Category: Sex Education

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Young women and girls are taking sex-ed into their own hands on YouTube


Many young women and girls who make YouTube videos about sexual consent also examine larger cultural, legal and political contexts.

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Sex education in Canadian schools continues to be highly politicized and young people are paying the price.

In Québec, for example, the provincial sexual health curriculum has shifted a few times in the last couple of decades, often leaving teachers and schools confused about the approach and the implementation guidelines. In Ontario, sexual health curriculum is also at the mercy of the province’s political climate.

In many Canadian classrooms, factors like inadequate teacher training and discomfort impact what topics are addressed or avoided. Unfortunately, these circumstances mean that youth may not get the information they need to engage in healthy, positive sexual relationships.

Meanwhile, sexual health resources flourish online. Studies show that many youth seek out information about sexuality in digital spaces. Within today’s participatory social media platforms and networks, many of these resources are produced by youth, for youth. Young girls and women specifically are taking sex education into their own hands.

As a doctoral student at McGill University and a sex education practitioner, I have had the privilege of studying how young YouTubers use their media to talk to their audiences about sexual violence and sexual consent, both in my own dissertation and in collaborative research. In these studies, I looked at a mix of YouTube videos and vlogs (or video logs) from youth of all genders, aged between 14 and 30 years old.

Female YouTubers as sex educators

The YouTubers in my study, including celebrity vloggers like Meghan Hughes, Laci Green and Hannah Witton, tackle many facets of sexual consent and sexual violence in their videos. They move beyond the oversimplified “no means no” and “yes means yes” messaging that permeates consent education.

Many of the young women and girls in my samples not only define sexual consent and sexual assault, but also frame these concepts within the larger cultural, legal and political contexts in which they exist.

This is important; examining sexual violence from these broad lenses helps spotlight rape myths and victim blaming. Helping youth recognize the impacts of sexual violence and the underlining societal beliefs and structures that sustain it is a positive step towards fostering a consent culture.

I found that young women and girls are taking to YouTube for many reasons, notably, to express themselves, to educate, respond to others, share their narratives and promote social change. Within their videos, several of the YouTubers in my studies actively encourage their audiences to respect sexual consent, to support survivors and to fight rape culture — for example, by how they vote.

Similar to young feminist activists in other online spaces, these YouTubers are positioning themselves as agents of change and using their vast networks to make a difference (some have hundreds of thousands of subscribers). Audiences listening to YouTube videos can therefore learn how about the skills and knowledge they need to engage in healthy relationships, and more broadly, to help prevent sexual violence.

I found that these girls and young women address sexual consent and sexual violence in creative and engaging ways. In their videos, they use emotional narratives, snappy media effects, music, examples that resonate with youth realities and informal language.

Their production choices lend to an authentic and conversational feel. In many ways, these videos offer a form of sex edutainment, combining educational elements with entertainment, to attract young YouTube audiences.

YouTube pitfalls

There are several benefits to learning about sexuality on YouTube: there is a large selection of videos, audiences can watch them 24/7 and there are opportunities for dialogue. However, accessible features also open doors to potential harmful rhetoric.

I found that some YouTubers (male and female) perpetuate harmful stereotypes and misinformation about survivors and sexual violence. Trolls often showed up in the comments. In fairy tales, trolls lurk under bridges waiting for victims they can eat — in the digital spaces I studied, many hid under the cape of free speech and openly mocked female YouTubers, women in general and feminists.

This was not a surprise; it’s well known that the internet can be a dangerous space for women and girls. Sarah Banet-Weiser, professor of media and communications at the London School of Economics, correctly describes popular feminism and misogyny as warring ideologies, with digital spaces being one of their battlegrounds. YouTube is no exception.

Viewers should also be aware of the corporate nature of YouTube. As researcher and lecturer Sophie Bishop points out in her study of beauty vloggers, YouTube’s “algorithmic political economy” means the platform will prioritize videos deemed more commercially viable. Some celebrity YouTubers are financially supported by companies, while others are looking for sponsorship — both of which may affect video content and performance. The algorithms also mean a diversity of voices may be left out.

Supporting youth

Parents can can help youth navigate the messages they see on YouTube and elsewhere. You and your child can also play an important role in sexual violence prevention and the promotion of consent culture in the following ways:

Ask and listen. Show interest in what youth are are watching, without judgement. Taking the time to listen to them describe the spaces that they occupy can help build the trust needed to talk to them about the messages they consume.

Practise critical media literacy skills with your kids. We cannot control what is said on the internet; however, we can teach youth to be critical of media messages and to be responsible content producers. MediaSmarts has tip sheets for parents.

Address the trolls. Youth already know about trolls. However, it may be helpful to discuss with them how to deal with hateful online comments. There is no best solution: learning more about it may be a good first start.

Be prepared for conversations about sexuality and sexual violence. If you are comfortable talking about consent, have open, non-judgmental conversations. If you aren’t comfortable talking about sexuality or consent, or you are aware that your views may not be healthy, help your child find resources (such as GoAskAlice or Amaze) and someone they trust that they can talk to (a family member, or friend or a local community organization).

Teach yourself and be prepared to “unlearn.” Rape myths, victim blaming and other harmful views of survivors are perpetuated across all types of media and platforms. Learn about them and reflect on the ways that you can cultivate positive values and beliefs that support healthy relationships and consent culture.

Keep an open mind: this may require questioning your own attitudes, assumptions and behaviours. Your conversations may lead into the social and cultural realities youth are navigating every day.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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What’s Typical About Youth Sexuality

What’s Not, How To Know The Difference

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When it comes to child development we have tons of information about how kids’ social, emotional, physical, spiritual and intellectual abilities grow and change over time. However, there is one aspect of child development that is nearly always overlooked — sexuality.

We are sexual from birth, and our sexuality develops and changes over time just like all the other parts of being human. Due to lack of information and education among folks who work with kids, developmentally typical behaviors are often mistaken for signs of sexual abuse. In this increasingly sexualized world it’s time to add childhood sexuality to the list and understand what’s typical, what’s not and when to get a child help.

Sexuality is a part of every human regardless of age, and while we are fully aware of the physical changes associated with sexual development, social and emotional development occurs as well. Typical and common behaviors, “sex play,” should be spontaneous, mutual and good-humored and are considered a healthy part of psychological, social and sexual development.

When puberty makes the scene children’s sexual behaviors and experimentation intensify and become more adultlike in nature. Once they are in adolescence kids generally engage in even more behaviors we would consider to be adult sexuality — making out, touching each other for pleasure, sex, exploring sexual orientations and gender, etc.

From birth until puberty children perceive healthy sexual behaviors as games; these behaviors are called “sex play.” When kids are involved in sex play it is usually spontaneous, mutual, good-humored. They are good friends with a close play relationship — besties, siblings or cousins who are similar in age and development.

Most sexual behaviors involve the following elements: curiosity about bodies, touching another’s privates, games like playing doctor or spin the bottle, gender identification, self-pleasure and/or masturbation. Behaviors that are cause for concern include: imitating adults sexually, sex play using force, threats, dominance, violence, aggression and/or compulsiveness. Any behaviors that are clearly adultlike (sexualized) or cause high adult concern should be thoroughly investigated.

Our first instinct is to think that a child has been sexually abused when they exhibit sexualized behavior. It’s important to assess the entire situation before deciding that sexual abuse has occurred. Often the child has been exposed to pornography or engaged in this sort of play with another child and they are acting it out.

COMMON BEHAVIORS

When you know what to expect in terms of sexual behavior in children it is much easier to determine if a child needs help. It is very important that you stop the play, casually chat with the kids about their behavior to determine whether further help is needed and remind them of the body-boundary rules.

These common behaviors by age group are adapted from “Preventing Sexual Abuse” by S.K. Wurtele and C.L. Miller-Perrin.

Preschool age (0 to 5):

Common: Sexual language relating to differences in body parts, bathroom talk, pregnancy and birth. Self-pleasure at home and in public. Showing and looking at private body parts.

Uncommon: Discussion of specific sexual acts or explicit sexual language. Adultlike sexual contact with other children.

School-age (6 to 12): This group may include both prepubescent children and children who have already entered puberty, which is when hormonal changes are likely to trigger an increase in sexual awareness and interest.

Prepubescent children (6 to 12):

Common: Questions about relationships and sexual behavior, menstruation and pregnancy. Experimentation with same-age children, often during games, kissing, touching, exhibitionism and role-playing. Masturbation in private.

Uncommon: Adultlike sexual interactions, discussing specific sexual acts, masturbating in public.

After puberty begins (9 to 12):

Common: Increased curiosity about sexual materials and information, questions about relationships and sexual behavior, using sexual words and discussing sexual acts, particularly with peers. Increased experimenting including open-mouthed kissing, body-rubbing, fondling. Exploration and curiosity about gender identity and sexual orientation. Masturbating in private.

Uncommon: Repeated adultlike sexual behavior, including oral/genital contact and intercourse; masturbating in public.

Adolescence (13 to 16):

Common: Questions about decision making, social relationships and sexual customs; masturbation in private; experimenting between adolescents of the same age, including open-mouthed kissing, fondling and body rubbing, oral/genital contact. Confirmation and exploration of gender identity and sexual orientation. Voyeuristic behaviors are common in this age group. Intercourse occurs among approximately one-third of children in this age group.

Uncommon: Masturbating in public. Sexual interest directed toward much younger children.

Because adolescents engage in more adultlike sexual behaviors, assessment can be challenging. If the behavior is explicit, repeated and causes adult concern the child needs help.

When we know how to identify healthy sexual behaviors in children it makes it much easier to determine if a child or teen needs help rather than assuming all sexual behaviors are problematic. Incorporating information about social and emotional sexual development is key to supporting the whole child and ensuring they are healthy and safe.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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What Your Teen Wishes You Knew About Sex Education

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Cora Breuner was sitting at home one day about to do a little work on her laptop.

“I remember, when I opened my computer, I looked at my son — who shall remain nameless — and I said, ‘Why is this porn site on my laptop?'”

“I’m an adolescent male, Mom.”

It would have been an awkward moment for just about any parent. Then again, Breuner isn’t just any parent. She’s Doctor Cora Breuner, and she works in the adolescent medicine clinic at Seattle Children’s Hospital. In other words, she is an expert on all the reasons her son had been browsing pornography on her laptop.

The moral of this story: No matter how prepared you think you are as a parent, few subjects can catch us off guard or tie us into knots more quickly than sex.

Well, NPR’s Life Kit is here to help. For this episode, we spoke with Breuner, along with a host of researchers, advocates and sex educators, about how parents can help tweens and teens navigate the hormone-infused awkwardness of puberty and beyond.

(Our previous episode explored how to talk to kids from birth to the doorstep of puberty — give it a listen if you want to brush up on the basics, like why you should use anatomically correct terms for body parts — call a vulva a vulva.)

Here are our biggest takeaways:

1. Don’t wait until puberty to start talking about puberty.

Puberty is a huge transformation, both physically and emotionally, and it can start as early as 8 years old, especially for girls. If children aren’t prepared for the changes — from breast and penis development to wet dreams and menstrual periods — it can feel even more disruptive.

Remember, this is a time when the brain is undergoing serious rewiring. The architecture of our frontal lobes, which regulate emotion, is shifting, says Breuner. Teens’ brains are also being flooded with hormones, including estrogen, testosterone and progesterone. Translation: Emotions will be volatile, and kids’ decision-making ability is gonna go a little haywire. “The part of their brain that is supposed to say, ‘Stop doing that!’ isn’t really working.”

The better that tweens understand the changes they will be going through, the better equipped they’ll be to manage the tumult. And that will require the grown-ups in their lives to be proactive. So find a few quiet moments, when the pressure is off — maybe in the car or on a hike, when you don’t have to make eye contact — and give them the basics.

When she was in fourth grade, 15-year-old Lily McGrath remembers her mother sitting her down “right before puberty started … basically prepping me and telling me, ‘So these are some things that are going to happen to you in the future. And if you have questions, please ask.'”

