The children's hands-on sex, I mean science, museum

If you want real evidence that the Dutch have a different attitude about sex than us prudish Americans, don't go to the red light district. That's for tourists. Go to NEMO, the children's hands-on science museum. There is a "Teen Facts" exhibit there that made me blush, and I do not consider myself a Puritan (I'm the mom who told her kids the facts of life the first time they asked. I apologize if they told your kids; I forgot to tell them to keep it to themselves). When I found myself standing beside a hulking teenage boy, both of us looking at 20 pairs of wooden artists' mannequins posed to demonstrate different sex positions, I hightailed it out of there. AWKWARD, as my daughter would say.

My 10-year-old son and his friends Isaac and Eliot did not go inside that exhibit; it was labeled for ages 12 to 18 (!). But they were interested in the exhibit where you could practice French kissing by sticking your hand inside a giant puppet of a tongue. "Be creative! Make it beautiful!" read the instructions.

They also watched this hilarious and rather brilliant three-minute film about puberty, which was looping continuously on a wall where you really could not miss it. Check it out here:

The boys found it fascinating and watched it twice. Zander pronounced it "disturbing" -- but he didn't really look disturbed.

There were a lot of things in the Teen Facts area that would have some American parents yanking their kids out by the hair. I admit, I was a bit shocked. But I also found it refreshing. Another blogger who wrote about this exhibit asked whether the frank attitude of the Dutch toward sex ed had a better outcome than the
American approach cited the following statistics, which support the case for openness quite elegantly:

	United States	Netherlands
Births per 1000, women ages 15-19	52.1	6.2
Abortions per 1000, women ages 15-19	30.2	3.9

Source: 2001 Unicef Report

By the way, this intrepid blogger took pictures of everything.

Comments, anyone?

[update: Interested in further information about what schools and government do in the Netherlands to produce the outcomes cited above? Check out this article: Adolescent Sexual Health in Europe and the U.S.—Why the Difference? ]