Disclaimer: This sample was made purely out of convenience, the question asked was very broad, and there is absolutely no scientific merit to anything I'm about to report. (just in case someone important reads this.... you never know...)
Now, don't misunderstand me, I am not implying that the teenagers in the study we just reviewed were not "real people". But when you read studies, you always wonder who those people are, if they are like you, where they come from etc. So I asked people I knew personally, just to see if there was any kind of correlation between the two. In hindsight, I probably should have asked the question AFTER I read the article, and then I would have actually been able to word it in a way that I might have gotten similar responses. However, in the interst of human curiousity, and the fact that I promised a friend that she could have a cool, fake name on my blog, I'm going to report them anyways.
I asked the following question to a few select friends via a private Facebook message:
"What do you wish you would have known? The article is about what you wish you would have known before sexual and romantic relationships, but feel free to share anything you wish you would have known."
This is what I got back:
Ner Man wrote: "I wish I knew more about the sex industry (at large) ranging from the “risqué” to the commercial (e.g. personal hygiene to toys and everything between) but also the social constructs surrounding sex so why people react in different ways to talking about sex, why certain ideologies prevail, what are the cultural differences of how sex is interpreted/perceived/discussed/taught and what has influenced these cultural differences."
Danny Zuko wrote: "I wish I would have been taught straight up about how it all works. None of that birds and bees shit. You know nothing about it and you like you should know about it and you may get embarrassed to ask questions."
Ariel Mermaid wrote: "What I learned from my parents: when 2 people love each other very much, they have babies. Great job parents!... I would laugh at the jokes the girls made and generally tried to fit in... I just wish I had have known anything so my laughs would have been real."
Regina Philangie wrote (a novel):
"There isn't "1 thing I'd wish I'd known"....it's just that I wish Ontario had a sex ed program that was
1. integrated. a little bit every year. start em slow when they're young. a unit every year or something.
1. integrated. a little bit every year. start em slow when they're young. a unit every year or something.
2. accessible. this is the one time I might be in favour of online learning. In a dream world, kids would be comfortable talking about this stuff out loud but I think the reality is little humans aren't mature enough for that until they reach their late teens-20's. (even then...) If there was a comprehensive online learning program kids could even log in from home if they really had a lot of questions..there would of course be homework so they'd HAVE to actually go through the material and boy do I mean comprehensive. If we took the whole sex ed experience, written by nurses and doctors and psychiatrists and sex ed teachers and specialists...and gave kids real, reliable information and made it accessible.... that would be so amazing.
3. LGBTQ friendly."
Tinkerbell wrote: "I wish I knew more about contraception, like how the pill works. Also remember in grade 8 when we asked your mom if we could get pregnant for swallowing cum
hahahahaha."
Empty wrote: "I wish I had been given more facts about who has sex when. Like first time X percentage of people at X age... And how many people people actually sleep with, I feel like we got the impression everyone was doing it with everyone (when really not that many were)"
Study buddy wrote: "I wish I had known the symptoms and treatments of UTIS (urinary tract infection) and yeast infections... so that you don't freak thinking you have an STD when really all you need is to drink cranberry juice :/."
Gangsta G wrote: "I wish I would have known how expensive birth control is. And the HPV vaccine. It's 150$ a pop! And you need 3!"
Blunt Blunterson wrote: "I wish sex education would have been taught by someone more relatable, like maybe an older student, so we felt more comfortable asking questions."
So, as you can see, there are many things that the people around us wish they would have known. This is what young people actually want to know, and it is clearly implied that not all teenagers are having sex. In fact, our social construction of teenagers as hypersexual seems to create an illusion that all teenagers are or should be having sex, when this is simply not true. It would do us good to see what youth think about sex and all things sexually related, and implement those things into our programs. It is clear that there is a pretty big discrepancy between what teenagers are thought to do and know, and what they actually do and know.
Thank you to all who contributed to my poll, I hope you enjoy your personalized fake names.
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