Discounts Pharmacy

I’ve always taken the position that the internet is the catalyst for a major cultural shift in how we treat sexuality — and that the shift will be toward healthier, more relaxed attitudes about the whole shebang.

And yet here we are in the middle of the “information age” and a lot of us still lack the basic knowledge we need to keep ourselves alive, much less about reaching our full potential for rich, joyful sex lives.

According to a survey published this week by FPA, the U.K.-based Family Planning Association, almost a third of British adults thought that a woman could use post-coital exercising, douching or urinating to prevent pregnancy.

Half the participants didn’t know that sperm can live for a week in a vagina, and a quarter didn’t know that pre-ejaculate does indeed contain sperm.

“People don’t come out of school armed with a really good foundation of basic information (about sexual health),” says Rebecca Findlay, FPA spokeswoman. “They draw from a variety of sources, the media, friends, family or wherever, and because they don’t have a solid foundation, the myths start coming together.”

So on one hand, we have various groups on the sexual frontier, forging a world of sexual acceptance and pleasure, challenging our binary ideas of gender and relationships, and building communities where people with “alternate” tastes can come together.

On the other hand, we have smart, otherwise educated adults making elementary mistakes around sex that can have serious consequences, like unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Anne Weyman, chief executive at FPA, says that one in five pregnancies end in abortion in the U.K.; that’s about the same as in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute. I simply cannot believe that all or even most of those women prefer to terminate rather than prevent a pregnancy. So why aren’t they taking precautions?

Maybe they thought they were.

It’s hard to reconcile how easy it is to find good, solid information about sex — online and elsewhere — with how uninformed a large group of people seem to be. Part of it is that we don’t know what we don’t know, so we don’t go looking to fill the gaps. Another is that we don’t treat sex as a normal everyday activity that almost everyone will engage in at some point, and therefore worthy of continuous education.

Sex saturates our media, drives new technologies, enters the economy in creative ways and heavily influences who we choose as mates and parents of our future children. It’s a basic human need. But we can’t teach it with any kind of thoroughness because someone might get offended, and woe betide the teachers who stray from reproductive biology into more complex questions of relationships, gender, politics or pleasure.

“In the U.K., we have this strange relationship with sex,” Findlay says. “It’s everywhere, but we get embarrassed talking about it. We talk about it in moral terms or like it’s something funny. We don’t talk about it as a normal fact of life and just get the information so we can have an enjoyable, pleasurable sex life without the worry and without the risk. It makes it more difficult for people to act normally about sex.”

I’ve always taken the position that the internet is the catalyst for a major cultural shift in how we treat sexuality — and that the shift will be toward healthier, more relaxed attitudes about the whole shebang.

And yet here we are in the middle of the “information age” and a lot of us still lack the basic knowledge we need to keep ourselves alive, much less about reaching our full potential for rich, joyful sex lives.

According to a survey published this week by FPA, the U.K.-based Family Planning Association, almost a third of British adults thought that a woman could use post-coital exercising, douching or urinating to prevent pregnancy.

Half the participants didn’t know that sperm can live for a week in a vagina, and a quarter didn’t know that pre-ejaculate does indeed contain sperm.

“People don’t come out of school armed with a really good foundation of basic information (about sexual health),” says Rebecca Findlay, FPA spokeswoman. “They draw from a variety of sources, the media, friends, family or wherever, and because they don’t have a solid foundation, the myths start coming together.”

So on one hand, we have various groups on the sexual frontier, forging a world of sexual acceptance and pleasure, challenging our binary ideas of gender and relationships, and building communities where people with “alternate” tastes can come together.

On the other hand, we have smart, otherwise educated adults making elementary mistakes around sex that can have serious consequences, like unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Anne Weyman, chief executive at FPA, says that one in five pregnancies end in abortion in the U.K.; that’s about the same as in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute. I simply cannot believe that all or even most of those women prefer to terminate rather than prevent a pregnancy. So why aren’t they taking precautions?

Maybe they thought they were.

It’s hard to reconcile how easy it is to find good, solid information about sex — online and elsewhere — with how uninformed a large group of people seem to be. Part of it is that we don’t know what we don’t know, so we don’t go looking to fill the gaps. Another is that we don’t treat sex as a normal everyday activity that almost everyone will engage in at some point, and therefore worthy of continuous education.

Sex saturates our media, drives new technologies, enters the economy in creative ways and heavily influences who we choose as mates and parents of our future children. It’s a basic human need. But we can’t teach it with any kind of thoroughness because someone might get offended, and woe betide the teachers who stray from reproductive biology into more complex questions of relationships, gender, politics or pleasure.

“In the U.K., we have this strange relationship with sex,” Findlay says. “It’s everywhere, but we get embarrassed talking about it. We talk about it in moral terms or like it’s something funny. We don’t talk about it as a normal fact of life and just get the information so we can have an enjoyable, pleasurable sex life without the worry and without the risk. It makes it more difficult for people to act normally about sex.”