Death is much, much easier to understand than sex. It’s like an on-off switch. Someone can be alive, then they can be dead. The notion of permanence is not some

Death is much, much easier to understand than sex. It’s like an on-off switch. Someone can be alive, then they can be dead. The notion of permanence is not something that, say, under 5s, are good at understanding, but above that age it’s pretty clear what it means for something to die and not come back. Meanwhile, sex has layers upon layers of complexity. The basic notion of “it’s where babies come from” is the first layer that becomes intelligible, but the mechanics, motivations, and risks have increasingly sophisticated answers. It’s difficult to explain sexual desire to pre-pubescent kids with no personal reference point for that feeling. It’s difficult to explain the social dynamics of sexual relationships to tweens who are still rank amateurs at any kind of relationship. It’s no different really to math, where we don’t generally teach algebra to 5 year olds, and we don’t generally teach calculus to 10 year olds. The wider political debate happens because people disagree over where specific things lie on the scale of sexual complexity. There are extremists who think pre-teens can’t handle seeing a nipple, and there are extremists who think pre-teens should be reading books about blowjobs. Most people find a middle ground, then argue about it anyway.