“There is no shame in having all the information possible.”
“You are not chewed gum,” read an art display featuring wads of gum, located in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., unveiled on October 30 by advocates for science-based comprehensive sexual education. The display, organized by Advocates for Youth and Trojan, sought to push back on abstinence-only messaging that says sexually active youth are comparable to a chewed piece of gum for future partners.
The unveiling comes at a particularly crucial political moment for sexual and reproductive health. Earlier this summer news broke that the Trump administration had awarded $1.5 million in Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program funds to anti-choice organizations such as Obria and Bethany Christian Services. Additionally, some high-profile abstinence-only sex education activists have taken up prominent posts within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, rebranding what has been commonly known as abstinence-only sex ed to the more vague “sexual risk avoidance.”
But according to advocates, no matter what these programs are called, they still paint normal human sexuality as inherently shameful. “We see [that] this one was a very common factor in a lot of schools: the idea that anybody who is sexually active, their worth is lessening and lessening every single time they engage in activity, which isn’t true whatsoever,” says Bukky, a 19-year-old student at Howard University and a member of Advocate for Youth’s International Youth Leadership Council in an interview with Teen Vogue.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, 10 states and Washington, D.C., require that only abstinence-only sex ed be taught in public high schools, while 29 other states require that abstinence-only be stressed within sex ed curricula. Just 17 states require medically accurate sex ed be taught in public schools. According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, released in October, STI transmission rates for syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia have hit an all-time high in the U.S.
Sexual health advocates say now is the time for action. “I have seen many times over the impact of shame-based abstinence only education,” says Logan Levkoff, a sexual health educator involved in the protest. “I think it has implications; tremendous implications for physical health, and certainly has implications for emotional health, and none of them are good implications. So to be a part of a program that is really saying abstinence only sexuality education and [sexual risk avoidance], as they’ve been rebranded, are setting our young people up to fail.”
The message of the day brought back memories for Bukky’s colleague on the International Youth Council, Ayanna, a 19-year-old student at George Washington University. “This really resonated with me because my sex education in North Carolina was just shaming, just all around,” she tells Teen Vogue. “We never talked about sex. So just the fact that sex is something that is pleasurable and, like, fun, and not something that, you know, necessarily has to be like a marriage for procreation. That’s a very heteronormative, cis perspective on it. We didn’t talk about… what sex can look like in different types of relationships with different genders. And we didn’t talk about anything related to gender expression. It’s just ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’”
Former Disney Channel star Joshua Rush was also on hand to detail for Teen Vogue his own experience with sex ed in his home state of Texas, which requires abstinence-only sex ed be emphasized, and later in California, which requires medically accurate comprehensive sex ed. “I grew up [in Texas], and I know there’s different personal convictions in the way that people feel, and a lot of that comes from religion,” he says. “But the fact of the matter is that this isn’t a conversation about religion. This isn’t a conversation about culture. We’re not telling kids, ‘Hey, go out, have sex.’ We’re telling kids, ‘Hey, go out, and have the information that you need. If you choose to make that decision.’ There is no shame in having all the information possible. There is a problem when people don’t have the right information.”
Ayanna frames the issues surrounding sex ed as a “concoction of terrible decision-making” centering [on] adult hang-ups with sex. According to her, sex ed needs to match up with the reality adolescents are facing today.
“We know that high schoolers and even some middle schoolers are out here making pretty adult decisions because of the circumstances that they’re in,” says Ayanna. “So instead of trying to shelter them and coddle them and to give them, like, this sweet sugarcoated birds and the bees, we have to be real and honest because we know what young people are doing. So why not? And they’re gonna do it anyway. So why not make them prepared and safe so that they can live full lives and not be shamed to be who they are and engage in practices that they want to with consent with other people?”
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