McGrath is now a youth ambassador for the sex education initiative Amaze, talking to other youth about sexual health topics.

Lily says her mom, Electra McGrath-Skrzydlewski, told her that her breasts would likely begin to grow and explained what menstruation would feel like, “almost answering some of the questions before I even really knew that those were gonna be questions I needed answers to. … She was very open from the get-go, even before those were things that I needed to know about.”

2. If your teen speaks up about sex, sexuality or gender, listen, love and be humble.

Perhaps the most powerful thing parents and guardians can do to prepare their kids for adolescence is to create an open channel of judgment-free communication. That way, when a tween or teen starts feeling the rush of adolescence, they’ll take their questions to you first.

It doesn’t matter what they’re trying to share — whether they’re coming out, curious about birth control or still confused by the basic mechanics of sex — your teen needs to feel heard and supported unconditionally.

“You know, ‘We love and accept you,'” says Heather Corinna, the founder of Scarleteen.com, an online sex ed clearinghouse that’s packed with info on relationships, bodies and sexuality.

Corinna says that if your child is asking tough questions that you can’t answer or is sharing information that makes you uncomfortable, “then you can follow that up with, ‘We don’t get it! And we need to find out more about this.'”

To be clear, though, “we don’t get it” is not the same as “we don’t believe you” or a dismissive “you’ll grow out of it.” In fact, Breuner says, if a tween or teen is exploring a different sexual orientation or gender identity, it’s probably not a phase, according to the latest research. “My generation of physicians was taught that, which was wrong. And so the likelihood of somebody growing out of it is extremely low.”

Corinna says that in these moments, parents should also resist the urge to swoop in with their big feelings or a quick fix.

“Young people don’t really have any power but the power that we give them. And if we present ourselves all the time as the ones that know the most, the ones that are the experts at everything and the ones that have all the power, you know, it’s hard for us to have good relationships with them.”

McGrath-Skrzydlewski had always made good listening a hallmark of her parenting style, and so, one sunny afternoon when her daughter, Lily, was 12, she mostly listened as Lily told her that she identifies as pansexual — meaning gender and sexuality aren’t determining factors in whom she is attracted to.

No matter how strong their relationship, though, it was still hard, Lily says. “So awkward. It was just me sitting on the floor pointing to a pride flag.”

“As I was watching her struggle to find the words,” McGrath-Skrzydlewski says, “I just felt some really deep sympathy, because it felt painful in a way that, from where I sat, it didn’t have to be that. And I was just sitting there ready to hold her, right, for whatever she needed.”

Listen, love and be humble. It won’t prevent the difficult conversations of adolescence, but it will help you — and your child — get through them.

3. Teens need to understand the basics of a healthy relationship.

One sexpert we interviewed, Daniel Rice at Rutgers University, likened sex to algebra. In other words, it’s advanced. Just as addition and subtraction are fundamental math skills necessary for algebra, listening and communication skills, as well as abiding respect for the needs and rights of others, are foundational to a healthy, happy sex life — and a healthy, happy life in general.

“I can’t have, you know, a meaningful lesson with young people on what relationship goals may look like when we haven’t established the foundation of, like, how to negotiate with a partner, how to communicate, how to select a partner who’s respectful of you,” says Brittany McBride, senior program manager of sexuality education at Advocates for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works on sexuality education and sexual and reproductive health.

If you’re lucky, you can model these skills at home. It’s also a good idea to talk affirmatively about relationship ideals: about kindness and consideration, about how people in a family or a couple take care of each other, resolve conflicts, admit fault and show forgiveness.

And Corinna at Scarleteen has another tip: Middle school is a great time for parents to start paying more attention to their kids’ relationships with peers. Because, by middle school, many platonic, adolescent relationships are “not even dysfunctional. They’re just flat-out abusive.”

Abusive verbally, emotionally and even physically — because of tweens’ brain chemistry, because our popular culture makes cruelty seem cool and because too many kids don’t experience consistent, loving, respectful relationships at home.

So, Corinna says, pay attention to your kids’ interactions, and if you notice something that crosses the line, “say, you know, ‘I just overheard’ or ‘I just saw’ or whatever the thing was that you did. And then you say, ‘How do you feel about that? Is it OK with you?’ And then have a talk about it.”

A cornerstone of any healthy relationship is consent, and tweens and teens especially need to understand that sexual consent has to be enthusiastic, ongoing and specific. No one can consent to sex if they’re drunk or wasted. And a yes at the beginning of the night is not a yes at the end of the night. Kids need to know that they need to check in with their partner.

4. Sex feels good. Don’t try to hide that from your kids.

Sex ed usually emphasizes the risks of sex — like infections, untimely pregnancy and sexual assault — but rarely explores the big reason people choose to have sex in spite of those risks: pleasure. This gives adolescents an incomplete, arguably inaccurate understanding of sex, and that’s a problem, say our experts.

Instead, tweens need to hear about the risks as well as the fact that most partnered sex isn’t for reproduction but for recreation and connection. Knowing that, says McBride, “removes a little bit of that mystifying, really cool, like, ‘What is this I hear so much about?’ aspect of sex.”

Parents can also share a more positive message about self-pleasure. Nix the shame and stigma, says Breuner. Masturbation, she says, “is not ugly and gross. It’s important to establish your own sexuality and be able to figure out what gives you pleasure so that when you are at a place when you want someone else to give you pleasure, you know what to tell them.”

Corinna suggests easing into the conversation about pleasure by talking about your favorite dessert or a song you want to listen to nonstop. “Just like all of those things, sex is one of those things that people, by and large, do … to make ourselves and/or each other feel good.”

5. Porn isn’t real life, and your kids need to hear that.

Realistically, says Breuner, you may not be able to keep your kids away from pornography altogether. Remember, she caught her son using her laptop to browse porn. Even if they can’t access it at home, she says, they’ll still likely run into it at a friend’s house or at school. So you need to talk about how porn can give them wrong ideas about sex, pleasure and relationships.

Mainstream commercial pornography has little use for consent and often features scenes of pain, control and coercion, as well as unrealistic depictions of female enjoyment. There’s also a narrow range of body types and little body hair, giggling or awkwardness.

And it’s not just porn. Kids need a reality check when it comes to the broader category of what Corinna calls “sexual media.” Whether it’s bikini models on Instagram or hawking beer on TV, the problems are similar. Teens need to hear it from you: Sexual media is fantasy. It’s people doing a job for money, and that’s not how sex works in the real world.

A 2015 study from Texas Tech University found that when parents talked with their middle schoolers early and consistently about porn, sharing their own values, it made a lasting difference. When those young teens became college students, they were less likely to view porn, and if they dated someone who did, it had a less negative impact on their self-esteem.

6. You may want to get backup.

We say this often on Life Kit, but especially when it comes to adolescents and sex, you may need backup. Corinna says parents can find it hard to talk to their kids even — or especially — if they have experienced something similar.

“Some of the parents that are the most scared about their kids being queer or trans are parents who are queer or trans, because they know what they went through. They are accepting. Of course they’re accepting, but they’re also terrified,” Corinna says.

Parents who have their own experiences with sexual assault, abuse or abortion can also find it that much harder to respond when children come to them with difficult questions. Don’t be afraid to enlist the help of a close family friend, another family member, pediatrician, trusted teacher or coach.

Parents can also find help and resources at health centers, YMCAs and teaching hospitals. Sometimes places of worship host sex education workshops. Books can also be a valuable resource, though make sure they’re up to date.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Parents should start teaching sex ed while their children are in diapers, experts say

by Jennifer Gerson

One day, your toddler will point to a pregnant woman, cock their head, and ask, “How did that baby get into that lady’s tummy?”

You might think it’s too soon to start teaching your innocent preschooler about sex at that point, but it’s not. In fact, some experts say, it might even be on the later side.

“Human beings are sexual beings from the time they are born,” said Dan Rice, interim executive director of Answer at Rutgers University, an organization that promotes access to comprehensive sexuality education to young people.

That’s why sex ed actually should start at a young age. Developmentally, kids are already trying to process their worlds, and their bodies are a critical part of that.

But it’s not just teaching about how their bodies develop and how babies are made. It’s crucial to start offering up lessons about boundaries, and who can — and can’t — touch them. 

What many adults fail to realize is that consent begins with hugs with relatives, high fives with teachers, and tickles from parents.

“Children are trying to make sense of their body parts, and their feelings” Nora Gelperin, director of Sexuality Education for Advocates for Youth, a group that advocates for access to sexual health education and services, told Insider. “It all feels overwhelming.”

If you have young children at home, here are the important lessons you can start teaching them, and how to communicate them in an age-appropriate way.

If you can teach a child to not spread germs, you can also teach them about physical consent.

In preschool, parents are starting to have conversations about what it means to be a good friend. This helps to build a solid foundation for developing healthy relationships now, and later in life. But there’s more to the discussion than just using nice words and not pushing others. It’s important to delve into bodily autonomy, too.

“When you teach a child to cough or sneeze into their elbow,” Rice said, “you’re teaching them disease prevention and having concern for not spreading disease to others.”

Children can just as easily understand that they don’t have to embrace anyone who comes close, even if it’s a loving cousin or aunt.

“It’s a really reassuring message for a child that you are in control of your own body,” Rice said, “and that you don’t ‘owe’ someone a hug or a kiss just because they want it.”

Use accurate terminology to name body parts from the beginning, so your child doesn’t feel shameful.

Parents might be tempted to use cutesy terms to refer to genitals. Some parents will call a penis a “doodle” or a vagina a “minnie.” This isn’t a protective measure. In fact, using euphemisms sends the message that the accurate terms aren’t OK to use and that a child should feel ashamed of those body parts.

The goal is to teach children that while genitals are private, they can be talked about among parents and trusted adults.

“You call your nose your nose and your elbow your elbow,” Rice said. “So when you talk about the vulva or the penis, you should call them those things.”

Start early, before your child is even old enough to speak. Gelperin recommends using diaper changes and bath time as opportunities to practice naming body parts with your little one.

That way, she explains, as your child continues to grow and get more verbal, they already will already have the vocabulary to have open conversations about their bodies.

Referring to body parts by their correct names also plays a critical role in preventing sexual abuse.

Teaching your children to name their body parts appropriately is a safety measure since predators often prey on compliant kids who may not know the words for “vagina” or “penis.”

Kids who can’t accurately name these body parts are less likely to report abuse, Gelperin noted.

“You don’t need to go into graphic detail,” Gelperin said. “Just name them and explain that it’s normal, natural, and OK to ask questions about how their body works.”

Identify a trusted adult for your child to turn to in every situation.

It’s essential for young kids to know that they can always turn to a trusted adult during a time of need. A helpful exercise is to have them identify one reliable adult at school, at home, and one outside both of those environments. From there, it’s all a matter of emphasizing that there are grown ups available if someone has harmed them, has approached them in an inappropriate way, or if they have a difficult question to ask.

“Kids naturally have curiosity, and sexuality is a natural and normal part of being human,” Gelperin said. “When you trigger a discussion around those things, this will help communicate to your kid that you value this part of who they are and that you want them to have happy and healthy relationships.”

Dispel gender stereotypes from a young age to show that men and women are equal.

Gender-based violence and sexual violence is often rooted in a sense of inequality between genders.

That’s why it’s important to teach children from a young age that everyone is equal.

“We all deserve to be treated the same,” Gelperin said. “If we can start teaching that lesson to children when they are much younger, we’re all better off for it.”

These lessons can begin with conversations around how there’s no such thing as “boy colors” or “girl colors.” It’s helpful to emphasize there are no activities just for boys, or just for girls. These conversations can extend to toys, clothing, and costumes too.

Educating about self-esteem and self-worth teaches children that it matters how they are treated.

Another critical component is instilling in children a sense of self-importance, and the idea that taking care of themselves is just as crucial as how they treat other people. This is a foundational principle before learning other concepts related to sexual health, and consent, according to Rice.

