Picture this.

A Saturday morning. A huge hall. A PowerPoint presentation. People trying in vain to explain the very concept of, well, sex. Sounds like some sex addicts anonymous session or something, right? Wait, I'm forgetting one very important element.

The sleepy, bored juniors who all have the "I wanna get outta here!" look pasted on their faces.

I know it kinda doesn't make much sense. I mean, it's a sure fire formula for one big heck of an active discussion. Teenagers with raging hormones + the pure and simple topic of sex and human sexuality. I was honestly expecting students to be buzzing with excitement as the guidance councilors at the front discussed "hooking up", "getting it on", and "sleeping with each other".

But instead, what do I get? Very inactive juniors who are all the while buzzing...with their plans to go to SM. I'm not saying that I wasn't part of that group, though. Trust me, I may be sitting there quietly but my mind's been drifting to the magical world of Alessa Gillespie and the foggy town of Silent Hill.

Honestly, though. I can't blame any of us. The talk was all about human sexuality and how to deal with an idiotic boyfriend who keeps pushing you to have sex with him. The standard sex talk topics were kept, i.e., sexual arousal, the genitals, consequences of having a baby this early, blah, blah blah, so the entire session was basically just feeding us information we already knew.

And what do you call something that just informs you already about what you already know? Useless.

So that's how I found the whole thing. Useless.

Somehow, I felt like they were underestimating us. Did they really think that we didn't know THAT much about sex and sexuality? I mean, come on. We're TEENAGERS. Stereotypically speaking, we're supposed to be these hormone-riddled machines who often come of as...uh...horny, ergo, sex is the topic we are definitely not afraid to talk about.

So, what went down in the event, anyway? Let's look at the story from the very beginning.

Once you enter the hall, you're automatically commanded to take your seat. Then, once the opening ceremony ends, the sex talk begins. People pay genuine attention to the speaker in front, laughing at her jokes, staring at the PowerPoint presentation.

But that's just the first thirty minutes. By the end of the hour, the fun begins.

Students start lolling in their seats while they try their very best to keep their minds from flying away. The noise starts to rise and the speaker starts to get a little ignored. Cellphones of every model and PSPs start making their way to the hands of the YLA.

Yeah, not really what a sex talk should look like.

When I first heard of the compulsory event a few days earlier, my initial thought was "Human Sexuality? Uh, does it look like we don't KNOW that already?" Then, my eyes saw the date and time. "Saturday? In the MORNING?"

Heh. Saturday morning.

I guess that factor affected the talk as well. Saturday in the student vocabulary means sleeping in, enjoying one day of pure TV and relaxation, and playing the mindless shooting games we never get to play during weekdays. With the hectic schedule LHS has, Saturday even barely seems that way because in the afternoon (sometimes, even the morning), extra curricular activities start pouring down like rain and group activities planned sometime earlier in the week start crawling back into consciousness.

Still, we make do with this hectic supposedly-rest-day schedule. I was supposed to work with my group mates for our Music shadow play and our Filipino survey that day, but instead, my group and I were stuck in the function hall, reading the obvious on the projected screen.

Well, reading wasn't the only thing we did. We watched videos, too. There was one of that Lucky Me! commercial which really doesn't advertise their product much, then there's that home made video about some girl getting knocked up. Last but not least, there was the video of actual birth.

Yes, actual, bloody, baby getting pulled out of the mother's...thing, birth.

For me, it was really nothing. I'm not really disgusted by anything except maybe PDA and Justin Bieber, and with my sister studying to become a doctor, I'm pretty used to the whole vaginal bleeding thing (she shows me her PowerPoint presentations) so it was easy for me to stare at the screen without cringing or even the slightest show of repulse. This was not the case for most people, though.

Everywhere, you can see kids cringing into their seat mates or covering their eyes with their hands. Those bold enough to look at the screen without any cover had their faces twisted into fright and detestation. Moans and expressions of complete disgust echoed through the hall, most in unison. All I could really do at that time was to laugh.

Some, wait, MOST believed that showing the video was completely unnecessary. Well, maybe not COMPLETELY unnecessary. Seemingly, the only thing that can make a teenager really understand the consequences of something is by showing them what that consequence really is, true and uncensored burdens that you have to live through for a long time. Well, OK, maybe that doesn't apply for ALL situations, but for sex and early pregnancy? It most certainly does.

Sensing that we we could die of boredom any second now, the speakers tried to spare themselves from the smell of dead bodies. They asked questions, asking us to answer in the most honest way we can.

Wait, us? More like them.

The kids from the science section just sat there like sitting ducks, listening to all the regular students walk up to the mic and give their best beauty contest answer. Uh, hello! We exist, too! Maybe if they called just one or two of us, they could've gotten the answers they needed. Not the "wala lang" special that the others love to use so much.

Aside from the lectures and the traumatizing (for most) videos, the entire event was practically empty. What a morning wasted.

Sigh. Seriously, are the teachers deaf to our loud and ringing anthems about sex?

An Awesome Disaster by e.viray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.anawesomedisaster.blogspot.com.