LAST WEEK LAST NIGHT: Sex Miseducation

I could have listened to John Oliver dig into Donald Trump for the “blood coming of her wherever” crack over and over, like a six year old’s insatiable desire to ride “It’s Small World” in Disneyland over and over and over again. But we all have to grow up sometime. So, too, the Republican party. (But I’m not holding my breath. Let’s face it, in 2015 the only people who still hurl on-the-rag insults at women are arrested adolescents/perma-virgins and Donald Trump, current frontrunner for the Republican party nomination for the presidency of the United States. The only discernible difference between the two is that 13 year old boys actually understand menstruation as a biological imperative not just a verbal cudgel for witless shrivel-dicked misogynists. But I digress.) There are admittedly many downsides to ‘growing up’ but it does has its advantages, chief among them is finally being read in on the secret knowledge of the mechanics of human sexuality, also known as ‘sex education.’

Last night John Oliver pointed out that 22 states mandate sex education but only 13 require that class to be medically accurate. The sex ed I received in high school wasn’t so much a class as it was a long series of scare tactics demonizing outside-of-marriage sex and raining fire and brimstone down upon on those who dared. Plus, a slideshow of STD nightmares. And a heaping-helping of slut-shaming. In last night’s segment, Oliver shared a video from one school district’s curriculum vitae that compared a newly married woman to a pair of used up, dirty tennis sneakers. This was followed up by a clip of former “missing blonde” Elizabeth Smart, who was repeatedly sexually assaulted at the age of 14 during her nightmarish abduction, recalling how she once heard a teacher tell young girls that they were like gum and if they had sex they were being chewed up into an old, undesirable piece of gum. Glaringly absent in today’s sex ed classes is any discussion of the absolute crucial-ness — legally, morally and emotionally — of consent. Without this education teenagers are left to make up the rules as they go along. And anyone counting on teenagers to write the rules about ANYTHING, is completely, uh, fucked. Add alcohol and frat houses and naivete and raging hormones and, voila, you have our current epidemic of campus rape. So thanks for that, American educational system. — MEGAN MATUZAK