From missing to misdirected: young men’s experiences of sex education in Bangladesh

Abstract

ABSTRACT Some sex education research in Bangladesh documents how young people receive sex education but the focus tends to be on the perspectives of teachers and parents; much less is said about how children and adolescents, especially boys, describe their experiences of sex education. This study begins to address this dearth of research. Using a Foucauldian, poststructuralist lens, the study discusses how nine Bangladeshi young men aged 19–24 learned about sex and sexuality during their adolescence, how they interpreted what they learned, and how their learning and experiences reproduce and/or disrupt dominant discourses related to sexuality and sex education. The paper highlights five themes derived from in-depth interviews: silence from parents, lack of school-based sex education, unreliable peer navigators, pornography as a negative force, and the relevance of embodied learning. Of these sources, peers, pornography and embodied learning were the most convenient and common sources of information about sex and sexuality. The study also reveals that what participants learned about sex and sexuality was often strongly gendered (e.g. reproducing hegemonic masculinity and undermining the need for girls’ consent), limited, partial, prohibitive, superficial and unreliable.