The Institute for Social Development Studies (ISDS) has been developing
culturally and legally acceptable form of sex education for the past couple of
years. For example, the ISDS has held a workshop held two months ago to
kickstart educational programs on the topic across Southeast Asia. That
eight-day event drew all of 17 participants from Vietnam, Cambodia, China,
Malaysia, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. The low attendance despite the wide scope
of the workshop points to some real problems with raising awareness of sexual
health issues in this part of the world.
According to ISDS Deputy Director Dr Khuat Thu Hong, "the sexual websites that
many people were inadvertently exposed to at present were more likely to arouse
sexual desire with vulgar actions rather than healthy sexual intercourse."
Hence, "the establishment of an orthodox website about sex [is] extremely
important." The "orthodoxy" she's talking about, then, isn't meant to mean
"old-school sex," but rather "carefully watered-down and purely educational."
According to the original article, Vietnamese prostitution and abortion levels
are sky-high because "the lack of information about sex has adversely impacted
the health, happiness and love of both married and unmarried couples." Hong
says that it's common for married couples to go more than a year between, um,
intimate relations, and that it's "an undeniable social fact" that this leads
frustrated partners to seek out prostitutes.
The "purely educational" material to be offered on the government-backed site
might help with AIDS awareness and birth control issues, cutting down on the
1.4 million abortions that the government estimates are taking place in Vietnam
each year. That's a lot for a country of 83 million citizens.
And it's not as if the Vietnamese citizenry isn't interested in learning more.
The ISDS has set up a sexual education library with 3,000 print and CD-ROM
titles on reproductive and sexual health issues. The library is quite popular,
especially among students. That sounds to me like a normal and quite frankly
healthy appetite for sexual information among Vietnamese youth.
But if, as Ms. Hong says, sexual frustration is the crux of the problem, that
approach might just treat some of the symptoms and not the root cause. Some
observers are calling the proposed Web site "porn," but for the aforementioned
reasons, that's not likely to be the case. It might, however, be what the
Vietnamese people needs right now.