“A truly comprehensive sex ed curriculum includes things like self-esteem, self-worth, and body image,” Rice said, “since those things all impact how we see ourselves as sexual beings as well.”

If you need help starting these conversations with your children, consider turning to Amaze Jr. It’s an online-platform developed by sexual health educators to help young children and adults communicate effectively about these topics.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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It’s not just about sex:

How to talk to young kids about consent, and why it matters

By Amber Leventry

As a parent who is also a survivor of incest, I want nothing more than to protect my children from sexual violence. I constantly wonder what it will take to improve, if not end, rape culture in our society.

Every 73 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, or RAINN. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 1 in 5 women and 1 in 38 men have experienced completed or attempted rape — forced or coerced vaginal, anal or oral sex. Rape can happen at the hands of known or unknown assailants, including spouses or significant others.

My oldest daughter is 9, and my twins — a boy and a girl — are 6. They are not too young to be educated about sexual health and what healthy relationships look and feel like. We refer to their body parts with the appropriate names; we talk about hygiene, privacy and boundaries. I have taught them about tricky people, and the thing we probably talk more about than anything else is consent.

At the core of its meaning, consent is about permission or an agreement to give and take something. When we use the word “consent,” we often use it in a sexual context because when someone is raped, permission has not been given, and something incredibly personal has been taken.

My goal is to protect my children, but I also have a responsibility to send them into the world with respect for all bodies and an understanding of how consent works and why it is important. The nuances of communicating our wants and then hearing the response or seeing it in a person’s body language during nonsexual situations are lessons we can teach our kids now so that later, when the stakes are higher, they already have the tools to build safe sexual relationships.

I was in the kitchen one evening and could hear my kids trading Pokémon cards. My 9-year-old daughter asked her 6-year-old brother if he would give up one of his cards for one she was offering. He hesitated and told her he wasn’t sure. She tried again. He considered but was reluctant. She tried to negotiate. He said no. She continued to offer him cards he might like, but he clearly didn’t want to trade. She was badgering him. I knew it was making him uncomfortable because he wanted to please her, but he didn’t want to say yes; he was saying no but, in my daughter’s opinion, not enthusiastically enough.

The situation was making me uncomfortable, too, so I stepped in. I praised my son for using his voice to communicate what he didn’t want. I told my daughter that she needed to walk away from the situation. He was telling her and showing her that he didn’t want to trade. I explained that her desires should never be forced onto someone else.

I reminded my daughter of the phrase “You asked, I/she/he/they answered.” This is meant to eliminate nagging when my kids want me to change my mind, and it helps me teach them that they can’t always get what they want. The phrase is a lesson in consent. “You asked for the card, he said no.”

Lexx Brown-James, a licensed marriage and family therapist, certified sex educator and author of “These are My Eyes, This is My Nose, This is My Vulva, These are My Toes,” is also a parent navigating these issues. “When we teach consent to our children — across the gender spectrum — we also have to teach and model respect, [but] respect has changed so much even throughout my own lifetime,” she says. Brown-James grew up in the South and was taught to obey authority without question, but she points out that the definition of respect has changed. It can be a shared goal of treating others how we would want to be treated, no matter the age or power difference, she says.

Brown-James says it is important to empower our children to say yes as well as no, and to make them feel like they will be heard. But kids can’t be in control all of the time, so it’s necessary for adults to model informed consent. Brown-James gives the example of a child going to the dentist. It’s scary, and a child may not want to go, but healthy teeth are important. She suggests giving power to a child’s voice even in those situations. Let them choose the side of the mouth the dentist can look at first. Allow the child to say when they need a break. And be sure you or the dentist check in to see how the child is doing.

Consent also needs to be visible and identified in everyday acts. Asking kids if we can hug them, tickle them or take a bite of their food are great ways to model patterns of asking before taking and then showing them that their voice has power. Notice how none of the situations discussed so far have anything to do with sex? This is important.

I emphasize “no means no” and “stop means stop” with my kids, but it’s not always easy. If something hurts or makes us uncomfortable, telling someone to stop is still confrontational. We may want to keep the peace rather than face another person’s negative reactions. Although I hope my kids will speak up for themselves, I also want them to be able to interpret the other side of the no. If they are ever in a situation where consent is not clear through words, I want my kids to learn how to read body language so they can safely stop an action that is making someone uncomfortable.

Joe Navarro, 25-year FBI veteran and author of “What Every Body is Saying” and “Louder Than Words,” writes that parents should start to teach about body language as soon as their children can understand simple instructions. He emphasizes that all nonverbal communication has meaning and that body language conveys our emotions. Navarro encourages parents to remind children that learning to read body language is a way to make people comfortable.

But what happens when consent is given, but with hesitation? Not all consent is enthusiastic, so Brown-James refers back to teaching kids how to check in. Kids provide plenty of teachable moments for this when they want to do something but are nervous. Brown-James uses an example of her daughter wanting to pet a dog but feeling anxious. She said yes, but her body language did not convey excitement. By using a slow, check-in-as-you-go approach, Brown-James’s daughter got close to the dog, decided where and when she wanted to pet the dog, then finally touched the dog and was ecstatic. With each step, Brown-James asked whether her daughter felt okay.

The work and mindfulness necessary to teach these nuances are worth the initial stumbling points or emotional labor involved. Rape culture will not improve with a one-time talk at puberty. A foundation of empowerment, respect and thoughtfulness for others needs to be put in place early so kids’ intuition can guide them, whether because someone has touched them inappropriately or because they are navigating a new physical relationship as a teen.

Before our kids become teenagers, though, they need the skills to say no for themselves and for others if a situation doesn’t feel right. Deliberate, ongoing and forward-thinking conversations about consent in nonsexual situations will help them navigate higher-stakes sexual decisions when they are older.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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The Nuanced Push for American Sex Education

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According to the Sexuality and Information Council of the United States, only 38 percent of high schools and 14 percent of middle schools across the country teach all 19 topics identified as critical for sex education by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite research demonstrating the health benefits of comprehensive sex education that dates back to the 1980s and even earlier, abstinence-only curricula have historically been the federal go-to, establishing a dichotomy between what the science reveals and what American classrooms have the funds to teach. While federal barriers may complicate the conversation around sex education, many advocates and legislators are working tirelessly to ensure comprehensive sex education. When the need for comprehensive sex education is explained, especially by young people who feel its impact the most, the public tends to listen, even in areas where resistance to sex ed is strong.

In truth, sex education in America is not as controversial as it seems. In fact, public opinion overwhelmingly supports sex education. But while most Americans believe in sex education, Americans do not all agree on the best way to do it. And, as far as experts are concerned, sex education is not practiced across the country the way it should be.

At the federal level, certain initiatives and politicians have tried and failed to regulate sex education. Given the variety of opinions and sensitivities around the once taboo topic of sex, sex-ed legislation works best when approached at the state or local level, as demonstrated in states such as Colorado, Illinois, Texas, and Washington.

By the Numbers

The fight for sex ed gets complicated because sex is complicated. But while sex may be complicated, the American desire for education is not. When America argues over sex ed, the disagreement is never really about the need to educate our children, but rather about the topics of politics, religion, sexuality, and gender that are all inherently linked to sex.

For this reason, as Jennifer Driver, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at SIECUS told the HPR, successful advocates for sex ed provide a nuanced, gradual, “half-baked approach” to sex education.

Historically, there has been a major gap between public opinion and public policy with regard to sex education. According to a study by NARAL Pro-Choice America, “the public overwhelmingly supports age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education, yet anti-choice policymakers promote restrictive abstinence-only programs that censor information about contraception and STD/HIV prevention strategies.”

“Sex education is incredibly popular,” explained Dr. Sara Flowers, vice president of education at Planned Parenthood, who holds a doctorate in Public Health. “Whether looking at political beliefs, geographics, socioeconomic status, or demographics, we have seen through likely voter surveys that there’s resounding support for sex education across the country. There’s this stereotype that sex ed is controversial, but it really isn’t. There’s resounding support for sex ed.”

And, according to NARAL, a 2012 survey demonstrated that 93 percent of adults and 87 percent of teens deem it important to receive information about both abstinence and contraception. For Americans, it cannot just be one or the other.

A Planned Parenthood study from 2014 also demonstrates that Americans overwhelmingly support sex education, with over 90 percent of parents reporting that it is important to have sex ed in middle and high school. These parents advocated for comprehensive sex ed, saying that sex ed should incoporate topics including birth control, STDs, healthy versus unhealthy relationships, abstinence, and sexual orientation. According to these statistics, abstinence-only sex ed is insufficient.

Abstinence-Only, and a Look at the Resistance

But as mentioned, federal policies have historically favored abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula, and these programs have been popular across the aisle. The federal government has allocated over $2 billion to abstinence-only-until-marriage programs since 1982. In particular, the Clinton administration heavily supported these programs, and even allocated $250 million for them. Although they came to an intermittent pause in 2010, abstinence-only programs have again seen the light of day with the Trump-Pence administration.

Beyond the aforementioned abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, it is critical to note that there has always been and still is a resistance movement to sex education in general. Across time, resistance to sex education has arisen in communities with a tradition of little sex education, and which thus become shocked at the introduction of comprehensive sex ed.

“There’s a very strong-but-small movement against sex and sexuality. That movement is very well-funded and has done a successful job of getting people to have doubts about sexual education and [believe] that if you provide sexuality education, young people are more likely to be sexually active. But that is inaccurate info,” Tamara Kreanin, director of the Population and Reproductive Health Program from the Packard Foundation and former executive director of Women and Population at the United Nations Foundation, told the HPR.

From Kreanin’s experience, when advocating for sex education in school districts where sex education had previously faltered — for example, a community on the border in Texas — “ultimately what had the major impact was the young people from the school themselves speaking out and talking about how important comprehensive sex education is. They talked about their peers getting pregnant and syphilis and HIV, and I think what ended up having the biggest impact was the voice of the students,” she said.

The Role of Third-Party Organizations

There is no denying that it has been difficult to implement comprehensive sex ed in American schools. As a result, third-party organizations and groups such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the Unitarian Church have stepped in to offer comphrensive sex education outside of the classroom while simultaneously advocating for better sex ed within schools.

For example, Planned Parenthood, the largest sex-ed provider in the country, not only delivers its own sex-ed workshops and online information, but also develops relationships with schools to build school specific sex-ed curricula. Other groups that are similarly nonpartisan and geographically wide-reaching, such as the Unitarian Church, have created their own sex-ed curricula. The Unitarian Church’s comprehensive sex-ed cirriculum, Our Whole Lives, is one of the most well-regarded in the country.

These third-party organizations who supplement and foster sex ed in America’s schools have made major headway in the push for comprehensive sexual education.“We recognize sex ed in schools as an incredible opportunity because young people are in schools,” Flowers told the HPR. “But it’s important to understand that sex ed in schools is not the only place where sex education happens neither historically nor currently. It’s always been a partnership in schools and out-of-school spaces where sex education happens.”

Kreanin agreed with Flowers. “It’s important to think of sex education from three different lenses,” she told the HPR. “In schools, out of the school setting, whether that’s an afterschool setting or a safe community, and online. In an ideal world, you have all three,” she said.

Keeping It Close To Home: State Level and Local Policies

While it may be easy to keep after-school and online curricula similar across state lines, it proves much harder to do so in public schools. When it comes to sex ed in schools, individual states, and often even individual districts, have the ability to implement their own curricula — or not incorporate sex ed at all. In recent years, many advocacy groups and state level governments have made concerted pushes to improve their commitment to comprehensive sex-ed curricula in public schools.

“There’s definitely a pathway to legislation for sex ed at the state level,” Driver told the HPR. “We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to improve the education system and sex ed is a component. In science classes, there’s a foundation you need … The same thing needs to happen with sex ed. There needs to be a focused foundation setting in K-5 that introduces what it means to be a good friend and how to have strong friendships and family relationships.” Driver emphasized that students can move into much stronger conversations about sex ed after, and only after, that foundation is set. Comphrensive sex-ed curriculums are lauded by experts because they incorporate foundation setting and a focus on relationship building before launching into higher-level material.

State legislators are latching on to the push for comprehensive sex ed too. Successful campaigns for state-level comprehensive sex-ed legislation have happened across the country, with notable crusades in Colorado, Illinois, Texas, and Washington. Although Colorado public schools are still not required to teach sex ed, Colorado abides by local control laws. This means that if districts decide to teach sex ed at all, they have the ability to choose their own sex-ed curriculum. Experts praise Colorado’s local efforts and commend a new state law signed by Governor Jared Polis last May, which mandates that if schools are to teach sex ed, they must teach a comprehensive curriculum that includes conversations around consent. The bill also gives $1 million to fund sex-ed grants in schools and districts; these grants will be overseen by a parent representative and a youth reprenstative, as well as someone to represent students of color.

Illinois has followed a very similar path and also now requires that when sex ed is taught, it is comprehensive. This means it must include conversations around healthy relationships and consent. Meanwhile, policymakers in Texas, a state where abstinence-only sex ed has been a prescribed norm for the past 20 years and the fervent anti-sex-ed movement has a strong foothold, have suggested reworking state law to incorporate conversations about contraceptives, healthy relationships, and consent as well. And in Washington, while a proposed mandatory sex-ed bill failed last April, policymakers continue to fight for comprehensive state wide sexual education. The bill’s passage through the state senate demonstrates the progress made by Washington’s sex-ed advocates.

And At The Federal Level …

In addition to advocating for policy at the state level, Driver told the HPR that her organization continues to push for two priority bills at the federal level. One of these bills is the Real Education for Healthy Youth Act, sponsored by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), which “would be the first ever comprehensive sex-ed bill,” Driver said. The other is the Youth Access to Sexual Health Services Act, sponsored by Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.), which would ensure access to services particularly for LGBTQ youth and communities of color.

In prioritizing sex ed at the federal level, Driver said that society must recognize sex ed’s impact on many other social issues: “Sex ed links to overall education. It links to reducing trans- and homophobia and reducing sexual assault. If we were to prioritize and recognize the connection to so many other social issues it would be easier. Our downfall is that people see sex ed and see a 6 to12-week curriculum and then we’re done, but that’s not sex ed. It may be a curriculum and more.”

When discussing sex education in America in 2020, advocates need to make clear that sex education has support across parties and geographic lines, and that sex education is, after all, just education. All in all, sex education is just “responding to an inextricable part of our humanity,” said Driver. “There are real opportunities in this field to think about how we scaffold and integrate sex ed into adulthood. The knowledge and skills of sex ed provide and support relationships with others.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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To stop sexual and domestic violence, start in the classroom

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As two prosecutors with decades of experience helping survivors of domestic and sexual violence in King County, we spend all day, every day responding to cases involving abuse. Over the last year, almost 5,000 survivors of sexual violence and their families sought help from the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center. In 2019, the King County Prosecutor filed more than 2,000 sexual and domestic violence cases, from homicides to rapes to aggravated assaults. We assisted on thousands more protection orders, worked to reduce firearm violence and helped children who were often the targets of abuse.

We want fewer victims to experience violence. This is why we support Senate Bill 5395 and its companion, House Bill 2184, which will provide comprehensive sexual health education for all Washington students. This proposal would help stop sexual and domestic violence by requiring public schools to include age-appropriate curriculum that develops healthy relationship behavior in students.

Legislation can be a powerful tool to reduce violence. Last year, laws redefined rape and removed the statute of limitations on many sex crimes, reducing the burden on victims and giving many of them the time needed to come forward and report crimes. Our community also passed domestic violence laws to keep victims safe and reduce firearm violence.

These are steps in the right direction. For true culture change to happen around sexual and domestic violence, proactive education and prevention also is needed. Too often, young people don’t know how to ask for and receive consent, or how to engage in healthy relationships. Access to this information is a critical part of the solution to end cycles of abuse, especially when the cycles are generational. It is particularly critical that young people receive reliable, accurate information in a digital age where harmful explicit materials are one click away.

Government already makes choices about what schools teach. Washington requires financial literacy because learning about “spending and saving” are important life skills. We agree: Students should know how to balance their checkbooks. Students should also know how to treat their partner with dignity and respect.

Any conversation about sex and relationships must begin with the basic concept of respect. This is the modern, evidence-based approach to sex education. Washington should follow the lead of dozens of other states including Missouri, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Oregon and California and promote education on healthy relationships, dating violence, consent and sexual assault.

For too long, Washington has had no law and no plan to support prevention. We are at an important moment: #MeToo; mass shootings by domestic batterers; sexual assault on college campuses; and domestic violence as the leading cause of violent crime. We cannot prosecute, shelter, or rehabilitate our way out of sexual and domestic violence. The classroom is a far better option for lasting, positive impact.

Positive change is already happening and needs more support. Coaches at schools deliver lessons on prevention through Team Up Washington. King County Sexual Assault Resource Center (KCSARC) prevention specialists now teach middle and high school students as part of health educator teams in Renton schools. Many school districts in King County rely on the evidence-based FLASH curriculum to impart these life skills. We see the positive impact these programs have on young people and on school culture. Toxic environments fade when replaced with more care, less violence and hope for the future. There is no shortage of proven, evidence-based programs to help prevent abuse in schools, on teams and in student relationships.

Let’s grow beyond a reactive strategy to stop sexual and domestic violence. It is time we confront, head on, the culture in our community that leads to violence. We stand with all of our community partners, including Harborview Abuse and Trauma Center, KCSARC and many domestic-violence agencies when we say we can and must do better for our children and reduce the number of future victims by making comprehensive sexual health education a priority for our schools.

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The Answer to Your 15 Most Embarrassing Sex Questions

You’re welcome.

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Sex is confusing. There are SO MANY aspects to it and so many things to consider before, during, and after engaging in it. Chances are, whether you’re about to embark on your first experience with sex, or you’ve done it multiple times, you probably still have a ton of questions. What’s sex really like? Are condoms 100% effective? Does it hurt the first time? Read on for real answers and advice on hooking up, your first time, how to know you’re ready, and more!

Q: The other day my partner and I were hooking up, and they put their fingers inside my vagina. I was really surprised and didn’t expect them to do it, but I let them anyway. While they was doing it, it started to hurt, so I told them to stop. Is this normal?

A: What you felt is totally normal. Vaginas are sensitive and need to be treated VERY gently. More importantly, though, your partner should not be surprising you like this. If you and your partner want to get more physically intimate that needs to be a mutual decision—not something that they decide on their own. If this is not a step you are comfortable with, let them know. Tell them, “I really like you, but I’m just not ready for this.” If they have a problem with waiting, you may want to reconsider the relationship because they should always be asking for consent as you start to get more intimate with one another.

Q. How painful is sex the first time?

A. It varies. For some people, there’s no pain whatsoever; for others, sex can be uncomfortable. Some feel discomfort when the hymen stretches or tears, which can cause a little bleeding. Sometimes you may not be aroused (or you’re feeling nervous) so your vagina won’t be lubricated enough for a comfortable experience. Lubricated condoms can help. And of course, couples should always use a condom every time they have sex to protect against unplanned pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Sometimes it’ll be uncomfortable for the first few tries, and then it will start to feel better. In general, though, if you’re experiencing a lot of pain during sex, talk to your doctor.

Q: Everyone says that sex is fun and that it feels good. I’m a virgin and curious—is that really true?

A: Yes, sex can be fun and feel good, but it’s not true that sex just “feels good” across the board and in any situation. It’s impossible to separate the act of sex from the person you’re doing it with—or the person you are. If you’re not ready to have sex, or you’re doing it in the wrong relationship or with the wrong person, you’ll be worrying about it way too much to enjoy it. But if you feel totally comfortable and cared about, and sex is something that you truly feel ready for, then yes, it can be an amazing experience! With that said, for some people it can still be a little painful or awkward the first time, and that’s totally normal too. There’s a lot of pressure and it might take you a few times to figure out what you and your partner enjoy.

Q. How do you know when you’re really ready to have sex?

A. Sex is very intimate. It’s not just physical, it can be emotional too. It’s normal for teens to have strong sexual feelings, but it doesn’t always mean you have to act on them. You can feel physically ready for sex but not be in the right relationship for any number of reasons. Because having sex can be so emotionally powerful, it’s easy to get hurt. Sex is only part of a relationship. Other important things—like trust and mutual respect—need to be in place too. Finally, for all its magic, sex can have downsides, such as an unplanned pregnancy or STD, so make sure you’re protecting yourself against those.

Q: Is it better to shave off all your pubic hair or to keep most of it and trim it?

A: The best thing to do with your pubes is…whatever you want! Seriously, they are yours, so the ultimate decision is up to you. Just like you don’t dress in exactly the same clothes as your friends, you don’t have to keep your pubes exactly how they have them either. There is no right or wrong here—it’s all about how you feel comfortable. And if you’re worried about what your partner is going to think, know this: Being comfortable with your body is going to feel so much better than what your pubes look like. So trim or shave them or leave them as is (because body hair is natural)—however you prefer. And if you do decide you want to remove some of the hair, get tips about shaving down there here.

Q: My partner and I have been talking about having sex, but I’m really nervous. I’m afraid something will go wrong.

A: Sex shouldn’t hurt too much the first time, but it certainly can hurt a lot if you’re not really ready for it. Being nervous can cause you to clench up your muscles, and if you and your partner haven’t worked up to intercourse by making out and touching each other first, your body won’t be aroused—and that can make things pretty uncomfortable. But here’s the thing: If you’re really scared about doing it, like you say you are, then it doesn’t sound like you’re truly ready. Having sex is a big responsibility because yes, there is always a chance something could go awry. Even if you use protection, the condom could break, and no birth control is 100% foolproof. There can be the risk of STDs, as well. You have every right to feel freaked about that and not want to risk it! But when you’re really ready for it, you’ll feel excited and safe…like the way you feel before a rollercoaster—good scared, not bad scared.

Q: My significant other and I have been going out for almost nine months now and have only gotten to third base. Is this normal? Should I let them do more?

A: Deciding to take any kind of sexual step should be a mutual decision—not something that you do just because your partner wants to—so there is nothing wrong with taking things as slow as you need to. (This may mean dating someone for months or even years without ever having sex!) If you enjoy hooking up and doing things other than sex, then keep doing that. It’s totally normal. A lot of people like to work up to sex by experiencing the other bases first. And if you do at any point want to have sex, just be sure that you’re doing it because you really want to, not because you feel like you should. There’s no magic amount of time to be in a relationship where all of the sudden you need to have sex with a partner. Take your time, and wait until you’re truly comfortable.

Q: My partner is pressuring me to have sex. How do I know if they’re is just using me?

A: Sometimes in relationships one person is ready to have sex but the other isn’t. This can be stressful because you don’t want to compromise what you’re not ready for or what you believe. You need to do what is right for you. Anyone who tries to pressure you into having sex isn’t really thinking about what matters most to you. People who pressure others into having sex are only looking to satisfy their own feelings and urges about sex. If you feel pressure to have sex because you’re afraid of losing your significant other, it may be a sign that you’re not in the right relationship. Sex isn’t something you should feel you must do. Relationships are meant to be fun for both people. They should make you feel appreciated, respected, and supported, not pressured or uncomfortable. If your partner truly cares about you, they won’t pressure you to do something you don’t believe in or aren’t ready for. So talk with them about how you feel. If they’re the right person for you, they’ll understand.

Q. I always hear my friends talking about having sex with their boyfriends, but I want to have sex with my girlfriend. If I have sex with a girl, what technically counts as sex?

A: Sex is about trust, respect and intimacy, so there are a bunch of different ways that you can have sex. Oral sex or sex with a toy is something that two partners can share, as well as ~outercourse~ techniques like fingering and mutual masturbation. Sex with a same sex partner most definitely counts as sex. You can read more about what counts as sex here.

Q. If I have sex with a girl, am I technically losing my virginity?

A: Virginity is a fraught topic because of how differently it’s handled when it comes to guys and girls. Guys are encouraged to get their virginity over with. Meanwhile, girls are told that virginity is a gift that you need to hold onto, that it’s some kind of commodity and that you’re “losing” something once you have sex for the first time. Virginity is yours and yours alone, and you choose what to do with it. Sex is about intense intimacy with another human being, so you can “lose your virginity” in a number of ways

Q. What’s an orgasm, exactly, and how do I know if I’ve had one?

A: An orgasm is an intense, pleasurable physical feeling that can occur during sex or masturbation. Like many feelings, orgasms are difficult to describe. Orgasms vary from person to person, and can be different for the same person at different times. Some are more subtle, while others are very powerful. A person’s heart beats faster, breathing gets quicker, and muscles in the pelvis contract and then suddenly relax with a wave of feeling that can be pleasurable and, for many people, emotional.

Q. I’m ready to have sex but I don’t know if my S.O. is. How do I bring it up? What should I say?

A: It’s great that you’re thinking about this ahead of time. When it comes to sex, there are lots of issues to think about, such as how sex could affect your relationship, what happens if you get pregnant, and how you can prevent STDs. Sometimes people avoid talking about these important issues because they’re embarrassed, they don’t know how, or they think it will make the mood less romantic. But you need to talk about these topics ahead of time. If you think you’re ready to take this step in your relationship, you should be able to talk to your partner about your interests and concerns. If they’re not receptive, it might not be the right time or the right person.

Q. What’s the deal with masturbating? I feel so guilty doing it or talking to my friends about it. Is it dirty, or bad for you?

A. Lots of people have heard all sorts of myths and misinformation about masturbation. Some worry that masturbation may cause health or emotional problems—but that’s not true. It’s normal for teens to masturbate. If someone is masturbating so much that it interferes with their daily life, that could be a problem, though. Masturbation is often considered a private topic and some people may feel embarrassed to think or ask about it. And when you’re too embarrassed to talk about something, you might hear and believe things that aren’t accurate. If you have concerns or questions about masturbation, have a conversation with your doctor, nurse, or other health counselor—any question you may have, I’m sure they’ve heard it before.

Q. If my S.O. and I just have oral sex, I can’t get pregnant, right?

A. You can’t get pregnant from oral or anal sex alone. For people to get pregnant, sperm has to get into a vagina—and eventually make its way up through the cervix into the uterus—and this can’t happen physically with oral or anal sex. However, if a couple has anal sex and some of the sperm ends up near the opening to the vagina, there is a chance of pregnancy. Although you can’t get pregnant from oral and anal sex, you can still get STDs like herpes and HIV (the virus that causes AIDS). So if you’re having oral or anal sex, it’s still important to use protection.

Q. I want to start using birth control but I don’t want to tell my parents I’m having sex. Where/how can I get it without them finding out?

A: It can be difficult talking to parents about having sex. But surprisingly, many parents are receptive to discussing sex and birth control. Still, if you can’t talk to your parents, there is a lot you can do. If you are interested in finding out your birth control options and getting sexual health care, your first step should be to set up an appointment with your health professional (pediatrician, gynecologist, adolescent medicine doctor, or other health provider). You can tell you parents you have a cold or something, and then when the door is closed you can get real with your doctor about the nature of your visit. Don’t be afraid to discuss birth control with your doctor. Thanks to doctor-patient confidentiality, your doc can’t spill about the Pill to your parents without your permission.

Another option is making an appointment at your local Planned Parenthood, free clinic, or at your student health center if you’re in college. The Pill is covered by most health insurance plans, but that may not be an easy option if you are on your parents’ plan. The Pill can cost anywhere from $20 to $50 a month, depending on type, and this may be something you can afford without having to go through insurance. Just remember that if you do go on the Pill, it’s not a free pass to unprotected sex. You should still make sure your partner always wears a condom, but luckily there are a ton of places for you to score free condoms.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Transgender People on What They Wish They Had Learned in Sex Ed

From safer queer sex to less gendered language.

 

By Syd Stephenson

Across the United States, sex education curriculum is severely lacking. Many receive abstinence-only education, which can leave out important things like the emotional aspects of sex, how to use protection, and that it is not only normal to have sex, but normal to seek pleasure from sex.

I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma and my sex education did not prepare me at all. In middle school, I was asked to sign an abstinence pledge. In high school, the only time I heard anything about the LGBTQ community was when we watched a video on HIV/AIDS. I felt alone. I was a closeted queer and trans person who had no idea how to voice what felt good. Because I never heard the term transgender during sex education, I thought that there was something wrong with me for not feeling like a girl.

I am certainly not alone in my experiences as a transgender person feeling like an outsider in discussions surrounding sex. So, I talked to 12 transgender people from across the country about their experience with sex education and how curriculum can improve to be more inclusive of transgender bodies.

Include Education Specific for Transgender People

Most sex education curriculum is geared specifically toward cisgender, straight people. As such, transgender people are not getting information that is necessary for their own bodies and sexual experiences.

Not all transgender people experience gender dysphoria, but for those who do, it can be very difficult to have sex at all. Val Wiestner of Alhambra, California, said that a discussion of gender dysphoria in sex education courses would be helpful for cis- and transgender people alike.

“I think it would be amazing for these classes to include things like gender dysphoria. As a trans man…I have found myself having to explain over and over about my body and why I do not like certain things,” he said. Liam Gillin, a student at Marist College, echoed a similar statement. “Something I wish I had learned in sex education was more about how you can stay safe as someone who was [assigned female at birth] and LGBTQ+, and more about how to alleviate gender dysphoria during sexual activity.”

Genitals Don’t Equal Gender

Often, students are separated into two groups (by gender) for their sex education. This can mean students are not getting holistic or accurate education on body parts and bodily functions. When we separate students by their assumed genitalia for sex education, we are reinforcing the idea that genitals are equal to gender, and that there is no difference between sex and gender. This is a bioessentialist viewpoint, teaching people that gender is biological, rather than a cultural construction.

“My experience with sex education was, being in Oklahoma, abysmal,” Aileen Gibson, a student at the University of Oklahoma, said. “While I was taught about safe sex once, the majority of it was awful. The ‘boys’ learned only about the ‘male’ reproductive system, ‘female’ secondary sex characteristics, and what a ‘male’ orgasm looked like. I didn’t even know what a tampon was until sophomore year of high school, (which I had to look up because I had no clue).”

By educating students in a less binary-centric format, transgender youth could find more validation and acceptance from themselves and their peers.

“One of the easiest ways for sex ed curriculums to be more inclusive is to drop the outdated language of ‘female body parts versus male body parts’ and teach everyone about the human body together while acknowledging the vast array of intersex people whose anatomy may not fit into the simple, standard boxes of male and female,” said University of Michigan student Elijah Haswell. “My uterus is not a ‘female body part.’ It’s just that — a uterus.”

Removing the idea that gender and genitals are one and the same can also work to reduce violence against transgender people.

“As a trans person, specifically an agender individual, I wish I could’ve been taught from an early age that genitalia does not define your own gender identity or realm of existence,” said University of Central Oklahoma student Fernanda Casanova. “Specifically teaching sex ed without trans inclusion or overall intersectionality is an act of violence against trans people. That type of mind-set will continue to marginalize trans individuals. You cannot teach separately either; cis individuals also need to know about trans education. That is how you can start to avoid violence against the trans community.”

Teach Alternatives to Heteronormative Sex

There are many ways to have sex outside of a man putting his penis inside a woman’s vagina. By not informing students of other methods of having sex, many may be left with the idea that there is no way for them to safely and pleasurably have sex — especially if they are transgender or gender nonconforming.

“As a nonbinary and gender-fluid person who is also queer, one thing I wish I learned in sex education is more about safer sex between people of the same sex,” said Christine Miyazato. “My sex education mostly revolved around sex that involved cisgender people and heterosexual relationships, so I never really got to learn about what safer sex could look like between people of the same sex. Most of my knowledge about the matter came from going to LGBTQ-inclusive sex ed workshops on my college campus or by word of mouth and from listening to friends’ personal experiences.”

Offer Medically Accurate Education Beyond Abstinence Only

By now, we know that abstinence-only sex education does not work. This method of sex education is not helpful for any students, but particularly for transgender youth who are trying to figure out their gender or what sex looks like for them.

“My sex ed teacher in high school actively sought to teach an abstinence-first mind-set, and all mentions of anatomy, hormones, biological processes were painfully gendered,” said George Washington University student Aedy Miller.

It is also imperative that transgender students are receiving medically accurate information about sex, though most states don’t require sex education to live up to that standard.

“Because public school education is largely state-controlled, sex education policy and curriculum vary wildly from state to state,” said Sin Guanci, a Ph.D. student at Ohio State University. “Accordingto the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS) 2018 state profiles, only 31 states and D.C. mandate sex education, seven require culturally appropriate sex ed and HIV/STI instruction, only 12 require that sex education be medically accurate, and only four states mandate that health education affirmatively recognize different sexual orientations and gender identities/expressions (SOGIE) or teach the dignity or worth of all people regardless of SOGIE.”

Guanci said that the lack of policy requiring that sex-education “recognize and affirm” all people based on their sexuality or gender is not the biggest barrier. Unfortunately, seven states prohibit the mention of LGBTQ people in sex ed except for when it comes to portraying them negatively in terms of disease transmission. This inaccurate information can make transgender youth feel like they need to stay in the closet or that there is something wrong with simply being who they are.

Talk About Consent and Healthy Relationships

Setting boundaries and understanding what consent looks like is vital information for all students in sex education. For transgender people in particular, it can make all the difference in the world when it comes to a sexual encounter being safe and affirming or traumatic and dysphoria-inducing.

AC Facci from Oklahoma City said that pleasure and consent should be discussed more meaningfully by sex educators. “I have a vague memory of learning what constituted sexual assault but I never remember being taught anything that affirmed my ability to say no at any point during a sexual encounter, not just before sex began,” they said.

It is also important that sex educators accurately discuss what healthy relationships look like, especially for students who are LGBTQ.

“I wish that asexuality had been covered, and that there had been more open conversations about emotional involvement rather than just sex itself. Knowing how healthy relationship dynamics work could have saved me and a lot of people I know from some awful and just awkward situations,” said James Washburn, a student of Cornish College of the Arts.

Understand That Inclusion of Trans People Can Save Lives

“During sex education, I often felt alone,” said Athena Schwartz. “I felt like I couldn’t talk about myself or my identity. As someone who has been very passionate about health education, I felt trapped in my shell. I felt like I was watching the class behind a wall; like I was an outsider. A lot of what I learned about trans people was outside of my own high school. I had to go out of my way to even learn the term nonbinary. While I loved what I learned outside of high school, I wish that it was taught in school. I think if more people learned about trans people, then more people would be inclusive toward us.”

When we do not include transgender people in sex education, it can cause significant distress to people from those communities who are present. It can be incredibly invalidating to have educators never acknowledge your existence, especially if you are not finding support outside of the classroom. Just having educators that support their needs and validate their experiences can make all the difference in the world for transgender youth.

“Simply having a word for one’s experience can provide a world of comfort and open the door to greater introspection, self-understanding, and a more comfortable orientation toward the world,” said Jamie, who asked that his last name be omitted. “Having a space for these discussions, even just acknowledgement of the existence of these discussions at the bare minimum, is invaluable to young trans lives.”

Another important step that sex educators can take is to let students know that it is okay to be trans — that being transgender does not make you a burden or mentally ill, that your feelings and gender are nothing to be ashamed of.

“I wish I’d been told that the feelings I was having were okay to feel,” said Aedy Miller. “I wish they’d taken a more expansive approach and taught us more about gender identity as opposed to just sex/anatomy, as that might’ve given me the words to describe how I was feeling in a safe environment.”

