We had a small group session to discuss taking a sexual history, a topic potentially awkward enough that our school thought it best to start off with a role-playing session (with some lucky individuals able to play the part of the homeless heroin-abusing dude-helping-dudes prostitute with HIV or the newlywed conservative Christian male who has somehow contracted HPV from his not-so sexually conservative wife). If you’re wondering about the maturity level of medical students when it comes to sex, you should know it includes giggling.

During the session, I heard an at-first-glance amusing and then-later-on depressing anecdote about college students using contraceptives.

  1. A woman who wished to avoid pregnancy decided to use spermicidal jelly. However, because the the name of the product included “jelly,” she thought it worked as a dietary item: she spread it on toast and ate it. This, of course, neither works as intended nor (I would imagine) tastes very good.
  2. Another woman also wanted to use spermicide to reduce the chances of getting pregnant, but she opted to use a spermicidal suppository. Because of what most people think of when they think of suppositories, she inserted it into her tush—ineffective and probably uncomfortable.

If there are people in the world that even in their efforts to use contraceptives fail so spectacularly, it’s no wonder abstinence-only education is a terrible alternative to comprehensive sex education. Everyone needs to know as much as possible about the subject; it will almost certainly be relevant at some point in their lives. Better to make kids giggle (and parents cringe) then to have more unwanted pregnancies and STIs because they thought pulling out is fool-proof or that spermicidal jelly is a condiment.

ABC news reported last month that anal sex was on the rise among teens. There were several reasons why:  no real chance for pregnancy, preserved ‘vaginal’ virginity, and easy access to pornography (for inspiration, of course) among them, but many surveyed teens believed another benefit was that they couldn’t get STDs—which is simply not true. Dangerous misinformation. Even with the internet, our society can’t risk leaving this sort of education up to the intrepid googling of our youth.