “disgraceful and misleading,” while others applauded Xie Runhua’s innovative teaching method as “direct,” “vivid” and “effective.”

Xie told the Shanghai Morning Post he had found students ignorant of sexual basics and contraception and decided to organize a special class in response. He asked one of his students to shoot the lecture and upload the video to educate more students.

Not just Xie, but many teachers have met with opposition from parents fearing frank discussions will make their children more curious about sex.

“Kids may be horrified if they know all the secrets of the human body at the age of 9 or 10,” a 26-year-old teacher told the Beijing News.

“But sex education at an earlier age is absolutely necessary.”

Girls fall easy victims

Many young girls believe abortions are a simple, quick and painless procedure, claimed the Beijing News reporter Tao Chun. It is younger women who tend to be most uninformed about the risks of abortions or catching sexually-transmitted diseases, she wrote.

After decades of taboo, China’s parents often feel out of their depth in handling these long-buried issues: In most cases, parents struggle to communicate with their fast-growing children, said Deng Jun, a doctor specializing in sex education at Beijing Second Hospital and one of China’s leading authorities on these issues. Most of the 19 parents interviewed needed to first educate themselves before being able to talk to teenagers about pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Panicked parents have been dragging their primary school-age children to health clinics after hearing of relationships with members of the opposite sex, wrote Tao Chun: 84 percent of 600 Beijing 13-16 year-olds admitted having no knowledge of sex in a 2005 survey by Deng.

One student reportedly told the Beijing Times, “Teachers always turned over the sex education page in the biology textbook and asked us to read it at home.”