When Sex Goes to School

Our health minister Dr. Harsh Vardhan, believes the way we impart sex education in schools should change. Will he be bold enough to take a cue from the Scandinavian model, widely regarded as the best in the world in terms of teenage and healthcare education? Here is a fictional narrative of what it means to be a student in Scandinavia.

By Sangeeth Sebastian

Muffled giggles erupted as the girl in tartan pinafore scribbled down the words one after the other on the black board. Standing next to her, with arms folded across the chest and a straight face was a genial looking woman in charcoal grey executive skirt and a matching suit. She was intently observing the scribbles on the board.

‘Fitte,’ ‘Faen ta deg,’ ‘Drittsekk…’  It was a cluster of swear words inappropriate in any civilised setting leave alone to be used in a room full of children. Surprisingly, the woman goaded the girl to be more forthcoming with her abuses.

                    

“These are words, which they know or will come to know anyway,” Irma Krdzalic told me at the end of her class. “The idea is to remove the shock value from them. The words lose its sting the moment we stop reacting to it,” she said.

Krdzalic now wanted her students to ask her questions. ‘Any burning question you have got will be answered,’ she said. However, gauging the inhibition, she decided to break the ice herself.

‘What do you think is the point of sex?’ she said. There was a brief silence before the first answer. ‘It is a good way to lose weight,’ shouted a boy with a moppy hair sitting two rows ahead of me from the back. The class chuckled in unison.

Her session with students from higher classes, in the subsequent days, got even more risqué and explicit. In grade X, she taught a class of 30 how to unroll a condom on a plastic penis and told them, in her characteristic nonchalance, to check for any wear or tear on the rubber.

‘This is unbelievable,’ I muttered to myself trying to make sense of the events unfolding in front of my eyes.

  

I imagined how it would be if something like this were to happen in India. A national outrage no doubt, with 24x7 news channels playing the ‘shocking’ visual of children unrolling condoms on plastic penises, in loop.

Krdzalic’s session, meanwhile, was getting steamier. ‘Can anyone tell me the only living creature in the planet that has an organ devoted exclusively for pleasure?’ she asked.

The responses were swift. ‘Man,’ said one. ‘Apes,’ said another. ‘Chimpanzee,’ yelled someone from the back. The guessing game continued for a while until Krdzalic raised her hand and indicated that she was going to reveal the correct answer.

‘Women,’ she said. There was a gasp of disbelief from the boys.

‘Do you know what it is called?’ ‘Clitoris,’ she said without waiting for an answer. She then drew the attention of the class to a wall hanging poster of female genitalia. ‘Can anybody tell me where the clitoris is located?’ Students peered hard at the poster. Again without waiting for an answer she highlighted the spot with a marker. ‘Here it is,’ she said. ‘It’s a tiny button like structure right above the opening of the vagina. It becomes larger when a woman is sexually excited,’ she said. The class ended with students being distributed a box of condoms.

‘Mr. Mathew, I hope you liked my classes,’ said Krdzalic walking down the aisle. ‘It was unbelievable,’ I said.

Tagging along with Krdzalic, the science teacher of Sogn Videregaende School, Oslo, was to me like taking a stroll through Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes for children.

‘In fact I want to talk to you more about it,’ I said. ‘But first I would like to talk to some students.’

‘Please go ahead I will be in my room.’

I caught hold of the boy who yelled ‘chimpanzee’ and asked him about the session. He was a tall—about six— pimply looking guy named Espen Arild Jenssen. ‘It is good,’ he said. ‘I thought I knew everything about sex from the internet and magazines. I learned a lot of new things.’

His classmate Zahra Ismail in a headscarf framing her face was however worried about taking the condoms home. Her parents who immigrated to Norway from Iraq to escape the war never approved of the classes. ‘I am going to hide this from them,’ she said waving the box of condoms.

Krdzalic’s room was on the second floor. I strolled through the swanky corridor searchingly until I saw a sign almost towards the end of the building, which read ‘STAFF ROOM.’ It was spacious with monochromatic cubicles bearing the names of individual teachers. I looked around for Krdzalic. She was sitting inside her cubicle leafing through some files.

“Please sit. I’m just checking attendances. Do you mind if I finish it first.’ ‘Not at all.’ There was a framed black and white photograph of a feisty looking woman on the wall behind her desk. I looked at the photograph quizzically. ‘That is madam Ottar, the pioneer of sex education in Scandinavia said Krdzalic closing the attendance register.

‘I hope you found the sessions helpful for your research,’ she said.

‘It’s way too progressive and explicit to even think about in my country,’ I said.

‘Yea, our visitors keep saying that all the time,’ she said.

‘But Ms. Krdzalic, how do you manage to conduct the classes without any protest from the parents or the public? Especially with children from conservative religious communities in class,’ I said.

‘Mr. Mathew, Sex education is a non-controversial subject in Norway,’ she said. ‘The purpose of sex-education is to allow students to form their own opinions,’ she said. ‘It is about allowing them to grow up as honest individuals. Yes, there are challenges, but nothing much by way of protest,’ she said.

I recalled my stint as a reporter with The Secular in Kerala when I was told to cover an emergency meeting convened by the Parent-Teacher Association of Scared Heart Higher Secondary School, Pattom. It was one of the largest schools in Asia managed by the Catholic Church. The meeting was in protest against the proposed sex education syllabus for students by the Central Government. The school auditorium was packed with parents, teachers, priests and media persons. Surprisingly, there were no representatives from the students.

