Will our teenagers never experience fumbling about in the backseat?

Much of the blame has been put on the lack of an effective curriculum, people saying our schools don't teach our children the right thing, from an early enough age. Others blame parents for pulling the wool over their eyes and ignoring the problem, or aiding it by hosting parties where alcohol is present. Others say pornography is the devil, giving children a distorted sense of what a consensual sexual relationship actually involves.

But how do we talk to our children about what sex, good sex, actually is? In all these conversations we should be having is anyone telling our children that sex can be pleasurable, that it can be fun, and enjoyable? That you don't need to be married, that you don't even have to be in a relationship with someone, that two (consensual) strangers can have a completely fine time with no strings attached? I remember one encounter at university where I met a boy and we talked and danced and had a few drinks and enjoyed a memorable night before waking up both completely mortified because we hadn't bothered to ask each other's name. We introduced ourselves, talked some more, enjoyed a lazy morning, and became good friends.

I fear that children will never have nights like this, or fumble about in the back seats of cars, or learn how to flirt, because they are too scared of what might be construed.

Is this how I learned about sex? Sure, there was a lot of learning on the job, you might say, but what other education did I ever receive?

If we go right back I remember in late primary school, and we're talking the late 1970s here remember, my parents and I attending a night which was effectively a "birds and the bees" talk with a bad film about the very basics. Apparently I asked a lot of questions, according to the family myth, embarrassing my parents no end.

I can't ever remember attending something with my own children. I'm sure I would have embarrassed my own children if we had.

Along the way Where Did I Come From? was recommended reading, later on we played spin the bottle at parties (now there's a game, on reflection, which took consent right out of the equation), or snuck off to secluded spaces at the local roller skating rink.

But it was Dolly magazine which really ramped things up. Reading the sealed section armed with a hand mirror, we learned about what our vulvas looked like by looking at our own, not by looking at porn. We read the questions from other girls our age about what their boyfriends wanted them to do, or what they liked to do, we learned about masturbation and what our clitoris was for, and what a penis looked like, and what to do with one.

I didn't lose my virginity until I was at university, I think I was close to 20. I'd just never really got around to it at school. The timing, and the boy, was never quite right. I'm glad I waited. While the majority of teenagers become sexually active between 15 and 19, that wasn't me.

When I got married in the mid 1990s, it was compulsory for us Catholics to attend pre-marriage classes, where they covered sex with what seemed like that same video rolled out in 1978. There was a couple in our class who admitted, when we all slipped out for a catch-up afterwards, that was the first time they had had anything like a "talk". I felt really sorry for them.

There was a story last year which angered me. The defence barrister in rugby league player Jarryd Hayne's trial for aggravated sexual assault said Hayne was guilty of bad sex, not rape.

"To be frank, his sexual prowess turned out to be terrible," Phillp Boutlen, SC, told a court in December 2020. The case is currently back before the courts.

But being guilty of bad sex is no defence whatsoever. How dare he trivialise it. Even bad sex should involve consent.

Good sex starts with a conversation, and that conversation starts at the kitchen bench, but it follows through to the bedroom or the backseat as well. If we can teach our children about respect, and instill in them a confidence to talk to their sexual partner, to talk to them past that initial yes, to keep talking all the way through it, to enjoy it, and to make sure their partner is enjoying it as well, we'll be more than halfway there.

Maybe putting pleasure at the forefront of the conversation is the key?

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