THE light came on upstairs this week.
Politicians and youth workers jumped on their soap boxes and declared that sex education in schools needed to include information on the emotional and relational effects of having sex.
At last.
About time someone acknowledged that the bodily act cannot be separated from the emotional and that, dare I say it, sex is a spiritual experience.
In Launceston recently, Dr Allan Meyer spoke on the topic of sexuality to a full house at Door of Hope Christian Church.
Yep, even churches are beginning to talk about what has been a taboo topic for so long.
(You should've been there for the R-rated question panel a few weeks later!)
He made an illuminating observation.
Of all the people he has counselled for all kinds of abuse, it is those who have suffered sexual abuse that struggle the most with ongoing torment.
One woman he knew had been sexually abused as a five-year-old child and was still suffering the repercussions in her 80s.
His point was that sex has the ability to touch something so personal, at the core of our being, that it can be at once beautiful and destructive, even in a consensual situation.
Bruises disappear, bones heal, but wounds of the heart can be permanent.
1 Corinthians 6:16-18 puts it like this: "There's more to sex than mere skin on skin. Sex is as much spiritual mystery as physical fact. As written in Scripture: 'The two become one'. Since we want to become spiritually one with the master, we must not pursue the kind of sex that avoids
commitment and intimacy, leaving us more lonely than ever _ the kind of sex that can never 'become one'." (The Message)
This is the stuff that young people need to know.
Most kids know the biological, er, ins and outs of sex well before their parents get around to the "birds and the bees" discussion and certainly before the school sex ed course cranks into gear.
What's lacking is an understanding of the emotional effects of sex and that they have a choice.
For a society obsessed with pro-choice, young people are given very little choice when it comes to sexual activity.
They're told what goes where, the importance of foreplay and the biological processes that are activated by the act.
Then condoms are liberally handed around, as with information on all the other methods of contraception and how to avoid STDs.
The pressure mounts.
They are encouraged to "experiment" with their sexuality.
No one tells them they have the choice to wait.
No one tells them of the emotional strings attached and the potential destruction that can ensue.
Choice is about being presented with the full gamut of options, not just the most popular preferences.
I don't believe young people are being given a choice at all.
There is a saying that goes something like this: "There are always two choices, two paths to take. One is easy, and its only reward is that it's easy."
Do young people know this?
Or, as the writer Richard Bach once penned, will they discover that, "some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives".
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