A non-academic beginning to the sex education series

 This post is going to be quite short and rather unscholarly, but the series coming out of this will be much more detailed and serious.
 I thought since I'm doing a blog on kids and sex, I would look at books that are popular among parents and educators for to give to kids to teach about their bodies, puberty and sex. From this light reading, I'll do a little bit o' analyzing as a recurring series. This might seems like a cop-out in the scholar department, and it kind of is, but I promise I'll take my fine tooth comb, my critically feminist eye and social-constructionist-'til-the-end attitude to the pages of these books that are more often (and appropriately?) found in a fourth grade classroom than in the bookshelf of a university student.  

Some quick things that I've observed on my mission thus far:

• Surprisingly, Indigo has quite a few books in the children's section about the body, sex, puberty and "growing up". It actually never occured to me until just now that I probably should have checked to see what kind of books there were for adults wishing to educate kids about sex. Oh well, I'm not interested in parenting.
• Most of them are written for a a female audience, and are even labelled with some kind of "for girls!", "all about girls and growing up!" type slogans. (And as we all know... being labelled girls means being labelled female. But this is not the time nor place for that rant and discussion. This post was supposed to be short.)
• People tend to look at you funny when you're 21 years old, sitting on the floor in the corner of the children's section, scanning through books about bodies and sex, trying to decide which ones to buy. I can't imagine what the reaction would have been were I a guy.
• All of the books seem to talk about male and female bodies, regardless of the intended audience, which was something I was rather relieved to find.

 The first book I wound up buying is called "girlology: A Girl's Guide to Stuff* that Matters. *Relationships, body talk & girl power!" by Melisa Holmes and Trish Hutchison, both of whom are medical doctors. It's about 250 pages, but obviously I won't be analyzing every single page or even chapter because I plan to do a few critical analyses sex education books. I'll probably wind up looking at websites and other resources a lot, too, because I really don't need this many kids books about sex in my collection. And I have other ways to use money. Like food.

 Glancing through, a lot of pages seem to have a "your brain is responsible for..." theme. This worries me a little bit, but some of the chapter headings look promising. Maybe I'll learn something new in time for the next post.   

(Complete citation for book:  Holmes, Melisa, M.D. and Trish Hutchison. girlology: A Girl's Guide to Stuff* that Matters. *Relationships, body talk & girl power!  Health Communications Inc, Florida, 2005.)