Nick Offerman, Laverne Cox And Other Comedians Vastly Improve High School Sex Ed On ‘Last Week Tonight’

Anyone who’s been subjected to the sight of a middle-aged teeball coach profusely sweating while awkwardly rolling a condom onto a mysterious plastic rod — shoutout to Mr Vaughn from Year 9 PDHPE — won’t be surprised to know that the state of sex education in Australia is still desperately wanting. Once study from LaTrobe University last year, showed that 50 percent of students have expressed dissatisfaction with what they were offered at school, calling it irrelevant to real-world situations and not inclusive of LGBT perspectives. Even more worrying: 25 percent of those surveyed also reported they’d had an experience of “unwanted sex of some kind”.

Just take a moment to consider how horrific that actually is.

This is perhaps even worse in the US where Christian lobby groups still have enormous sway over school curriculums and abstinence-only education receives $50-$70 million in funding each year from Congress. As John Oliver noted on this week’s instalment of Last Week Tonight, this is doing a huge disservice to students, and the nation’s resistance to talking about the subject is leading to enormous problems with teen pregnancy, sexually-transmitted disease, sexual assault, bullying (from teachers as well as students), and severe misinformation that affects the mental health of young people and in particular, young girls.

As Oliver notes, with no standard national curriculum on the subject, there are only 22 US states that mandate kids receive any information at all, only 13 of these require that information to be medically accurate, eight states explicitly prohibit certain topics like homosexuality, and in Utah, the actual mechanics of the physical act aren’t allowed to be discussed at all.

“There is no way we’d allow any other academic program to consistently fail to prepare students for life after school,” he said. “And human sexuality, unlike calculus, is something you actually need to know about for the rest of your life.”

With this, he also enlisted the help of Nick Offerman, Jack McBrayer, Kristen Schaal, Megan Mullally, Kumail Nanjiani and Laverne Cox to make what might be the world’s first legitimately decent sex ed video.

A few important takeaways from that:

– With 40 percent of college students still confused about what consent actually is, it’s clear this is a huge issue schools (in the US and elsewhere) desperately need to address, particularly with young men. Oliver’s comparison to boxing — “if both people didn’t fully agree to participate, one of them is committing a crime” — is a great way to get clarity on the issue, and this has recently been done in other ways as well:

– The more people who address the fact Kenickie from Grease is clearly a sexual predator, the better. It was my school’s annual musical in Year 7 and I remember bopping around to that date-rape song in a pink poodle skirt by grandma had made me. Not okay.

– We must never, ever forget this beautiful fact about Mike from Breaking Bad:

– We should probably get comedians to start doing sex-ed in high school. At the very least they’d be better than Harold from Neighbours.