It’s adults, not teens, who need a sex talk

‘People honestly think IVF is a cure-all!’ my friend who runs a fertility clinic told me. ‘I want to shake them! I want to say, ”Do you know what it involves? Do you know how heart-in-mouth horrible it is?”‘

 

By November 11, 2014

There’s been a lot of hoo‑hah recently about Department of Education plans to tell 13-year-olds that it’s perfectly healthy to go at it like rabbits on Viagra. I totally understand the hoo-hah (readers under the age of say, 25, should note that ”hoo-hah’’ is not a euphemism). At 13 I found topless pictures of Take That terrifying, and had you asked me what oral sex was I might have ventured that it involved talking on the phone.
My sex education was as fumbling as a first sexual experience. Twenty excruciating minutes of the science teacher trying to shove a condom on a banana – to this day, I still don’t know how to put a condom on a banana – followed by a class warning of the dangers of Toxic Shock Syndrome. After that, it was only me, a copy of Just Seventeen, and the endless innuendo of adolescence.
At 34, I can’t say I’m much more advanced. I won’t go into my sexual knowledge in any great detail, because a) there isn’t really any and b) you might be eating your breakfast, possibly even a banana. But suffice to say, it is pretty basic. Like my grasp of the French language, I have picked up what I can along the way in order to get on.
I don’t think this is particularly unusual in women and men of my age – or indeed of people of my parents’ age, or my grandparents’ age. When it comes to blush-inducing subjects such as intercourse and – gasp! – foreplay, we have mostly had to learn at the university of life. Given the current push for compulsory sex education, I am almost certain that there are 14-year-olds out there who know more about fornication than I do.
Which brings me to the main thrust of my argument (pun intended), which is: maybe it is adults who need proper sex education, rather than children. I mention this because over the weekend, the father of modern-day reproductive medicine gave an interview outlining his views on its future, and it perfectly summed up the idiocy of grown-ups when it comes to the subject of sex – even grown-ups as knowledgeable as Carl Djerassi, the 91-year-old inventor of the Pill.  

Prof Djerassi told The Telegraph that by 2050, we will only have sex for fun, with fertile women relying on IVF to get pregnant. “The vast majority of women who will choose IVF in the future will be fertile women who have frozen their eggs and delayed pregnancy,” he said. “Women in their twenties will first choose this approach as insurance, providing them with freedom in the light of professional decisions or the absence of the right partner or the inexorable ticking of the biological clock… IVF will start to become a normal non-coital method of having children.” These comments are at best misleading, at worst insulting to all the couples who have to go through IVF for medical reasons rather than it being a lifestyle choice. Plus, they help to perpetuate a myth that leaves many thousands of people in despair every year – the myth that fertility can in some way be controlled, switched on and off or stored up for future use like a Sky+ Box. Still, it amazes me how many otherwise intelligent people there are out there – people with degrees and important jobs – who don’t know that a woman is born with all her eggs, or have the faintest idea what assisted fertility techniques such as IVF involve. I was on a panel a couple of weeks ago at a parenting event, when the topic of egg-freezing came up with regard to Facebook and Apple offering the service to their staff. The man on the panel said that the uproar surrounding it was sexist, because the companies also offered men the chance to freeze their sperm. But without wanting to put too fine a point on it, extracting sperm is far easier than extracting an egg from a woman, which involves pumping her full of drugs for weeks (sometimes injected, sometimes administered through a nasal spray) before removing her eggs via a needle inserted into her vagina. The most recent figures show that in the UK, only 20 babies have ever been born from frozen eggs. I wonder if Facebook and Apple offer their employers that advice, too? I don’t want to sound like a smart-arse here. I only know all of this because I have a friend who runs a fertility clinic in central London, and every time I see her she is slack-jawed with amazement at all the highly educated, highly paid, highly functioning couples who pass through her doors every day with only the most basic notion of reproduction. “People honestly think IVF is a cure-all!” she squealed the other day. “I want to shake them! I want to say, ‘Do you know what it involves? Do you know how heart-in-mouth horrible it is?’” These are the lessons I wish someone at school had taught me, way back when. These are the lessons I hope today’s 13-year-olds are learning; lessons not just about contraception and the terrors of chlamydia, but the cruelties of basic, bog-standard biology. New life: Christina Schmid, whose husband died while defusing a bomb in Afghanistan, now has a baby daughter Courage of Christina who learnt to love again On Armistice Day, the pictures of Christina Schmid with her new baby, Isabelle Rose, must give us all hope. Schmid’s late husband, Olaf, or Oz, was killed in Afghanistan five years ago. He was a bomb disposal expert who had made 70 devices safe by the time he died on his last day of duty. When his coffin was driven through Wootton Bassett, Christina stood and applauded the funeral cortège. When she started her relationship with Mark Clarke, three years after Oz’s death, there were some who were uneasy about her moving on. This is the fate of the widow: always grieving, her head must be bowed in respect for the love she has lost. But Christina has refused to play that part, because it simply feeds in to the hands of her husband’s killers. “If losing Oz taught me anything, it’s to cherish what’s precious to you and live in the moment,” she has said. Appearing on the front of Hello! with a new life in her arms and a broad smile on her face is her act of defiance. For that, it is she who should be applauded. Spirit of commerce alive and well for Christmas Am I a Scrooge for feeling so cynical about all the Christmas adverts clogging up the TV screens at the moment? I suppose I should be thankful that this spectacle has at least done away with our national obsession over the Christmas number one, if only because we can expect it to be the song from the John Lewis advert. And, speaking of John Lewis, we were there at the weekend to buy my daughter a pair of shoes. My mum, who happened to be staying, was with us. As we went up the escalator, she raved about the “superiority of John Lewis over other shops, because its Christmas ads are about evoking emotions rather than just selling you things”. Had I imagined the penguins in the window, all playing on scooters or roller skates available in the toy department? Maybe. When we got to the shoe department, my mother was over the moon to see Monty’s Den, and led my daughter over to show her its delights. First we had to get through all the penguin merchandise, from pillows to pyjamas. Once we reached Monty’s Den, we noticed that the children inside were bouncing on giant £95 soft toys, while watching the advert on a screen – or “through Samsung technology”, as a sign helpfully told us. My daughter looked unimpressed. In fact, if she could talk properly, she might have said, “Bah humbug.”

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