May 15, 2015 - 11:05
Dear Jody,
I wanted to create a global sex education book because I was curious about how children in other countries learned about sex education. My hypothesis for my research was that other countries were more conservative when it came to sex education. I now understand that this was a naive "America is the greatest nation in the world" assumption. I was surprised to find that sex education in other countries was more informative than I had presumed. From this I took that complete, or close to complete sex education was available in more more countries around the world than what I previously thought.
My book is aimed at individuals who are in an atmosphere geared towards a scientific approach to sex education. I understand that this automatically excludes all those who are raised in anything but a scientific household, however the only way I could write a children's book that I felt was effective in providing a complete sex education was one which approached it through a scientific lens.
In doing this I hoped to provide two instances of crisis. The first was for children who are learning sex education from a non scientific approach. The books is meant to be warm, inviting, and an easy read, allowing children from a non scientific approach to engage in a form of crisis. My desire is that this crisis leads towards curiosity and questioning through different lenses than the ones they have been taught through.
The second instance of crises is for those who have been taught through a scientific lens. For them, the pages on abstinence were designed to put them in a form of crises that would motivate them to understand how other children learn about sex education that is different from their own lens. Hopefully this would lead towards further research and education.
I could have included a detailed explanation of how in other countries, particularly African and conservative Arab countries, women are taught that sex is solely for a man's pleasure and many only engage in sex because they are forced to. I thought long and hard as to whether I wanted to include topics such as this, and whether or not it would be beneficial for children to learn about rape and nonconsensual sex through a book. Personally I believe that those subjects are something that should be talked about in person with an adult, not learned through a book. My hope is that the pages on abstinence would lead to dialogues with adults such as these.
At the end of the day, I wanted to create a book for children who were being taught sex education from a scientific lens. I wanted to show that other children around the world are also learning sex just like those children. This book, if it were to be published, and actually illustrated in a nice way, would be aimed at 7-10 year olds who are just learning about sex. Hopefully it would provide them with a springboard from which they can go out and ask more questions about sex and sex education in the global world.
Thanks,
David (Dwhite) White