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    Sexual education

    On the menstruation thread I mentioned the sexual education provided by Bravo magazine to generations of German teenagers.

    It really was excellent, especially in the eras when many adults were still too embarrassed to talk about sex.

    Bravo was extremely open, with regular pictures of nudes. In my formative years, The "Aufklärung" (as sexual education is called in German) in Bravo was conducted under the names Dr Alexander Korff and Dr Jürgen Sommer. Behind both were teams of people under the leadership of a doctor, psychotherapist and religion teacher called Martin Goldstein.

    Korff's column was the 4-page sex-ed feature which would deal with everything, from how the body changes during puberty, to why teenagers masturbate, to how to deal with molesting uncles to why we have sexual urges and how to handle these, to what kind of birth control to use. Usually these would be framed around plausible case scenarios.

    The refrain was always on sexual responsibility and personal sexual autonomy. It was non-judgmental -- want to have sex, okay; don't want, also okay. Korff would let the religions have their say as well, to give teenagers a full range of informed sexual choices.

    I've re-read some of them recently, and thought that they were pitch-perfect.

    Dr Sommer was the agony aunt, dispensing advice on all matter of stuff (from "I'm ginger, why does everybody hate me" to "My druggie boyfriend is trying to get me to shoot up"). Lots of questions were sexual: Do I have to put out? Why can't I get an erection? Am I gay because I looked at a friend's penis? and so on.

    Sommer's team gave good advice; the level of empathy they showed was impressive. They were brutally honest too. Sometimes they'd shit on a correspondent from a dizzy height.

    Upshot is, I cannot think of a better sex ed curriculum than what Bravo provided.

    At school it was all very technical. Though in an experimental way, my Grade 1 class got some sex ed: we were taught the correct name for penis and vagina and how these interact to produce a baby. No surprise, our teacher did not teach at the school the following year. And we still thought that babies can be conceived by kissing...

    #2
    Sexual education

    You've mentioned this before, and it has always left me wishing that we had a Bravo equivalent in the US.

    One thing that makes that difficult is that I don't think we have ever really had a non-gendered magazine for teens. The vast majority of boys wouldn't be caught dead reading the likes of Tiger Beat, and female readers of Sports Illustrated just slightly outnumbered male readers of Seventeen.

    Sex education in this country is an awful mess, as illustrated by the persistent expansion of "abstinence only" curricula.

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      #3
      Sexual education

      One of the older girls at my boarding school was Austrian, she used to smuggle copies of Bravo into the convent and sell them at a profit. But my German was too crap to take advantage, I just used to laugh at the corny pictures in the foto love story. The nudey stuff fit a stereotype of Teutons letting it all hang out, I hadn't a clue what the articles were about.

      It strikes me that Bravo was read by both genders. [ursus beat me to the point!] The magazine market in the anglosphere is very gender-segregated. The British publications aimed at girls did talk about sex in a practical and fairly open way, but it was always girls talking to each other against a backdrop of 'how to get and keep a boyfriend'. You learnt about sex by yourself, or with your besties, and then tried to apply what you'd learnt to a real boy-human, only to discover that his teenage reading material was Metal hammer and one of those photo magazines with lots of gratuitous naked ladies.

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        #4
        Sexual education

        Bravo, from what I've seen, was like Smash Hits with a Just Seventeen on steroids feel - I reckon I would have bought it, as I loved both of those, but only bought SH.

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          #5
          Sexual education

          If only Metal Hammer and Kerrang had had sex-ed sections.

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            #6
            Sexual education

            No, Bravo was -- in my youth, anyway -- Smash Hits with teen lifestyle. They'd have the dreamy pop star stuff, fashion and the romance stories for the girls. But they'd also have regular pieces on the best mopeds or football players.

            There'd be lots of Bay City Rollers, but also lots of Sweet or, later, AC/DC. They had a few interviews with Johnny Rotten as well.

            There were also grreat features on getting jobs or life in jail, and pretty hard-hitting true life stories of young people's experiences, from being raped to being a drug mule.

            Bravo used to organise concerts in various cities. Usually the line-ups comprisede a few mid-level Schlager singers, budding teen bands and one or two headliners. I was amazed to find The Clash being billed on one of them.
            One other thing struck me about

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              #7
              Sexual education

              It really was excellent, especially in the eras when many adults were still too embarrassed to talk about sex.
              apparently it was only west german adults who were too embarrassed to talk about sex

              check out for instance the clip of the east german TV programme that starts just after the 13 minute mark in that video

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                #8
                Sexual education

                [quote=garcia post=1088474]
                apparently it was only west german adults who were too embarrassed to talk about sex[/url]
                During a cycling holiday in Mecklenburg a few years back, I got chatting to some of the locals in a boozer. At one point, one of the women said, "We were obsessed with sex in the East. There was fuck-all to buy, nowhere to go and nothing on the telly. What else were we supposed to do?"

