DamianaRaven wrote:Are we in agreement that the vast majority of these sexual misunderstandings could be prevented with better sex education for teenagers?
What do you mean by "better sex education"? If we're talking about something that happens in schools, the problem there is that a classroom is not where people do most of their learning. I mean, I'd hazard a guess that every kid in America has been told by a teacher or other adult that bullying is wrong, and yet it still happens all the time. Why? Because that message is often going up against lived reality.
Picture this: a kid goes to class and hears from his teacher that bullying is wrong and not to be tolerated. Then that kid goes to lunch, and notices that the kids who pick on anyone weaker than them get approving laughs from the other kids, not horror and rejection. They go home and notice that when Dad gets angry and starts punching walls, Mom caves and gives him whatever he wants, and Dad receives no apparent consequences. They flip on the TV and see "lovable assholes" like Dr. House, Tony Stark, or Bill Maher being adored by millions for treating folks around them like garbage--not in spite of that behavior, but precisely because of it. Compared against all that evidence that bullying is socially acceptable as long as you pick the right targets, the teacher declaring that it's wrong is like a fart in a hurricane.
The same applies to any other stubborn social script. This time picture a kid hearing from his teacher that no means no, so if you make some kind of move on someone and they express disinterest you should respect that. This same kid has watched girls eventually fall for guys who just kept on asking and never gave up. They grew up watching Pokemon, where Misty secretly has a crush on Ash despite outwardly hating him, and later on they watch a more adult version of the same "woman says one thing and secretly feels another" pattern play out in movies like
Goldfinger, or
Say Anything, or
Iron Man. They hear womenfolk talk about how sexy it is when a guy is persistent and "knows what he wants", and watch girls swoon over characters like Angel from Buffy or Edward from Twilight, both of whom win over the main characters through the sheer romantic power of stalking, even when they're pretty unambiguously
told to fuck off at first.
The lesson they learn, over and over, is that what a woman says or does doesn't necessarily match what she actually wants or feels as far as sex and romance are concerned, and a guy has to be prepared to not take women at their word if he wants to get anywhere. Again, a teacher droning on for a class period about how "no means no" is not going to accomplish much if a conflicting lesson is constantly taught outside the classroom.
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn