Up until I was about halfway through my first year of university, everything I knew about sex I’d learned from a TV show.
Late-night Sex and the City reruns became my sex ed class, and Carrie Bradshaw my sex ed teacher. Bradshaw taught me how a typical single gal acts, provided me with a dictionary of proper sexual terms as opposed to crass slang, and, above all, taught me about how sex works.
To summarize, I was completely clueless.
My parents never gave me “the talk” and, being a part of the Catholic school system my whole childhood, my sex education curriculum never extended further than “Sex is bad, mkay?”
Now that Sex: A tell-all exhibition has opened at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa, a small portion of the city’s population is up in arms over how the half an hour spent in the exhibit will forever corrupt our youth. These people are writing op-eds and littering Facebook with comments, letting their outrage be known while taxpayer dollars are being spent on turning our young men into savage sex beasts and our young women into filthy little harlots.
The other side of the debate says the exhibit will teach kids about their sexuality — a topic evidently so simple, especially to post-pubescent adolescents, it can all be explained by a walk-through museum exhibit. The problem with both sides of the argument is they’re forgetting who the target audience is — teenagers.
The side aggressively arguing against the exhibit doesn’t seem to realize that the stuff being taught in the exhibit could probably be found elsewhere. I’m willing to bet serious money that most of the 12-year-olds running their curious little paws over the now-notorious mannequin with the light-up tatas have already run those curious little paws over their keyboards to spell out “YouPorn.com” at some point when they were home alone, after they’d learned how to delete browsing history.
Teenagers going through here may LOL and scoff at some of the display’s contents to make sure their friends know they’re cool enough to know what “clitoris” means, but on the inside, they may discover things they were confused about before. At the same time, it’s such a confusing time for some of them, and sex is such an awkward topic for most, that an exhibit in a museum, no matter how well-orchestrated, couldn’t possibly touch on everything necessary to paint a clear picture for those it’s trying to help.
Sure, an exhibit in a science museum put together by scientists and sex experts is a better place for kids to learn about sex than Sasha Grey’s latest on-camera escapades, and certainly better than those god awful prime-time CW dramadies, but is it as important as its defenders are saying? Probably not.
It’s a worthy exhibit that deserves its place in the museum, but is in no way a quick teach for a lesson that takes years to figure out.
— Cassie Aylward
Third-year journalism