Shabeer Khan, the fiftyish looking president of the association was fulminating into the microphone. ‘We send our children to school to educate them. To turn them into future doctors and engineers…But the government wants to corrupt them, teach them about homosexuality… masturbation… pornography…We’ll see to it that the syllabus never gets implemented,’ he said. There was a thunderous applause from the audience. ‘We have a great culture. We don’t want anybody to teach our children about sex. It is for the Westerners,’ he said.

‘Looks like you are thinking something,’ Krdzalic’s voice broke into my ruminations. ‘There was this attempt to introduce sex education in schools in India sometime back,’ I said, ‘but had to be abandoned due to protests.’

‘Oh…that is really sad for a country that produced Kaa-ma-sootra she said.

‘Our culture is inherently contradictory,’ I said.  ‘But with globalisation, things are in a state of flux again. Internet and western media today have the biggest impact on sexual attitudes,’ I said.

‘Even in Norwegian media there is a celebration of sexuality,’ Krdzalic said. ‘From female orgasms to dildos to Q&A columns…This makes sexuality education all the more important for children,’ she said.

‘Ms Krdzalic has Norway always been a permissive society?’ I asked.

‘Teenage sexuality was more or less accepted in Scandinavia for ages. It was never a taboo. We had this tradition of night courtship, though mainly in Denmark, where boys visited girls to lie in bed with them. We also had strong social movements lead by people like Madam Ottar campaigning for women’s rights and sex education,’ she said.

                                                     

                                                        *******

It was the last day of my three-day trip to Oslo. I thanked Krdzalic for her help and decided to explore the city. I had this Oslo Pass with me. The pass gave you access to a whole lot of places, including free travel and special discounts in restaurants. Then I suddenly remembered this Swedish woman whom I met in Kerala last summer. Her name was Ulla Kjellstrand. She had told me she lived in Oslo and had asked to give her a buzz when I visited Norway. I met her through one of our common friends, David Hart, a British priest, who lived in Thiruvananthapuram. She had even gifted me a box of ginger biscuits before she left. She told me to place each biscuit in my palm and push it in the middle before eating. If the biscuit breaks into three I could wish for something, which I wanted to come true. It was some old Scandinavian belief.

I fished out her card from my wallet. It had changed colour from the dampness of my wallet, the writing was almost smudged. But I could still read it. She was an interior decorator and lived at Asker. It was a suburb of Oslo.

Initially, I thought there was no one at home because the phone kept on ringing. Then finally someone picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’ I said clearing my throat. ‘Hello,’ it was the voice of a woman. ‘Can I speak to Ms Ulla?’

‘Yup Ulla here,’ she said.

‘Hi Ulla, this is Mathew Kurian from India. Hope you remember me?’ I said. There was a brief silence from the other end. I could tell she was running my name over in her mind.

‘We met when you were in Kerala with my friend Dav—’

‘Mathew… Mathew…. Mathew Korean from The Secular?’

For some weird reason she kept pronouncing my surname Korean.

‘Yea that’s right,’ I said.

‘How wonderful, what brings you to Oslo?’ she said.

‘I’m here on an offi—’

‘Didn’t I tell you that the ginger biscuits will bring you here?’ she said.

‘Yea..I guess it worked,’ I said. ‘So are you on a holiday?’ she said.

‘No, I am on an official visit. To draw lessons from the Scandinavian model of sex education in schools,’ I said.

“That’s interesting,’ she said. ‘So will you be you going to Sweden and Denmark as well?’

‘No, my colleagues are there. We will file a joint report once we are back.’

‘So you will be filing it for your paper?’ she said.        

‘No, actually I’m no longer with The Secular… I’m now a researcher with NACO… in Delhi.’

‘What’s that?’

‘National AIDS Control Organisation,’ I said.

‘Mr. Korean, it was really nice of you to call me, where are you calling from? Where are you now?’

‘I’m in a phone booth… near Egon restaurant’

‘Egon where? Paleet or Byporten?’

‘Paleet.’

‘How long will you be there? Are you in a hurry to leave?’ she said.

‘Well, I’m pretty much done with my official work… thought will explore the city befo—’

‘If you can wait for sometime, I’ll join you,’ she said.

                                                             *******

It was well past noon, when Ulla finally turned up. She looked stunning in her black halter top and cream coloured trousers. She had a pair of massive hoop earrings and wore her blonde hair in straight natural style. 

‘Nice to see you again, Mr. Korean,’ she greeted me with a hug. ‘Nice to see you too Ms. Ulla,’ I said. 

‘You look good.’

‘Thank You.’

‘So, which all places have you seen?

‘I have just started, but I’m afraid I don’t have much time,’ I said.

‘You should visit the Frogner Park,’ she said.

                                                                                                                 

                                                           

The park was crowded with tan-seekers staking out spaces on its grassy lands. But what made the place unusual were its nude life-sized sculptures. There were hundreds of them all over the place, each striking some inconceivable posture or the other. Some of them were really weird, like this statue of a naked man kicking the shit out of babies. Gustave Vigeland, who designed the sculptures, kept on adding to his collection till he died. Though nude, his creations were devoid of any erotic undertones.

‘For Vigeland, nudity depicted the eternalness of life,’ said Ulla.

                                                    

Flying back to India, my mind was still at the Frogner Park, such audacious display of nudity in the heart of a city, what was the artist trying to convey? ‘May be paying his tribute to Scandinavian openness,’ I wondered.                                                     

                                                           

There were bundles of rolled up newspapers stacked outside my apartment, when I arrived. I instinctively reached for the entertainment pullouts. A sultry siren in a skimpy dress graced the facing page of all the pullouts. The headline emphasised her relevance to be on the page usually reserved for Bollywood celebrities.

‘Porn star Sunny Leone now most Googled celeb in India’

The story was short listed for an Indo-Norwegian fiction contest “In Your Shoes” in 2012.