Watch a 2-minute clip from a popular teen show (e.g., To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, Heartstopper, Euphoria – choose age-appropriate).
Ask students:
In 1991, the primary driver for sexual education in Belgium was the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Prior to the late 80s, sex ed focused largely on biology and reproduction. However, the Belgian government and educational organizations (such as Sensoa, then known as PAS) pivoted aggressively toward disease prevention.
Materials from 1991 are characterized by:
The most important lesson puberty education can teach is this: You are not a character in someone else’s story.
In romantic storylines, conflicts are resolved in 22 minutes, grand gestures always work, and the credits roll at the first kiss. Real relationships are slower, messier, less photogenic, and infinitely more rewarding because they are chosen.
A young person with strong relationship literacy can:
When we stop teaching puberty as only biology and start teaching it as a story of emotional discovery, we give young people something revolutionary: the permission to write their own love stories, not just copy the ones they’ve seen.
Final Thought: The next time an adolescent swoons over a fictional couple, don’t roll your eyes. Get curious. That swoon is a doorway into their values, fears, and hopes. Walk through it together.
The Unzipping
Kortrijk, Belgium. 1991. The air in the Gemeentelijke Basisschool’s assembly hall smelled of waxed linoleum, damp wool coats, and the faint, industrial tang of a nearby sugar beet factory. For the twelve-year-olds of 6B, however, the only smell that mattered was fear.
“It’s separate,” whispered Katrien, clutching her Lisa Frank sticker album. “Boys in the music room, girls here. My brother said they show a film.” Watch a 2-minute clip from a popular teen show (e
“A Belgian film?” asked Sofie, her eyes wide.
“Worse,” Katrien said. “A Dutch one.”
The girls huddled closer. The boys, across the hall, were pretending to punch each other, a frenetic energy masking the same terror. Puberty had arrived like a silent, confusing bell-ringer. Some girls had started carrying mysterious purses to the bathroom. Some boys’ voices now cracked like dry twigs. But no one talked about it. Not really.
Then came the “RAR work.” That’s what Mr. Desmet, the balding principal, called it. “Relationele en Seksuele Vorming,” he’d announced in morning assembly. “Compulsory. Your parents have signed the forms.”
The girls’ session was led by Mevrouw DeClippel, the school nurse, a woman whose smile seemed to be stitched on. She wheeled in a heavy television on a cart, then clicked a VHS tape into a Philips recorder.
“First,” she said, holding up a diagram of a uterus that looked like a fleshy, inverted pear, “the menstrual cycle.”
Sofie stared at the diagram. It was clinical. Bloodless. The words on the chart—eierstok, eileider, baarmoeder—were the same ones from their Flemish biology book. But then the film started.
It was a NIK-based production, likely from the late 80s: soft focus, pan flutes, and a narrator with a guttural, authoritative Groningen accent. The screen showed a cartoon of a sperm, shaped like a frantic tadpole, swimming upstream.
“De zaadcel ontmoet de eicel…” the narrator droned.
A girl in the back row giggled, a high, hysterical sound that wasn’t funny at all. Katrien squeezed Sofie’s hand so hard her knuckles turned white. The cartoon dissolved into a real-life photograph of a naked woman, her breasts blurred for some reason, but her pubic area horrifyingly clear. It looked like a startled, hairy face.
“Now,” Mevrouw DeClippel said, pausing the tape. “The tampon.” She held one up, still in its plastic applicator. “You insert it. Here.” She pointed to the diagram. When we stop teaching puberty as only biology
A collective, silent gasp. Insert? Like a key? A suppository? Sofie felt a strange, unwelcome map being drawn inside her own body—a geography of shame and secret mechanics.
Meanwhile, in the music room, the boys were having a different apocalypse.
Their teacher, Meneer Dewulf, a lanky man with a mustache that looked like a startled caterpillar, was braver than Mevrouw DeClippel. He didn’t use a diagram. He used a carrot and a condom.
“This,” he said, holding up the carrot, “is a metaphor.”
Jan, the class clown, whispered, “For what? A stew?” But no one laughed. They were transfixed.
Meneer Dewulf tore the small foil packet with his teeth—a sound like a zipper—and rolled the latex down the orange vegetable with practiced, unnerving calm. “You leave a space at the tip,” he said. “For the… deposit.”
A boy named Pieter started to cry. Not loudly, just a single tear that traced a clean line down his cheek. He was thinking of his older brother’s Rammstein cassette. He was thinking of the hair that had sprouted on his own upper lip, soft as dandelion fuzz. He was thinking that no carrot in the world would ever prepare him for what his body was about to demand.
The film for the boys was worse than the carrot. It was a grainy, almost clinical documentary about “nocturnal emissions.” It featured a boy in striped pajamas waking up, looking at a damp spot on his sheets, and smiling mysteriously. The narrator said, “Dit is volkomen normaal.” This is completely normal.
Jan leaned over to Pieter. “I’d rather have the damp spot than the carrot,” he whispered. Pieter laughed so hard a bit of snot came out of his nose.
The sessions ended. The boys and girls filed back into the main hall for a final, awkward joint lecture from Mr. Desmet.
He stood at the podium, shuffling note cards. “Remember,” he said, clearing his throat. “These changes are a natural part of… becoming Flemish.” Final Thought: The next time an adolescent swoons
A few kids snickered.
He continued, earnest and red-faced. “Respect is the most important thing. For yourself. For the other person. And for the… materials you were given.”
He gestured to a table where a stack of booklets lay. The cover showed a cartoon sun smiling over two silhouetted figures holding hands. The title was: “Van Piemel tot Puberteit: Een Gids voor Jongens en Meisjes.” (From Peepee to Puberty: A Guide for Boys and Girls.)
As they shuffled out into the grey November drizzle, Katrien handed Sofie a folded note. It read: “I’m never using a tampon. I’m going to move to Australia and become a nun who raises sheep.”
Sofie wrote back: “Same. But I’ll keep the carrot.”
They laughed, a real laugh this time, the tension finally breaking. The RAR work was done. They had been officially unzipped. And for better or worse, the map of their bodies was no longer a secret—just a strange, borrowed country they would have to learn to live in.
For boys and girls, often taught separately in early sessions, the curriculum focused on:
For boys:
For girls:
Joint sessions for both genders: