Petting Zoo

"From here down," says Cally Leighton, pointing to her chin while standing in front of a classroom of students at Federal Way High School, "your body doesn't know if it's married or not. It's just this physical thing that's supposed to cha-cha-cha and have fun."

Leighton, a former cheerleader with three grown kids, is in Federal Way to deliver a lesson on sex eduction, preaching that intercourse should be reserved "for the uniqueness of the marriage relationship." She tells the students about a class of all boys she taught last year in Kent. When asked how many of them wanted to marry virgins, "100 percent of those boys flew their hands up," says Leighton.

"I thought it was pretty amazing," says Leighton after class, referring to the preference the Kent boys expressed for virgins. "It may be an old, archaic, '50s thing, but it's still hanging around."

But some people think what's archaic—and inaccurate—is the kind of sex education Leighton and others like her are delivering to public school districts. Leighton belongs to a Kirkland-based group called SHARE (Sexuality, Health and Relationship Education), a subset of the Christian organization Life Choices, which offers pregnant women alternatives to abortion. Among the concepts SHARE teaches: that the failure rate for condoms is higher than usually believed; that men get aroused by French kissing while women don't get aroused until the petting stage; and that women who engage in French kissing may leave themselves vulnerable to date rape.

The Seattle School District has rejected using SHARE because of concerns over accuracy and gender bias, but SHARE speakers have nonetheless lectured in the Renton, Issaquah, and Lake Washington school districts. And sex-education speakers from all over the country come to SHARE's Kirkland offices for training, according to director Lisa Merrifield.

Partly in response to curricula offered by SHARE and several similar groups around the state, a coalition of organizations— including the local chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, NARAL, Pro-Choice Washington, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington—is pushing for a bill this legislative session that wouldn't require districts to offer sex education, but would mandate if they do that instruction be "medically and scientifically accurate" and include teaching on both abstinence and contraception.

Currently, the state requires that students receive at least one lesson on AIDS prevention every year beginning in the fifth grade. By law, the curriculum must stress abstinence. Most districts choose to offer additional sex education, but the curriculum "varies significantly from one place to another," according to Pam Tollefsen, health program coordinator for the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI).

According to a survey commissioned by the aforementioned coalition, dubbed the Healthy Youth Alliance, whose results were to be released this week, 20 percent of 200 schools that responded from 125 districts statewide teach an "abstinence-only curriculum" that offers no information about contraception. Within that 20 percent, the majority of schools instruct students to remain abstinent not just until they're older or out of school but until marriage.

On the wall of Meredith Zeltner's Federal Way High School classroom are numerous posters warning kids about the dangers of sex. "Sex with one partner can still be group sex," proclaims one. "Forty-eight teens were inflicted with HIV today," says another. A family and consumer science teacher, she spends about four weeks per year on sex education. She discusses birth control and brings in speakers from Planned Parenthood and public health agencies. To discuss abstinence, she relies on SHARE.

That is how Leighton came to be standing in front of Zeltner's class on a recent Tuesday. "We get to talk about sex today—woo-hoo!" Leighton begins. She comes across as the mom who's a little bit corny but also the one who takes all her kids' friends out after a school game.

Sex is like a prom dress that you keep in the closet, she says. You don't drag it out for any old occasion. If you did, you risk the possible consequences of not only sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy but damage to your ability to form healthy relationships in the future. On an overhead projector, she flashes information about condoms. One bullet point: "20 percent of teens under 18 using condoms get pregnant over a period of a year."

"Women and men are wired very differently," she tells the class again and again. "Men are kind of like a lightbulb. You turn a lightbulb on—ta dah!—it's on. Women are like a curling iron. You plug a curling iron in . . . it takes a while to warm up."

To illustrate the "progression of sexual expression," as it is labeled on the overhead projector, she tells an elaborate story about a hypothetical Billy Joe Bob and Mary Sue, who run through all the stages. First they meet, spend time together, hold hands, and engage in a simple kiss. Then they move into a prolonged kiss (nicknamed "prune" by SHARE because you pucker you lips together as you say the word) and French kissing (nicknamed "alfalfa" because you use your tongue to pronounce it).