We all remember our first time, for better or worse. If my experience was anything like yours... well, it probably wasn't the most confident you've ever been. I had no idea what I was doing, which isn't a feeling I like to have. I definitely would have appreciated the opportunity to get some guidance from a sexpert beforehand.
Besides awkward conversations with your parents, gossip with friends who can't possibly be as experienced as they say they are and possibly — although not definitely — sex ed at school, it can be tough to learn what to expect from sex before you just go out and have it yourself.
This has definite consequences like, for example, that the US has the highest teen birth rate in the developed world. If more teenagers knew how condoms worked, that might not be the case.
Well, thankfully there's an actual school you can go to to learn not only how to have sex safely, but also how to have it well. You know, how to have fun with it. How to blow your partner's mind – for men and for women.
With education like this, you can come into your first time or 101st time ready to really make an impression.
Sound good? Great. All you need to do is buy a plane ticket to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where the school is located.
That's right, there's a sex school in the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous former-Soviet republic with a socially conservative population of about 5.6 million.
This is a country that doesn't exactly have a good grasp on democracy, only had its first peaceful and democratic transition of power in 2011 after 20 years of autocratic leadership and is populated mostly by Muslims and Russian Orthodox Christians.
Fascinating as it is, Kyrgyzstan is hardly a country where you'd expect to find a school that specializes in making its students better at sex. It's not like it's a particularly sex-positive culture; the Soviet legacy and the strong current of religion in the country has kept the subject mainly taboo.
However, one enterprising businesswoman, Rakhat Kenjebek kyzy, noticed there was both need and desire for a way to teach people more about sex, so she opened the Jade Gift school last year. Her program has had so much success that she recently expanded into Kazakhstan, a neighboring country with a fairly similar cultural heritage.
Basically, Kenjebek kyzy realized people are going to have sex even in a country where no one wants to discuss it, and she decided to help them have it better.
Which brings up the question: If she can do it there, what's stopping us from doing it in America?
We're one of the major world powers — unlike Kyrgyzstan — yet we can barely get it together to give kids a rudimentary understanding of how sex works and how to have it safely.
Unsubstantial sex education leads to both the proliferation of STDs and an extremely high number of teen pregnancies, which ends up costing taxpayers something in the neighborhood of $9.4 billion every year.
To be fair, it's not like the Kyrgyz education system has suddenly adopted a new curriculum for sexual education, and it's just a single school. A drop in the bucket, essentially.
However, we're in a much better position to attack the problem of too little sex ed in the States, and programs designed to educate people and provide things like birth control have already had proven success.
Where's the pushback coming from, then? We have a decent grasp on democracy, and our legislatures have at least sometimes in the past been capable of pushing through new laws.
The problem, of course, is that there's still a demographic of the country who refuses to accept the reality that people will have sex, educated or not. They'll have sex as teens and adults, married and unmarried, for the purpose of bearing children or not.
They'll use protection or not, usually depending on how well they're educated on the subject. They'll have good sex and bad sex, depending on their experience, their partners, their relationships and any number of other factors.
The fact is, we're wired to do it. None of us would exist if our ancestors had not had sex in an unbroken line going all the way back to the beginning of sexual reproduction.
And as they've made clear again and again, many conservatives — and unfortunately too many of the ones in power — hate the fact that people have sex for pleasure.
They try to prevent it from happening by limiting resources, like information and protection, as if that will change people's decision to have sex, which starts this evil cycle of teen pregnancies and STDs and terrible sexual experiences.
All Kenjebek kyzy is trying to do, then, is help people break out of that cycle. She's realized, in a way that American conservatives have seemingly not, that sex is a key part of any human's life, and there's a way to improve it and strengthen people's relationships through that.
In a way, it's like driving. Most Americans are going to do it, but you'd never get on the road and drive cross-country without knowing something about how the car works.
As you get more experience, you learn things about how to drive more efficiently, where exactly the clutch catches, how to make the car really purr.
We have the capacity to do it, so why should we treat sex any differently? Rakhat Kenjebek kyzy realizes we can be happier and healthier with education. We should follow her lead.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of Elite Daily.
Citations: STATE POLICIES ON SEX EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS (National Conference of State Legislatures), Jade Gift (The Jade Gift School ), The World Factbook: Kyrgyzstan (The Central Intelligence Agency), The sex school breaking taboos in Kyrgyzstan (The Guardian), How The GOP Rejects Common Sense And Wants To Control Your Sex Life (Elite Daily)
