It's just not normal to spend your adolescent and teenage years separated away from the opposite sex. But it's one of the central tenants of religious education, and a recipe for sexual dysfunction, says Eamonn Dwyer.

Did you hear the one about the young boys sent up the hill to be taught by a pack of priests? It sounds like the start of a mickey-take, but the Catholic Church still educates a lot of Ireland’s young, and overwhelmingly educates them single-sex. In Britain, the faith school and independent sector continues to promote sex-segregated education.

New Labour’s city academies, which the Conservatives have promised to expand, are also promoting single-sex compared to the comprehensives they replace. Out of four new academies in Manchester, two are single sex.

Ireland and the Catholic North are still fundamentally conservative countries when it comes to sexuality. Moves to legalise abortion would be nipped in the womb, adequate sex education is regularly blocked by school boards, and condom usage was only unwrapped in the 1980s. But middle class parents in Britain are also uncomfortable with the idea of their teenage selves going through sexual discovery.

Check out Harrow School's promotion of single-sex shuttering, tapping into this parental phobia: “Many parents feel it is a good thing for their son or daughter to be away from the opposite sex for one part of their lives … It is inevitable that co-educational boarding schools have serious disciplinary problems caused by boy-girl relationships which the single-sex schools avoid.”

You see? Throw boys and girls in the mix together and they’ll be at it like rabbits.

Parents and advocates of single sex education will inevitably point to marginally better exam results (particularly among girls). Less sexual distraction, more scholarly traction, or so the logic goes. But socially crippling young men and woman for the sake of a few exam points is a poor trade off, even if it were true. Divorce rates and middle aged depression are much higher for single-sex-educated boys than kids given a chance in polysex.

In another howler from their single-sex advertorial, Harrow claims “there is no question of not knowing what the opposite sex is like”. I've got news for Harrow's web-pimps: it is entirely possible to go through your teens without seeing a vagina. I recall going to the toilets and finding porno pictures glued to the inside of the cubicle. Some spread-eagled blonde pasted up like a public service ad – except, without exception, their private parts would be torn out.

Maybe it was just the school I went to, but I can’t recall seeing a single undefiled labia for the duration of my education. The female organ was called fadge in local parlance – a strange, deeply odious beast which braggart explorers had investigated with a brave digit. At 18 years of age, when confronted with the oleaginous form in the flesh, I simply gagged in disgust. The first thing I could think of (film buff that I am) was: “So that’s where HR Giger got his idea for the Facehugger.”

To be fair, my potential sexual partner had a similar reaction to my own member, dashing off to the bathroom so she could wash her mouth out. She too went to a single-sex school; as Freud related about immature girls, she seemed overwhelmed by the idea of the penis’ dual function as urinary tract. The issue here is not naivety or anatomic incompetence, but sexual preconceptions which form and harden in a vacuum.

At university, exposure to the opposite sex revealed how little I knew of how to interact with them. I was 24 years of age when I finally got the knack of when to kiss a woman on the cheek. 24! It took years of studying the dip of the head, the circumstance, relaxing one’s body posture to the required level. In single-sex boys’ schools, physical touch is frowned upon unless it’s a strike in sport or in anger. Evolutionary psychologists have found that ‘no touching’ rules cause huge amounts of stress in adolescents and stunt development.

The sexual inhibition of my isolated teenage years looms large over my relationships. I’ve had fourteen sex and relationship counselling sessions on the NHS to no avail, and most of my friends from secondary school are similarly inhibited in approaching and being intimate with women.

If I do manage to impregnate some poor woman with a lass or a boy, I can assure you we won’t be adding to the waiting list of the local league-table-topping ‘faith school’; we’ll be packing ours off to the nearest bog standard comprehensive.

eamonn.dwyer83@gmail.com
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