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Five new books by trans and non-binary authors you really must read in 2020

John Waters once said, “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!”

Five books by trans and/or non-binary authors

By Vic Parsons

So, treat the queer, queer-adjacent or curious bookworm in your life to one of these books by trans, including non-binary, authors.

Juno Roche – Trans Power

Juno’s last book, Queer Sex, was a landmark exploration into queer and trans people’s sexuality. A series of intimate interviews that delved into, well, intimacy in the trans community, and how gender identity and sexuality feed into our experiences of that.

For their latest book, Trans Power, Juno used a similar technique – a series of warm, nuanced conversations between them and other people in the trans community. Some of these were conversations with our most prominent thinkers and activists – like Travis Alabanza and Amrou Al-Kadhi – and all of them contained revelations about how gender is constructed, layers of identity and being trans.

Juno’s also breathtakingly honest about their own feelings towards their gender, an insight that is rare in an era of hot-takes and carefully crafted narratives about ‘the trans experience’.

Dr Meg-John Barker – Gender: A Graphic Guide

 

Author of too many books on gender, relationships and sex to name, Meg-John’s latest is a very accessible and beautifully illustrated guide to gender.

It’s perfect both for family members in need of a little education and queers wanting to learn more about how our current conversation on trans issues fits into a wider context. Written from a staunchly feminist, anti-racist and intersectional perspective, Meg-John goes deep into gender non-conformity and trans history, without assuming the reader has prior knowledge of any of those things – truly a gift.

Plus, their favourite gay animal is the notoriously lesbian long-eared hedgehog – the kind of author trivia we endeavour to provide here at PinkNews.

Buy it online here or head to your local bookshop.

Glamrou – Unicorn: The Memoir of a Muslim Drag Queen

A mandatory read for anyone on the queer and/or gender spectrum who’s had a less-than-perfect coming out.

Amrou tells all our queer stories of self-acceptance and learning to celebrate every part of ourselves in some of the most heart-breaking and heart-warming pages of the year. Readers will be finding immense affinity with Unicorn and thanking Amrou for sharing their story for many years to come. – Charlie Leslau

Non-binary, Muslim drag queen Amrou Al-Kadhi sees queerness as a part of their faith.

Andrea Long Chu – Females

Short, unconventional debut book/essay/investigation from a New York Times-published writer on what it is to be female.

Chu spends this essay trying to defend the statement that “everyone is female, and everyone hates it”. She draws guidance and inspiration from the SCUM Manifesto (1967) and its author, Valerie Solanas – the radical feminist best known for shooting Andy Warhol.

In a similar style, Females is also an uncompromising and at times intense read, but rewarding.

Buy it online here or head to your local bookshop.

Samantha Allen – Real Queer America

If you buy one book on this list – and you made it this far – make it this one. We hear so much about homophobia and transphobia in the States, but that masks a truer (and better!) story about queer resistance in small towns and cities, away from the national media.

Samantha is a trans journalist, and Real Queer America weaves her own personal story of coming out, finding love and creating family with the stories of other trans people who she meets.

In a road trip across the country, she talks to activists, old friends, legislators and – most compellingly – with young trans people who are staying put in the places they were born, rather than moving to the nearest big city when they turn 18.

This book is a way of getting outside the bubble, for city queers, and it’s a non-patronising lesson in hope and resilience for all.

If you want more books by trans authors like these, then these were the seven new books by trans and/or non-binary authors to read last summer.

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The Questions Sex-Ed Students Always Ask

For 45 years, Deborah Roffman has let students’ curiosities guide her lessons on sexuality and relationships.

Deborah Roffman

About 25 years ago, a public school in the Baltimore suburbs invited Deborah Roffman to teach a class on puberty to fifth graders. Roffman, who was known as the “Sex Lady” at the private Park School of Baltimore, where she had been teaching for two decades, was flattered. But she was troubled by the restrictions that the public school’s vice principal had given her: She couldn’t use the words fertilization, intercourse, or sex. And she couldn’t answer any student questions related to those subjects. That wasn’t going to work for the Sex Lady.

Eventually, Roffman reached a compromise with the public school: Students would get parental permission to attend her talk, and Roffman could answer any question they asked, even if it meant using the S-word.

Roffman’s title of human-sexuality educator has not changed since she arrived at the Park School in 1975, but the dimensions of her role there have steadily grown. So, too, has her outside work in consulting and teacher training: Over the years, she has advised at nearly 400 schools, most of them private.

Initially, Roffman taught elective classes in sexuality to the juniors and seniors at Park, but within two years, she had expanded to seventh and eighth graders. In the 1980s, she added fourth and fifth graders to her roster. She also meets annually with the parents of students as young as kindergartners, to coach them on how to talk with their children about sexuality, and she leads summer training for the Park’s elementary-school teachers on incorporating sexuality instruction into their classrooms. “There is this knowledge that we keep in a box about sexuality, waiting until kids are ‘old enough,’” Roffman told me. “My job is to change that.”

During her 45 years of teaching, Roffman has witnessed the evolution of the nation’s attitude toward sex education and, as her experience at the public school shows, how uneven that education can be.

Perhaps more than any other subject, sex education highlights the country’s fierce loyalty to local control of schools. Twenty-nine states require public schools to stress abstinence if they teach about sex, according to the latest count by the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., and New York that promotes reproductive rights. Some of the more outrageous abstinence lessons employ troubling metaphors, such as comparing sexually active, unmarried women to an old piece of tape: useless and unable to bond. Only 17 states require sex education to be medically accurate.

Most research has found that sex education for adolescents in the United States has declined in the past 20 years. Like art and music, the subject is typically not included on state standardized exams and, as the saying goes, “what gets tested gets taught.” In the case of sex education, waning fear about the spread of HIV and AIDS among heterosexual youths has contributed to the decline in instruction, says John Santelli, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.

But some bright spots do exist, says Jennifer Driver, the vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. For example, in some parts of Mississippi and Texas, there has been a shift away from “abstinence only” to “abstinence plus” curricula, with the latter permitting at least some information about contraception.

Roffman remembers her own sex education while growing up in Baltimore as being limited to a short film in fifth grade about periods and puberty. She began working in sex ed in 1971—when access to birth control was rapidly expanding amid the sexual revolution—helping Planned Parenthood train health-care professionals who were setting up family-planning clinics in the region, and doing broader community outreach.

Four years later, she followed her Planned Parenthood supervisor to the progressive Park School, where students often address teachers by their first name and current tuition runs about $30,000 a year. When she arrived that spring, she heard that the senior-class adviser had recently rushed into the upper-school principal’s office, exclaiming that something had to be done before the seniors’ graduation, because “we forgot to talk to them about sex.”

During the next several years, Roffman not only made sure the school remembered to talk to students about sex but steadily built up the curriculum. At Park, students learn about standard fare like birth control and sexually transmitted diseases but also delve into issues such as the history of abortion rights, changing conceptions of gender roles, and how to build respectful, intimate relationships.

Students start by learning about the reproductive systems, the importance of open communication, and the fundamentals of puberty in their first classes with Roffman, in the fourth and fifth grades. In seventh grade, they take a deep-dive course on human sexuality, covering everything from pornography to the use of sex in advertising to gender identity and sexual orientation. They see her again for a shorter, related course in eighth grade. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Roffman’s seventh graders spent most of a semester researching the candidates’ differing views on sex, gender, and reproduction. “In the process of doing that, I got to teach about every topic I wanted to teach about,” she said.

In high school, students take a required sexuality-studies seminar. The specific content varies year to year, but it’s always based on what Roffman calls the “eight characteristics of a sexually healthy adult,” which include staying healthy, enjoying pleasure, and relating to others in caring, nonexploitative ways.

The through line of her approach, at any age, is letting students’ queries guide her instruction. So she asks her students to submit anonymous questions at the start of the semester, and makes sure that she answers them as the course progresses.

Regardless of whether they grew up in the ’80s or the aughts, kids of certain ages always ask versions of the same questions, Roffman has found. For instance, middle-school students, she said, want to know if their bodies and behaviors are “normal.” Many older students ask her at what age it’s normal to start masturbating.

High schoolers routinely ask about romantic communication, relationships, and the right time for intimacy: “Who makes the first move?” “How do you know if you or the other person is ready for the ‘next level’?” “How can you let someone down easy when you want to break up?”  

But some contemporary questions, Roffman said, are very different from those she heard earlier in her career. Sometimes the questions change when the news does. (More than 30 years ago, Roffman started reading two newspapers a day to keep up with the rapid pace of news about HIV and AIDS; she’s maintained the habit since.)

She said she received a flood of questions about sexual harassment after the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in the early 1990s. The same decade ended with a spike in student interest in oral sex and behaviors that had previously been considered more taboo, such as anal sex.

Sometimes changing student questions signal broader cultural shifts, like the recent surge in student queries about gender identities. “There would have been questions 20 years ago about sexual orientation, but not about gender diversity,” Roffman said. But one recent eighth-grade cohort submitted questions like “How many genders are there?” “What does ‘gender roles’ mean?” “What is the plus sign for in LGBTQIA+?” and “Why is ‘gay’ called ‘gay’?” She finds a way to answer them all.

Roffman’s students appreciate her blunt and holistic approach. As a sixth grader at a charter school several years ago, Maeve Thistel took a brief unit in sex education. The teacher seemed uncomfortable and nervous, she remembers. The condoms the teacher brought for a demonstration were expired, and split when she took them out of the package. Thistel came away from the class with the impression that sex was both “icky and disturbing.”

Thistel, now a college freshman, transferred to Park for high school, where she found that Roffman presented some of the same material quite differently: Her very first step in the lesson on condoms was to point out that all of them have an expiration date that should be noted and heeded.

Under Roffman’s guidance, sexuality at Park has come to be treated as something closer to social studies, science, or other core subjects. Sex ed is “just another part of the curriculum, not carved out as its own special thing,” says David Sachs, a 1988 graduate who studied with Roffman and whose son, Sebastian, is now in 11th grade at the school and has her as a teacher as well.

Like all Park students, Sebastian Sachs had to complete an eighth-grade project wherein he examined the root cause of a social-justice issue. His team picked sexual assault and, with Roffman as their adviser, focused on consent education and how to introduce it in the youngest grades. Sachs and his teammates created a curriculum for preschoolers that, among other things, encourages them to ask permission before hugging a classmate, borrowing a pencil, or swooping in for a high five.

In Roffman’s ideal world, the school would implement lessons like these, and other age-appropriate sex and relationship education, from the earliest grades. Several of her co-workers agree. “Fourth grade might be too late for us” to begin this kind of education, says Alejandro Hurtado, Park’s Spanish teacher for the lower grades. Last summer, Hurtado participated in a voluntary two-week workshop led by Roffman that aimed to create a sexuality-education curriculum for Park’s elementary-age kids. “It will be subtly woven in,” he says, noting that he plans to talk more explicitly about traditional gender roles and expectations in some Latino cultures as part of his own class.

In her teacher training, Roffman encourages colleagues to be scientifically accurate and use age-appropriate language when answering even the youngest children’s questions. Four-year-olds are beginning to understand place and geography, so they will frequently ask where they came from. “The proper answer is that there’s a place inside a female body called the uterus, and that’s where they grew,” Roffman said.

Sarah Shelton, a Park third-grade teacher who also participated in the summer workshop, says Roffman inspired her to not dodge students’ questions about bodies and sex. In the past she’s deflected sex-related inquiries, such as when a student asked about birth control last year.

“I told her, ‘Great question. Ask your parents,’” Shelton recalls. “If that were to occur again, I would say something like ‘When reproduction happens in the body, there is medication that you can take to stop it so you can have sexual intercourse without creating a baby.’”

