By Amanda Tan

WHAT do you make of a bra-wearing lesson for 17-year-old girls, or having to watch five re-runs of abortion documentary The Silent Scream?

Well, if you are a teenager with a lot of burning questions about sexuality on your mind, not much.

As our bodies matured, our minds became obsessed with dating, pre-marital sex and same-sex relationships - things we never really talked about at school.

If there were answers we were looking for, they generally had to do with those topics.

Instead - at my school at least - we were subjected to age-inappropriate information, or repeated scare tactics.

At 17, I had to sit through a lecture titled How To Wear Your Bra Correctly by an over-enthusiastic trainer - a topic more appropriate for the start of our lingerie-wearing years, at 13.

Meanwhile, by the time my peers and I were in Secondary 4, we had also become immune to the gory abortion procedure as depicted in The Silent Scream. After all, we had seen the same material used since we were in Primary 6, so repeated viewings had rendered useless any scare tactics intended.

What's more, rather than address contraception and condoms, we were told not to have sex. We were told not to date, instead of how to mend a broken heart.

All this, set against the backdrop of the Internet, which offered us free, full-frontal insights into the trysts of our more sexually active peers.

Real, relevant and meaningful - these morsels were not for us.

Now, with the recent Aware saga raising some questions about sex education in schools, I can't help thinking when this question will be asked: How is the young person supposed to get answers if there are so many things we cannot talk about?

Touchy topics they may be, but they are still facets of life - they happen, whether or not we put them in our syllabus. So why not take our questions seriously, and tell us the clinical truth?

Don't panic. You don't have to do it all at once.

If the question of how old someone needs to be before he or she can watch an NC16 or M18 movie is decided by the movie content, perhaps the same can be done for discussions of sexuality.

Feed us small doses, but make it directly relevant. How about compiling a list of questions from those of us in the same level, find out what the most common ones are, and address those?

In this way, information can relate directly to age range without undermining the intelligence of the listener.

When I was in school, my teachers used to talk about sex in a roundabout way, using euphemisms such as 'you- know-what' or 'birds and bees'. It all might have left us more dangerously curious than before.

The more they talked around it (and made us sit through gory videos and pointless lectures), the more we craved information. I dare say it left us to seek out alternative answers, but not always with the best results.

On the Internet, we trawled through questionable sites. We would share half- baked pieces of information with one another; or, as it was with some male friends, turn to pornography.

But what we really needed was frank talk - relayed to us in the same way an older sibling might share juicy gossip - unabashed, down-to-earth and honest.

No point trying to create the perfect silver bullet for questions from youth about sex.

Instead, just tell it like it is.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.