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                  #9
                  Sexual education

                  Well, those fuckers. When I was 14 and tried to get romantic with an East German girl, she rebuffed me. Wanted to be friends, as if it was appropriate for a 17-year-old girl to be friends with a 14-year-old boy...

                  And I was regarded as a hero for smuggling Bravo magazines over the border (or so I was told by a friend many years later). They were hard currency there, like cigarettes in a jail.

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                    #10
                    Sexual education

                    "We were obsessed with sex in the East. There was fuck-all to buy, nowhere to go and nothing on the telly. What else were we supposed to do?"
                    sounds a bit like ireland in the same period (even though our grim state ideology was officially anti-sex). the birth rate reflected these social realities.

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                      #11
                      Sexual education

                      Well, those fuckers. When I was 14 and tried to get romantic with an East German girl, she rebuffed me.

                      A propos of almost nothing:
                      During a bus journey, I once heard a woman with a Saxony accent say the word Kitzler (she was talking neither to me nor about her own Kitzler). Not a pretty sound.

                      Every time I've read or heard the word Kitzler since then, I've thought about this woman.

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                        #12
                        Sexual education

                        John Oliver did a very good piece on Sex ed in the US this week in fact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0jQz6jqQS0

                        (Watch for the video at the bowling alley featuring a teenaged Mike from Breaking Bad early on in the clip for some really useful bowling/menstruation information)

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                          #13
                          Sexual education

                          Treibeis, I dunno what a Kitzler is (I've had a guess though), but did it sound like giggsler? That's what the Saxons do, isn't it?

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                            #14
                            Sexual education

                            san2sboro wrote: Treibeis, I dunno what a Kitzler is (I've had a guess though), but did it sound like giggsler? That's what the Saxons do, isn't it?
                            It was more like "geetzlaw", with audible mucus on the second syllable.

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                              #15
                              Sexual education

                              If we were at all serious about educating kids and immigrants about how this country really works, we would just use a curriculum based entirely on John Oliver clips.

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                                #16
                                Sexual education

                                Not if it's the one I went to school with. Which it probably isn't.

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                                  #17
                                  Sexual education

                                  ursus arctos wrote: If we were at all serious about educating kids and immigrants about how this country really works, we would just use a curriculum based entirely on John Oliver clips.
                                  Quite.

                                  I was inordinately pleased with myself that I immediately recognised Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad in that clip. But them, I remnembered him from Beverley Hills Cop and the TV series Wiseguy.

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                                    #18
                                    Sexual education

                                    Anyway, who here had productive The Talks with their parents?

                                    My mother was very open about sexuality, but didn't really have a proper talk. Nor did my stepfather. Stepfather assumed that I knew everything anyway, and when I was 14 proposed to take me to a brothel in Hamburg so that I could lose my virginity. I wasn't really keen on that and my mother said it should be my decision.

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                                      #19
                                      Sexual education

                                      G-Man wrote: Anyway, who here had productive The Talks with their parents?
                                      If by that you mean, "Were you, at the age of about 14, given a book about hamsters?" then the answer is a resounding Yes.

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                                        #20
                                        Sexual education

                                        ...why teenagers masturbate...
                                        Presumably then leaving the teenagers in the dark as to why everyone else does..?

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                                          #21
                                          Sexual education

                                          Since when do teenagers give a shit about what anyone older than them does?

                                          Although, if one would want to discourage teenage masturbation (which Bravo didn't), all you'd need to do is publish a photo of a hairy old guy rubbing one off, sex-face on, with the legend: "Your dad wanks. Do you want to be like your dad?"

                                          The Catholic Church has missed a trick there. Don't go on about masturbation being naturally disordered and intrinsically evil, but publish Wanking Dad photos in the catechismn.

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                                            #22
                                            Sexual education

                                            Similarly, abstinence can be taught more effectively if kids (especially girls) were communicated the notion that no sex is better than bad sex.

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                                              #23
                                              Sexual education

                                              Since I was once the oldest virgin in Ireland (or at least it felt like that) I viewed sex education as a form of mental torture designed to destroy my self esteem - this was rendered even worse when I discovered that the Bishop of Galway had more sexual partners than me.

                                              It was like an awful curse. What could be worse than having knowledge and knowing that it was impossible to apply it.

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                                                #24
                                                Sexual education

                                                Since when do teenagers give a shit about what anyone older than them does?
                                                Well, that wasn't really my point, but, okay.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Sexual education

                                                  Toby Gymshorts wrote: If only Metal Hammer and Kerrang had had sex-ed sections.
                                                  They didn't? What were all those pictures of Doro Pesch and Lee Aaron for?

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