Feature Articles

Reflective journal on my learning of Human Sexuality and participation in the Hong Kong Sex Cultural Festival

Ref Number: SCF2015_9a

  • Date7 Sep 2015
  • Category A Word from Friends
  • TargetsN/A
  • AuthorMr David Chan, Student of Department of Health and Physical Education, Hong Kong Institute of Education
  • Topic Sex Culture

This semester, I had taken a course called Sexual Health and Human Sexuality. It was extremely enjoyable and useful that I not only learnt the sex knowledge through lecture in school but also some field trips like having guest talks, visiting clinic and mobile classroom. In general, the numbers of lectures in school were not as much as other course. However, there was no doubt that the quality was much higher.

The first lesson gave me a lot of beneficial enlightenment about sex education. I was shocked when I learnt the meaning of sex, sexuality, sexual rights and sexual health because the relationships between them were a little bit complex and I had to spend a lot of hours on them. For instance, I had to first know the sexuality comprehensively otherwise it was impossible to understand the definition of sexual health. Thus, learning in a right order was helpful to consume new knowledge effectively.

In the last lecture, I learnt one of the most authoritative child developmental theories which were named Freud’s psychosexual stage theory. This theory was focus on sexuality and included five stage levels by age. It was very astonishing to know that boy on phallic stage will develop unconscious sexual desires for mother and want to replace father. It was relieved of me to know that children could develop masculine characteristics and identify the sex and represses sexual feelings toward parents. I thought this stage was very important because once if there were any fixations, children might have serious problems like sexual deviancies or sexual identity disorder. Thus, children ought to be given sex education as early as possible in order to complete all stage successfully to prevent any fixations and, parents often play a vital role on it.

There were two talks held by staff of The Family Planning Association of Hong Kong.   The topics were about sex education and contraception. In my opinion, I quite enjoyed learning sex knowledge from different people since it was helpful for me to think an issue from a different perspective. For example, they thought sex education was about ‘informed choice,’ in which people would be able to make decision wisely based on the sex knowledge they obtained. Besides, the ‘ASK’, which stands for attitude, skill and knowledge, was quite practical as I could know what I should prepare before sex education or presentation.

There was also a nice sharing by their volunteers on some real cases they used to cope with, such as run-away girl. I like this interactive session very much because it could help me to brainstorm some ideas with my group mates and speakers would give us feedbacks immediately. Apart from that, they also talked about online dating which was really common nowadays. I learnt many methods to deal with the problem and the right attitude on making new friends through the net was honesty.

Another funny event was visiting the FPA Jockey Club Teen Bean Mobile Classroom which was a mobile library with many multimedia learning devices. It was a great chance for me to interact with local primary students. While playing games with them, I could share some sex knowledge like differences between ego and super ego. When their parents came to get back the children, I could recommend some books to them. Therefore, it was really a nice activity to practice and review what I had learnt.

I firmly believed the most unforgettable experience must be the Hong Kong Sex Cultural Festival which was an extremely famous international event. It was truly my honor to take part in this worldwide activity and exhibited our school’s works.
The two hours volunteer work was a piece of cake. The staffs only told me to walk around the venue to look after the items on display. It was cheerful of me to see that all visitors were obedient and none of the exhibits were damaged. There were many participating organizations like Action for Reach Out and Action Q. Their exhibits were absolutely thought-provoking. For example, the design of three photos, which were exhibited by Action Q, was intellectual. Even though I spent a few minutes studying them, I still could not know the messages clearly. However, when I noticed the sentence under each photo, I had a feeling that I saw the whole picture and was enlightened. Besides, there were also two personal exhibitions by Koch and Coco Pop. Both dolls and costumes looked amazing. I felt very joyful not only because I could take a photo with handsome Koch but also I could learn something I could not learn at school such as what other people think about sex.

At the end of this course, students need to have a group presentation. I like this part very much because it provided a great opportunity to practice what I had learnt and also learnt from my school mates. For instance, Benji had defined the sex expression into three aspects which included biological, psychological, and social behavior. That was quite different to my group and I thought that was very listener friendly because audience could get the information clearly.

Overall, I enjoyed the process of studying this course and strongly believed that it was helpful to develop my career in the future.