Sex Education in China, or Why the Cultural Revolution Cannot Replace Sexual

Today, China is ahead of the entire planet in many areas. If somewhere the Celestial Empire is not yet in the top three, then we can confidently say that the gap will soon be eliminated. Only in one thing is the country hopelessly behind — in the sexual education of its youth. Why is the gender issue so neglected in China and is there any hope for improvement?

In the American comedy "Mean Girls", a physical education teacher tells schoolgirls: "Don't have sex, because you will get pregnant and die!" It sounds funny, but it's even funnier that the Chinese Communist Party sets up its youth in this way. In the country, the prevention of unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases and psychological trauma is inextricably linked with sexual abstinence before marriage.

Pornography is banned in China, and violators of the law for creating and distributing adult content face serious prison sentences, up to life. In the Middle Kingdom, only light eroticism is legal, which, before getting to the consumer, passes strict censorship.

But the bans do not prevent the citizens of the country from being interested in the issue - studies show that half of the anonymously interviewed young people are still looking for porn on the web and get some information about the relationship of the sexes from it. Such "sexual education" does not always turn out to be of high quality, but there is, in fact, no other in the country.

In 2020, feeling a serious omission, the Family Planning Association, the Tsinghua University Health Research Center and the Youth Association of the People's Republic of China conducted a large-scale study of the sexual life of students. It turned out that only 50% of the respondents had sex education lessons at school and only 15% of these "lucky ones" were satisfied with the knowledge they received.

It also turned out that 3% of students do not consider it necessary to protect themselves during sex, and 94% of girls said that if they accidentally get pregnant, they will have an abortion. 56% of girls have never masturbated in their lives, and 30% do not know what an orgasm is. Among the guys, the picture is not so depressing — 87% of respondents were engaged in masturbation, and 65% were looking for pornographic materials on the web.

In the Chinese segment of the Internet, you can find propaganda comics telling about "Mr. bad kidneys". The hero of these visual novels is a boy who has caused harm to his health by unrestrained masturbation and belatedly regrets it. On Chinese forums, you can find topics in which they seriously discuss the relationship between self-satisfaction and dementia and tell horror stories about deaths from exhaustion of the soul and body by masturbation.

The low level of sexual literacy has led to a deterioration of the epidemiological situation with HIV. Last year, 958 thousand new cases of infection were detected in the country. However, some believe that the increase in cases is associated with the state program to combat HIV, which started in 2016. Perhaps we are not talking about an increase in cases of infection, but about the beginning of mass detection of carriers of the virus.

In 1978, China for the first time started talking about the policy of openness and the need to reform the education system. They swayed in party offices for exactly 10 years and in 1988 a directive on education among young people was born. Boys and girls were increasingly ill with sexually transmitted diseases, pregnant schoolgirls were commonplace and at the same time there were cases when the newlyweds did not know what to do on their wedding night.

Anarchy in sex education was decided to overcome by the introduction of new curricula covering "sexual physiology, sexual psychology and moral sexual education." 20 years later, in 2008, a document with the serious title "Guidelines for health education for children and youth" appeared.

This solid volume of work contained specific instructions on what information and at what age young citizens of the People's Republic of China should receive. It all came down to the fact that a high school student had to confidently answer the question "where did I come from", and also have an idea of the basic norms of morality.

An illustration from a Chinese textbook

Yes, it should be especially noted that the school curriculum of sexual education speaks only about heterosexual relationships and monogamous couples. The rest of the sexual diversity does not seem to exist at all. In 2011, for some reason, a reform took place again, which changed absolutely nothing — sex before marriage was also demonized, and relations between people of the same sex were ignored again. At the same time, surveys have shown that 70% of Chinese still had sex before entering family life.

All these timid attempts to reform sex education, lasting for decades, have led to the fact that children receive information from random sources, and most often in the family. Since the older generation is not God knows what experts in the matter, then such an education brings appropriate fruits.

Sexologist Hu Jiwei told reporters that already in the 3rd-4th grade, many children believe that in case of rape, suicide is the best way out of the situation. Also, many believe that the rapist should be forced to marry the victim. Who else but him? Who else needs a girl who has been abused? And in rural areas, the tradition of teenage marriages has still been preserved and girls are married at the age of 13-14.

Not all families welcome such enlightenment — many parents consider such lessons and lectures to be nonsense. It also happens that parental councils in schools categorically refuse sex education lessons for their offspring. They see such classes as a threat and believe that, having received knowledge, children will start having sex earlier and will grow sexually promiscuous. Did the grandfathers who staged the cultural revolution fight for this?

Some parents are shocked by textbooks that tell about the relationship of the sexes. Some adults consider them dangerous and even pornographic. There are also progressive parents who write letters of thanks. They regret that they did not have access to such knowledge at the time. Unfortunately, there are not too many such people yet.

In this regard, teachers face an additional task - to carry out explanatory work in families so that moms, dads, grandparents do not interfere with children getting such knowledge they need in life.