Sarah Huss, the director of human development and parent education at the private Campbell Hall school in Los Angeles, says Roffman helped her rethink her school’s sexuality education. Huss reached out to Roffman after reading her book Talk to Me First: Everything You Need to Know to Become Your Kids’ “Go-To” Person About Sex. The ensuing dialogue prompted Campbell Hall to begin sexuality education in third grade and to significantly shore up its middle-school programming. Prior to meeting Roffman, “I had taught sex education as ‘Don’t get hurt, don’t get pregnant, don’t get a disease,’” Huss says. “That wasn’t a hopeful message for the kids.”

Huss admires her colleague’s patient tenacity. “She’s walking into schools where there is so much emotional baggage around a subject,” Huss says. “To suggest doing it differently, you have to confront years and years and years of thinking that talking with young kids about sex is dangerous.”

After decades of striving for change both within and beyond Park’s walls, Roffman is optimistic about the future of sexuality education at progressive private schools like Campbell Hall and Park. “I’ve always believed that independent schools have the responsibility to give back to the larger educational community,” she told me. “It’s up to us to demonstrate that, yes, this can be done well and successfully.”

By contrast, “I see very limited movement in the public sector,” she said. And in a country where only a minority of states require medically accurate sex-education classes, her dream of seamlessly integrating the subject from kindergarten up may be a long way off. But Roffman has lived through one sexual revolution, and she holds out hope for a second in education.

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Will We Ever Figure Out How to Talk to Boys About Sex?

Teenagers and young men still don’t have the right vocabulary. Can we help them get there?

By Peggy Orenstein

A while back, during a discussion I was having with a group of high school students about sexual ethics, a boy raised his hand to ask me, “Can you have sex without feelings?” The other guys in the room nodded, leaned forward, curious, maybe a little challenging. Strictly speaking, of course, even indifference is a feeling, but I knew what they meant: They wanted to know if they could have sex without caring: devoid of vulnerability, even with disregard for a partner. To put it in teenage parlance, they wanted to know whether it was truly possible to “hit it and quit it.”

I thought about those boys this week as I watched Harvey Weinstein, in an Oscar-worthy performance of abject harmlessness, hobble on his walker into the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan. The #MeToo movement has exposed sexual misconduct, coercion and harassment across every sector of society. But shining light on a problem won’t, in itself, solve it, not even if Mr. Weinstein ends up with (fingers crossed) the longest prison sentence in history. To make real change we need to tackle something larger and more systemic: the pervasive culture that urges boys toward disrespect and detachment in their intimate encounters.

Despite a new imperative to be scrupulous about affirmative consent, young men are still subject to incessant messages that sexual conquest — being always down for sex, racking up their “body count,” regardless of how they or their partner may feel about it — remains the measure of a “real” man, and a reliable path to social status. As one high school junior explained: “Guys need to prove themselves to their guys. So to do that, you’re going to be dominating. You’re going to maybe push. Because, it’s like the girl is just there as a means for him to get off and a means for him to brag.”

I never intended to write about boys. As a journalist, I have spent over a quarter of a century chronicling girls’ lives — that has been my calling and my passion. But four years ago, after publishing a book about the contradictions young women still face in their intimate encounters, I realized, perhaps inevitably, that if I truly wanted to promote safer, more enjoyable, more egalitarian sexual relationships among young people, I needed to have the other half of the conversation. So I began interviewing young men — dozens, of different backgrounds, in their early teens and 20s — about sex and love, hookup culture and relationships, masculinity and media, sexual consent and misconduct. #MeToo wasn’t the impetus for my work (I began well before the Weinstein story broke) but it quickly underscored the urgency.

Few of the boys had previously had such conversations. Certainly not with their parents, most of whom would rather poke themselves in the eye with a fork than speak frankly to their sons about sex. I can’t say that I blame them: It’s excruciating, and it’s not like our own parents offered a template.

Yet that silence has troubling implications. According to a 2017 national survey of 3,000 high school students and young adults by the Making Caring Common Project, a large majority of boys never had a single conversation with their parents about, for instance, how to be sure that your partner “wants to be — and is comfortable — having sex with you,” or about what it meant to be a “a caring and respectful sexual partner.” About two-thirds had never heard from their parents that they shouldn’t have sex with someone who is too intoxicated to consent. Most had never been told by parents not to catcall girls or use degrading terms such as “bitches” or “hoes” — this despite the fact that nearly 90 percent of the girls in the survey reported having been sexually harassed.

Adults may assume those ideas are self-evident, beyond the need for comment, but given the rates of coercion, misconduct and assault among men both young and old, boys are clearly not getting the message by osmosis. The vast majority of teenagers, though, who did have conversations like these with their parents — and boys even more than girls — described them as at least somewhat influential on their thinking.

Nor will schools pick up the slack. Most states still require sex education to stress abstinence (a legit option, for sure, as long as it’s one among many: not a mandate that equates sexually active teens with, say, chewed pieces of gum). But many more progressive, supposedly comprehensive classes aren’t much better, often focused predominantly on risk and danger: avoiding pregnancy and preventing disease. Increasingly, sexual consent is being added to that cautionary to-do list, as it should be. Too often, though, that question of yes or no becomes a stand-in for all conversation about sexual decision-making: another way to dodge more nuanced discussions of personal responsibility, open communication, establishing relationships, understanding gender dynamics and — the third rail of sex ed classes — reciprocal pleasure and the L.G.B.T.Q.+ perspective.

I found gay boys, by the way, to be notably more willing and able than others to negotiate the terms of a sexual encounter — they had to be, since who was going to do what with whom could not be assumed. They often seemed puzzled by heterosexuals’ reticence. “I don’t know why straight guys see consent as a mood-killer,” one college sophomore said. “I’m like, ‘if we’re talking, that means we’re going to have sex — this is great!’”
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Dan Savage, the syndicated sex advice columnist, refers to “the four magic words” gay guys will use during a sexual encounter: What are you into?” That’s a very different perspective than that of straight boys, who usually aim for one-word assent to options they define. I do fear, though, that since girls, as I’d previously found, are so often disconnected from their bodies’ desires and responses, their answer to an authentic conversation-starter might well be, “I have no idea.” What might happen, though, if teenagers learned to start talking to each other that way early on?

Absent guidance from trusted adults, boys look to the media as a default sex educator, where they are bombarded by images of female sexual availability and male sexual entitlement. With the rise of the internet, smartphones and video-sharing sites like Pornhub, parents worry about the potential impact of pornography on teens’ sexual expectations. Let me be clear: Curiosity about sex is natural. Masturbation? Great! What’s more, there is all kinds of porn — ethical porn, feminist porn, queer porn. But the most readily available, free content portrays a distorted vision of sex: as something men do to rather than with a partner and women’s pleasure as a performance for male satisfaction.

Boys frequently expressed ambivalence to me about their porn habits. “I think porn affects your ability to be innocent in a sexual relationship,” a high school senior commented. “The whole idea of exploring sex without any preconceived ideas of what it is, you know?”

Even if parents could block all the triple-X sites (and good luck with that), the reality is that exposure to sexual content in media consumption of any kind — TV, movies, games, social media, music videos — is associated with greater tolerance for sexual harassment, belief in rape myths and the objectification of women. “I think music has some of the biggest impact on how guys treat girls,” another high school senior told me. “In the car, my friends and I listen to all this stuff that’s just” — he rattled off several oh-so-unprintable lines about women and sex. “When you hear that, like, five, six, 10 times a day, it makes it hard to escape having that mind-set.”

The promise of hot sex with a cold heart animates college (and increasingly high school) hookup culture — which is why, according to Lisa Wade, a professor of sociology at Occidental College, getting wasted beforehand is so crucial: Alcohol girds young people against the near-fanatic generational fear of the awkward while creating what Ms. Wade calls the “compulsory carelessness” necessary for a possible one-off. Most of the guys I met knew that sex with an incapacitated person is assault. Yet because, in their minds, you need to be hammered in order to hook up, the trick became being (and finding someone who is) drunk enough to want to do it but sober enough to be able to express a credible “yes.” And who is to be the judge of that?

Drunk boys, as it turns out, tend to vastly overperceive a girl’s interest in sex, often interpreting expressions of friendliness as It’s on. Alcohol has also been shown to diminish their ability to hear “no” or notice a partner’s hesitation. Wasted young men are more likely than they would be sober to use coercion or force to get what they want and — still looking at you, Brett Kavanaugh — they are less aware of their victim’s distress.

In consensual drunken hookups, the sex still tends to be meh. It “can feel like two people having two very distinct experiences,” a second-semester college freshman who’d had multiple partners told me. “There’s not much eye contact. Sometimes you don’t even say anything. And it’s weird to be so open with a stranger. It’s like you’re acting vulnerable, but not actually being vulnerable with someone you don’t know and don’t care very much about. It’s not a problem for me. It’s just — odd. Odd, and not even really fun.”

According to Andrew Smiler, a psychologist specializing in adolescent male behavior who surveyed over a hundred teen boys about dating and sex, most guys, in fact, prefer physical intimacy with someone they know, trust and with whom they feel comfortable. I found that to be true, too, though they seemed to view it as their personal quirk, not shared by their peers. Mr. Smiler suggests, then, that adults can ask boys what kind of sexual experience they want. “Not just whether they are looking to have an orgasm,” he said, “but about the context and quality of that orgasm. If we’re willing to be more vulgar and pointed, we might even ask, ‘Do you want a partner who’s more than just someone to masturbate into?’”

It occurs to me, after a quarter-century of talking to teens, that the activism on behalf of girls could offer a model to better guide boys. Back in the 1990s, when I first began writing about young women’s quandaries in a changing world — loss of confidence, stunted ambition, negative body image, sexual shaming — there was both a desire for and an apprehension about change: Some parents worried, not irrationally, that raising a daughter to be outspoken or sexually empowered would come at a social cost, that she would be labeled a bitch or a slut. Others raged that girls were being pushed, against their nature, to become “more like boys.”

But years of attention to girls’ experience, of work by parents and professionals, has reduced some of those fears, eased constraint, expanded girls’ roles and opportunities: Things aren’t perfect, not by a long shot, but they are better. Nonetheless, I found myself wishing, in my conversations with girls, that their early sexual experiences did not have to be, as they so often were, something they had to get over. That will require reducing the harm boys cause, whether out of monstrous venality, entitlement, heedlessness or even (maybe especially) ignorance.

For their own well-being, as well as their partners’, they need a counternarrative to the one that elevates the transactional over the connected, the sensual, the kind; boys need to value mutual gratification in their sexual encounters, whether with one-offs or long-term partners. That won’t be accomplished in a single “sex talk,” nor, really, any one easy fix, any more than you could teach your child table manners in one sitting. But at the very least, listening to their struggles is a start. I think about a guy I talked to early on, a rising college junior who’d equated a girl’s invitation back to her room with sexual consent. “I want to do the right thing,” he told me, “but I don’t know what the right thing is. I just know what I know, which is a lot of really confusing and wrong” stuff. He pressed forward unthinkingly, one might say manfully — or as he described it, “boom, boom, boom, boom” — until she put a hand on his chest, saying, “Whoa! I don’t want to do that.”

“And in that moment,” he said, “I could see just how wrong it was. The utter lack of communication that took place in those five to 10 minutes. And even realizing that I didn’t feel great myself about what we were doing. I just…” He shook his head regretfully. “I thought that was the only option. I thought that was the way things were supposed to be.”

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Shame Isn’t an Education

by Emily Newman

How did you learn about sex? Were you taught that it’s a natural part of life or that it’s a sin? Did you receive medically accurate information that prepared you to make safe and responsible decisions regarding your sexual activity? Or were you told that all sexual activity is bad and that having sex makes you unwanted and dirty, like chewed gum?

As odd as that metaphor may sound, it’s just one of several used by abstinence-only and sexual risk-avoidance programs to shame students, instead of providing reliable, accurate information. Now, condom brand Trojan and Advocates for Youth are raising awareness of such unethical strategies by turning chewed pieces of gum into protest symbols with their #Not
ChewedGum cam­paign (NotChewed
Gum.org or SRAisAbstinenceOnly.org). On October 30 the two organizations coordinated a billboard-sized exhibit in front of the Capitol in Washington, DC, with the message “You Are Not Chewed Gum. Information Is the Best Protection” crafted entirely from chewed gum.

