Family Planning's Sexuality Road is leading us up the garden path. Picture by Vilisow at Dreamstime. com
Family Planning's Sexuality Road is leading us up the garden path. Picture by Vilisow at Dreamstime. com
Amid all the din surrounding the proposal to teach nine-year-olds about sex, a small question has remained overlooked: Why are children apparently experiencing puberty at a lower age? The answer is deeply disturbing. It’s because changed dietary habits are making kids fatter, earlier, and fat levels are an important factor in the onset of puberty. This has the most serious implications for girls in later life, because they are likely to end up shorter and fatter. And this puts them at far greater risk of breast cancer and heart disease.

So rather than crash courses in sex at school for infants, parents would probably be better off putting their children on crash diets. The later puberty occurs, the better the outlook for long-term good health. Our misguided, Messianic sex educators, on the other hand, appear to know nothing about this hidden threat, and carry on up The Sexuality Road regardless.

They won’t stop at nine-year-olds either, if UK experience is any guide. In Britain, the crazy Labour Government is introducing sex education for five-year-olds! This horrifying prospect is causing huge headaches for parents alarmed at the total loss of innocence. At that tender age, you cannot call a spade a spade. There is a discussion about what to call the naughty bits when you’re talking to a tiny tot, so as to avoid what one expert has described as “psychic genital mutilation”.

Here are some of the suggestions for female genitalia: Front bottom, Winkie, Minney, Sparkly bits, Flossie, Doris and Fine China (a charming term first used in this context in 1675). One poor little soul, barely out of nappies, came up with a new one. When asked by Mum if she’d washed her armpits, the child replied: “Yes, and I’ve washed my legpits, too”.

The outrage is not confined to adults, either. This is what one youngster had to say, on The Guardian’s website:

“First of all, I’m barely a teenager – I’m currently in Year 9. I received sex education of sorts in Year 6 (I was 10). ‘Of sorts’ meaning we just learned about puberty, with boys and girls in separate classes, girls with a female teacher and boys with a male teacher. I was fine with it – my mother had already told me about puberty etc. The only thing that bothers me now is that no permission slips were sent out.

In Year 8 (I was 12), we got real sex ed. lessons – in a mixed class of boys and girls with two male teachers and again, no permission slips. It was compulsory. I was so horrified and disgusted that I ended up walking out of the class and almost throwing up in the bathroom. I can’t believe anyone would teach things like that in such an environment – I wasn’t ready and I’d have much preferred to talk with my mother about it before the school intervened. I will never take sex ed. again because I can’t handle it.

Now, if my little sister or brother told me they’d been taught about such things at school, I’d march up to the school and knock the teachers for six myself. I won’t stand for it. The government should have just let the vast majority of Britain believe they were a bunch of useless dimwits rather than put forward this ridiculous proposal, and prove it.

I’ll be leaving this country as soon as I turn eighteen and I won’t be coming back.”

And at the other end of the spectrum, this comment:

“My father told me about this stuff when I was six. I didn’t understand it. Now I’m 60 and I still don’t understand it.”