in brief: american school district preaches sexually active girls are like ‘dirty chocolate’

A school district in the American state of Mississippi has foregone discussion of condoms in sex education to go on a slut shaming lesson using the confection York’s Peppermint Pattie.

In possibly the worst metaphor ever, students shared the chocolate by putting it in their mouth and then passing it on to their classmates.

This was not a comparison of unprotected sex to raise the issue of potential sexually transmitted infections regardless of gender, but it was a means of denigrating sexually active young women.

In Oxford, Mississippi ‘they’re using the Peppermint Pattie to show that a girl is no longer clean or valuable after she’s had sex — that she’s been used’, public health educator Marie Bernard told the LA Times.

But the revelation has been rebuffed by Oxford school district superintendent Brian Harvey, who claims the method has not been taught for the past two years.

Mississippi law on sex education allows schools to opt into one of two teaching methods: abstinence only or ‘abstinence plus’.

The latter, abstinence plus, combines an abstinence focus with fleeting mentions of contraceptive methods.

It has been reported that 12 per cent of the state’s schools aren’t teaching sex education at all.

Further issues are present where sex education classes separate boys and girls, demonstrations of how to use a condom are not allowed and teachers have described homosexual intimacy as being illegal.

The abstinence only / abstinence plus dichotomy can be overturned or extended in Mississippi parliament in 2016.