Other insulting examples used to shame students include:

  • The used piece of tape: Students stick a piece of tape on their own arm then take it off and pass it to another student, who does the same. The teacher notes that the tape isn’t sticky anymore, concluding that when you have sex with multiple people you ruin your ability to experience emotional intimacy.
  • The cup of spit: Multiple students spit into one cup and the teacher asks if anyone wants to drink it. When no one does, the teacher explains that the cup of spit symbolizes someone who has had sex with multiple partners; “no one will want you.”
  • The dice roll and paper doll: Students roll dice and are handed a paper baby based on the roll. The lesson is that sex is risky and can always result in pregnancy, no matter if contraception is used.
  • The shredded heart: After students write their hopes and dreams for the future on a paper heart the teacher selects a student’s heart to tear into pieces. The teacher tells the class that once they have sex their hopes and dreams are destroyed.
  • The toothbrush: The teacher shows the class a used toothbrush and asks the boys if they would like to use it. When they say no, the teacher then turns to the girls and says that once they’ve had sex, they’re like the used toothbrush; “who would want you?”
  • The unwrapped candy: The teacher unwraps a piece of candy, has the students pass it around the class, and then asks if they’d rather have the candy that everyone touched or a wrapped candy. The lesson is that once you’ve had sex you’re like unwanted unwrapped candy. People will choose the untouched candy instead of the “dirty” one.
  • The crockpot and the microwave: Teachers explain that girls are like crock pots because they “heat up” slowly, while boys are like microwaves because they “get hot” quickly. Girls are also taught to be responsible for making sure boys don’t heat up too quickly.

“We need to counter harmful and shameful programs, and give people resources and tools so they can gain as much knowledge as possible,” said Bukky (pictured here), a nineteen-year-old representative of the Advocates for Youth International Youth Leadership Council and a current Howard University student who was present at the October 30 event in DC. She’s interested in working on global reproductive justice because she had a very “don’t ask, don’t tell” understanding of sex as a direct result of growing up in Idaho and attending the Church of Latter Day Saints’ schools. “If you talked about consent and birth control, you were shamed.”

Abstinence-only lessons are especially cruel to girls by claiming that they—unlike boys—are less valuable after having sex “whether they wanted to or not,” implying that sexual abuse is a female’s responsibility to avoid. This inequity is reinforced by the societal protection of girls’ virginity and the simultaneous celebration of boys’ promiscuity. Recently, rapper T.I. boasted in an interview that he takes his eighteen-year-old daughter to get an annual “hymen check,” but is fine with his fifteen-year-old son having sex. In response to that interview, feminist writer and Humanist Heroine awardee Jessica Valenti reminds us that there’s no medical definition of virginity. “There is no physical marker on men or women’s bodies that demonstrate virginity (not even hymens), and sex means something a lot broader than heterosexual intercourse.” However, seven states require only negative information be provided on homosexuality as part of sex education and several states aren’t even required to provide medically accurate information.

“We use sex to sell everything else, but as a culture we can’t talk about sex,” Trojan 
Marketing Director Stephanie Berez pointed out at the gum wall on the National Mall. This lack of frank conversation has led to Congress spending over $2.2 billion on ineffective abstinence-only programs and has permitted Donald Trump’s administration to cancel funding for eighty-one successful teen pregnancy prevention programs. It has resulted in cases of gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis reaching an all-time high in 2018, with about half of all new STD cases occurring in young people aged fifteen to twenty-four. And it means we’ve failed to equip young people with education for all genders and sexual orientations in order to prevent harassment and promote healthy relationships. As the Society of Adolescent Health and Medicine’s 2017 review of abstinence-only-until-marriage policies and programs concluded, access to sexual health information “is a basic human right and is essential to realizing the human right to the highest attainable standard of health.”

While the #NotChewedGum campaign focuses on the gross and backwards lessons of abstinence-only programs, the #ThxBirthControl campaign by Power to Decide celebrates the unlimited possibilities contraception gives individuals, couples, and families. People are encouraged to learn more about birth control and related legislation, share their stories, and ask questions, providing the comprehensive sexual education that should be in every classroom.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Clitoris, Clitoris, Clitoris:

It’s Not a Dirty Word and I Think Kids Should Know What It Is


By Jackie Gillard

It may seem shocking and vulgar to some, but teaching appropriately aged children of all genders about a body part existing only for a woman’s sexual pleasure isn’t just about a woman’s pleasure.

Almost all Canadian school sex-ed curricula avoid discussions on pleasure and focus on reproduction or risks, in either clinical information or warnings to our kids against all the “bad” things that can happen from having sex.

Even naming body parts often excludes the clitoris — it’s labelled in only a few suggested curricula. Yet sexuality educator Nadine Thornhill, PhD., emphasizes, “A child’s knowledge of all sexual body parts — including the clitoris — and understanding what feels good physically versus what doesn’t, are vital components of ensuring children truly comprehend what consent is all about.”

It’s a concept that can be difficult to grasp if you belong to the school of thought that heterosexual sex is about a man “doing” something to a woman; it’s not, and never should be classified as such.

A man asking if he can “do” those things is only one facet of consent.

If a woman doesn’t understand what feels good to her, is her agreement truly consent? Does she actually care or even know she’s not obligated to participate in any kind of sexual interaction that is not pleasurable for her as well? These concepts apply to men, too.

In the age of #MeToo and #TimesUp, men need to comprehend that a woman’s body does not exist simply for their pleasure or reproduction.

The idea that only men are sexual and women are reproductive is incorrect. Both genders are reproductive and both are sexual. The taboos around sexual enjoyment only perpetuate a disservice to both — women grow up feeling shame for bodily agency and sexual enjoyment, while men grow up not fully understanding the sexuality of their partners or how to satisfy them sexually.

We can’t possibly continue to uphold a secretive cover to women’s bodies and their pleasures. Our kids shouldn’t grow up believing anatomy like the clitoris and its functions are dirty, gross or simply a mystery they may go looking to potentially dangerous sources like the internet to have explained.

As parents, it’s our job to ensure we instill in our families a healthy sexual education based on gender equality and fact.

A few years ago, the creation of three-dimensional models of both the inner and outer clitoris taught me — at the ripe old age of 46 — what this integral part of my anatomy looked like inside.

I was born in the sexual liberation decade of the ’70s, yet didn’t even know the correct name or function of a clitoris until my early twenties. Interestingly, I had full comprehension of what my reproductive system looked like, as well as the inner and outer anatomy of mens’ sexual parts, when I was a teenager.

For those unaware, the clitoris actually is formed during gestation from the same tissues that becomes a penis in men. In fact, scientific studies have confirmed that the penis and clitoris have many similarities; enough to have some refer to the clitoris as the “female penis.”

Sadly, the penis and the clitoris are treated very differently by society. Modern culture still blushes at the mention of the clitoris and is generally lacking in even the most basic information about it. I consider myself a feminist, yet I too failed to name and describe this integral part of a woman’s sexuality with both my kids during every one of our open and honest discussions of sexuality.

Only a few Canadian provinces list the clitoris in the curriculum for naming genitalia, and it seems only Quebec discusses the concept of sexual pleasure with high school teens, at the interpretation and comfort level of the teacher leading the classes. My own daughter had a teacher in Grade 4 who only discussed girls having vaginas and didn’t even name the vulva, let alone the clitoris.

Contrary to what I believe to be the erroneous fear that teaching kids about the clitoris will somehow push them towards premature sexual activity, studies have shown honest discussions about sex actually have the opposite effect.

Curiosity is often what motivates youth to experiment sexually, and coupled with a lack of knowledge, can lead to unsatisfying, unpleasurable or even painful or negative sexual experiences for both genders. In the Netherlands, the sex-ed curriculum includes topics like sexual communication and differences between porn sex and real sex. Pleasure is discussed in the context of comfort with one’s own body and communicating personal sexual desires to a partner. The outcome? The Netherlands reports three times less sexual violence than America and has a lower teen pregnancy and STI rate.

At the bare minimum, those with a clitoris should know its name in the event of clitoral health issues. Like any other part of the body, the clitoris can require medical attention. Sadly, bodily shame about problems “down there” prevents some women from discussing issues of concern with even their own doctors.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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This Is How I Wish My Parents Talked to Me About Sex

By Alexia Lewis

By the time I turned 18, I still never got the “sex talk” from my parents. I entered the world equipped with only the knowledge mass media, pop culture, and my high school freshman sex-ed class could give me. At the time I thought I dodged an awkward bullet, but a few years later, I realized I missed out on a lot of helpful information. And it’s become the norm for a lot of teens to only know how TV shows or movies depict relationships or sex and never have anyone actually knowledgeable and relatable to talk to about our real experiences.

During my first week of college, I witnessed a ton of uncomfortable situations through my frightened 17-year-old eyes. Most of us freshmen were trying to fit in with our 20-year-old peers, but we had no idea what we were doing when it came to navigating relationships, sexual or otherwise. Most of those twenty-somethings didn’t even know much more than we did. Even though we were considered independent and exploring relationships in the young adult world, my experience in college didn’t feel too far off from high school. The young and uneducated were learning about sex and relationships in the most hurtful ways possible, from the simultaneously young & uneducated.

While my experience seems to be the norm for most teens, it doesn’t have to be. And you as parents can make all the difference in having a genuine conversation about sex with your teen. This is how I wish my parents talked to me about sex.

Understand the Internet Changes Everything

I know you were a teen once too, but there are new beasts in teens’ lives that are more vicious than the average adult can understand without first-hand experience.

Our world is interconnected in an extraordinary way. In this Catfish era, entire relationships can be conducted via text message or DM and can become virtually sexual even before the first real-life meet up. It’s different now than when you were my age, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Monitoring phones only makes us better at hiding our activity. And attempting to “disconnect” us from the world or taking our cell phone away only makes us better at using friends’ phones during school.

Teens feel bad enough, weird enough, and alone enough that we don’t need our parents’ judgment to accentuate those emotions.

Considering that this interconnectedness is inevitable, embrace it and try to encourage our knowledge and mastery of emotional intelligence on these platforms in addition to in real life. Teaching us how to navigate both worlds now will make us balanced and ready for the emotional and sexual relationships of the real world to come.

Keep the Conversation Real

The “sex talk” conversation can be over before it even starts if it doesn’t feel authentic. As important as it is to come to me as a concerned parent, come to me as a real person, too. A real person who was my age once, who had these same feelings and extreme transformations happening all at one time, and who understands that the world that I live in is a wild ride. There’s an organic way to be on my level outside of just lecturing me by saying “I was your age once.” Connect with me, tell me your own personal stories, share with me your experiences. Allow me to relate to you triumph and your trial, let me reflect and identify even if it’s in silence. Don’t force me to open up because at times, when you’re a teen and there’s so much you’re not supposed to do or know, revelation is in absorption.

It’s different now than when you were my age, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Monitoring phones only makes us better at hiding our activity.

Please, Don’t Condemn Me

Teens feel bad enough, weird enough, and alone enough that we don’t need our parents’ judgment to accentuate those emotions. On top of the wide range of changes we go through, the last thing we need is our parents telling us there’s something wrong with us too. Telling us we shouldn’t be having sexual feelings at such a “young age” doesn’t stop us from having them. Accept me for where I am and understand that may be different from where you were at my age and that’s okay. As teens, we’re growing into our own young adult selves, and we can only do that successfully when we have some sort of support.

Prepare For Awkward Moments

Within these conversations, don’t make us feel like we have to say what you want to hear. Be open enough to hear some things you aren’t ready for. Also, be tactful enough to understand that there may only be one chance to have this conversation the right way. Create a safe space, an understanding space, and most of all, an accepting space. Accept us for where we are in our experience, and we’ll accept you trying to guide us. It may be awkward and it will feel weird, but it will make a world of a difference. You can make the world of a difference.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!