But the same time, only last July, students at a Melbourne high school were being handed “educational” material that claimed that girls who had sex were like stickytape that loses its stickiness.

Anyone trying to convince themselves that our society is maturing in its sexual conversation need only consider that it was only last week esteemed Australian sex educator Cyndi Darnell found herself suspended by Facebook for sharing a viral video explaining how sex education works in Norway because – shock horror – the video depicted an actual penis in order to talk about one.

It sounds ridiculous to insist that the derivation of mutual pleasure should be the central message of sex education, but it’s a message that, unheeded, has outcomes among young people that are both painful and dispiriting.

Fairfax reported on Thursday widespread research findings that show “a quarter of all young people say they have ‘unwanted sex’, due to feeling pressure frightened or being drunk.” Another report featured in the Conversation that surveyed kids 16-18 discovered “women were repeatedly asked for anal sex by their male partners, and men’s and women’s accounts also raise the real possibility of of unwanted penetration for young women – who are sometimes put in situations where they are penetrated anally without their consent.”

There’s an excellent line in the book Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley, in which the protagonist opines that, “Sexuality itself was sometimes understood, by the women in my family, as a kind of violence that must be submitted to, buried deep in the privacy of domestic life.” It’s a tradition that informed much of my own generation’s fumbling. Thank god for the La Trobe education initiative, so that future generations may be spared.

I remember watching Danielle in that bus, talking about sex, pushing her bruise, and reflecting on my own early experiences and thinking: “It should all be a lot more fun than this.”

Curated by Erbe
Original Article