There was curiosity in my teens to learn more about sex and sex education and few people would deny that they didn’t have such curiosities.

The conundrum facing most societies is that for educated societies to have responsible adult families, the partners involved should be 18 years of age or older, which contrasts with the time they become sexually active – around 11 or 12 in the case of girls (these days) and around 14 or 15 in the case of boys. The increasing number of youth and the higher chances of social contact in modern cities make sexual encounters for most average adults possible before the purported age of responsibility. A minority (not a very small minority in India) escape this loss of innocence only to be married at a later age, usually their early youth, and yet another small minority marry much later.

Pre-marital sex is not very rare, although taboo. (Adultery is also not very rare, though taboo, although that is a different subject). Given these statistics, it should be made possible for schools to educate students about their sexual organs, the human sexual response cycle and relevant social aspects of sex. Much differentiation exists in the views, because there is no one standard of an educated individual, and many uneducated people consider themselves educated. These people, when in positions of social responsibility, usually take it upon themselves to mould society to fit their set of ideas. Naturally, there are others like this, which is where the conflicts and differences of opinion come in. Since communication these days is relatively quick, most people know about sex and sexual issues before they experience sex or before they are sexually active. This peripheral knowledge only creates an aura of danger or taboo around sex and naturally does not help the student very much.

The concept of sex education is probably another fall out of globalization and westernization and the import of the concept of dating, which was not original to India, (although India has a long history of love, erotic love, etc.).

There is not much to do about social issues which are a result of poor social engineering – if our education system didn’t perpetrate western science as we know it blindly, and if our television channels didn’t perpetrate dating, Sex and the City, Will and Grace, Baywatch and the like openly, and if girls at call centres in Indian cities didn’t obtain a poor reputation, we may have had a collective national mindset to take a scientific step towards sex education. But these are idealistic ruminations.