Welcome to the sex ed class that teaches boys 'No means yes.'

By SARAH NORTON

How would you feel if your child’s school was teaching them that when a girl says ‘no’ she actually means ‘yes’?

Or when a girl asks, “Do you love me?” she actually means, “I feel insecure and I need to know that you value me”?

Or that guys only go after the ‘hot’ girls?

Because this is what was being taught during a sex-ed class last week that has since gone viral.

A Singapore student was so appalled by the sex ed workshop at her school which she claimed “promoted bigotry and rape culture” that she penned a powerful open letter to her principal that has since gone viral.

The workshop, called “It’s Uncomplicated”, was held last week and was run by a conservative Christian group, Focus on the Family (FotF).

Agatha Tan, 17, wrote an open letter to her principal expressing her outrage at the course. The letter was shared on Facebook and has now been shared around the world.

This is what the letter says:

The most pressing [issue] is perhaps that the workshop and booklet actively serve to promote rape culture in school. On the cover page of the booklet itself, it is written, “no means yes?” and “yes means no?”

She continues:

From merely glancing through this booklet, I learned a simple yet important lesson: that bigotry is very much alive and it was naïve of me to think I could be safe from it even in school.

And if the sexism wasn’t bad enough, the workshop undermined other minorities too:

When someone else tried to raise that the facilitator’s views were too narrow and that they failed to consider, for instance, LGBTQ or polyamorous individuals, he effectively shut her down by saying that her views were not what the audience wanted to listen to and that perhaps she could remain quiet for now and bring it up with him afterwards so they could end the first half of the course for break, which was coming up “very soon”. (He failed to actually ask the audience if we wanted to listen to her opinion and assumed we wholeheartedly accepted his, and break was in fact almost another half hour later.) I personally thought that listening to her opinion was more important than tea break, but what do I know? After all, I am just a “gal”.

Ouch.

Agatha really hit home with her message at the end of the letter:

By engaging the services of groups such as FotF to teach sexuality education in school, the management hence indirectly participates in promoting rape culture, tells students that we should conform to traditional gender roles instead of being our own persons, demonstrates that the acceptance of diversity in people is unimportant, and erases minority groups in the student population.

Bravo Agatha, Bravo.

The book is unbelievable…