A moment, please, for the pure souls in New Brunswick high schools whose innocence has been siphoned away by the apparent smut-peddlers operating under the guise of sexual-education instructors.
Those delicate flowers, you must understand, were probably still playing with Barbies and Pokémon cards (despite what their parents were probably doing when they were in high school) until they were poisoned by talk of sex at school. Indeed, under the noses of both parents and Premier Blaine Higgs, an organization that teaches kids about human sexuality and safe sex managed to enter the province’s schools and teach kids about human sexuality and safe sex.
“To say I am furious would be a gross understatement,” Mr. Higgs wrote on X over the matter last week.
“A number of concerned parents have shared with me photos and screenshots of clearly inappropriate material that was presented recently in at least four New Brunswick high schools.”
He included a screenshot of one of the slides, which featured questions that actual high-school students had asked the organization that delivers the presentation. Those questions were: “Do girls masturbate?” “Is it normal to watch porn like people watch TV series?” “Is it good or bad to do anal?” “Does it hurt when you do it for the 1st time?”
Now, it might seem like these are perfectly normal questions for teenagers to ask as they contend with raging hormones and navigate their own sexuality. One might also argue that it is good that they are posing these sorts of questions to professionals, rather than seeking out answers from peers or on the internet, or not seeking out answers at all.
But you must understand: The presentation was titled “Thirsty for the Talk,” and it was accompanied by a graphic of a mouth licking a lollipop. The rules of helicopter parenting and puritanical hysteria thus deem the entire slide – nay, the entire presentation! – filthy and inappropriate.
Mr. Higgs claimed that the group giving the presentation was only supposed to teach students about HPV – a claim that the head of the organization, which is called HPV Global Action, denied in an interview with CBC News. Mr. Higgs further announced that the group will be banned from New Brunswick schools and that his government will consider updating its rules on presentations from third-party organizations.
Mr. Higgs is operating off a crib sheet drawn up by Saskatchewan’s government last year, which banned sexual-education presentations by third-party organizations in schools. The controversy there arose after a student picked up material inadvertently left by a presenter that used cartoon illustrations to depict sexual topics and positions. Saskatchewan has since updated its sex-ed policies to, among other things, allow parents to opt their children out of instruction in school. Ostensibly, New Brunswick will do the same thing. (Education Minister Bill Hogan indicated back in November that the government was considering an opt-out waiver for parents in the province.) Ontario already allows parents to pull their kids from sex-ed instruction, and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith indicated back in February that she intends to create an opt-in model, whereby parents will have to give consent for every classroom lesson about sex.
These concerns are a relic of a time when teens didn’t have access to the world’s most graphic, explicit and extreme sexual imagery at their fingertips at any given time. (I know what parents are thinking: not my Pokémon-playing prince, whose online activities I monitor with the utmost rigour. To which I say: That’s a beautiful fantasy you’ve got going there.) The instruction that kids are getting in school is undoubtedly the vanilla-milkshake version of what they are discussing with their peers or seeing online, which is why parents should be glad that kids have a resource to ask questions they’d never pose to their parents.
But hand-wringing about sex ed in school never quite went out of vogue even as instruction-by-internet took over. The contemporary concern among conservative politicians and parents, however, is more so around pronouns and gender identity – not about students asking if girls masturbate, or if sex is painful. That’s why Mr. Higgs’s freak-out over a single slide comes off as particularly prudish. Didn’t we get over our puritanical alarm once television shows stopped shooting Elvis from the waist up?
Mr. Higgs admitted in a scrum that he didn’t see the entire sex-ed presentation – just the single slide – before banning the group. It’s unclear, then, why he reacted with such furor and haste. Perhaps he saw an opportunity to rile parents up ahead of the provincial election in the fall. Or maybe he heard that a group of teenagers was dancing to rock music and drinking soda pops outside the legislature, and needed to act quickly before tackling his next social menace.