One summer day in middle school, our whole class was pulled out of the chemistry lab. The girls were asked to head to a room on the first floor, and the boys were asked to return to the homeroom. For an hour, the girls sat and listened to a lecture about periods, safe sex, pregnancies, and diseases. When we came back to the classroom, wide-eyed and a little troubled, the boys were laughing, chatting, and having fun.

After pushing down the indignation I felt, my first question was, what did you learn? To which they replied, “That the girls were being told about some ‘girl things.’”

In many classrooms, sex education begins and ends with a few diagrams. Boys learn about sperm, erections, and nocturnal emissions, and girls learn about periods, pregnancy, and the womb. Somewhere between these two lessons, a wall quietly rises—a division that tells each group what they need to know and what they don’t.

The phrase ‘girl stuff’ might currently be one of the quietest barriers in any classroom.

A lot about the female anatomy gets put aside, labeled as “girl stuff.”

The phrase “girl stuff” might currently be one of the quietest barriers in any classroom. It’s the invisible wall that keeps boys from learning about something they were all once a part of. While girls get information about both male and female bodies and how they work, boys are simply told about their own. Both learn about wet dreams and basic anatomy, but the…