So, I think that this would be the best time to talk about how I got to writing this blog. I’m %100 certain that everyone has had some sort of health education class. At some point they’ve had the conversation about the birds and the bee’s, so to speak. I’m also going to tackle some of these topics in much more depth in other posts, since this one in and of itself is still going to be fairly long.
I’m also willing to bet that more often than not, those classes were of the Mean Girls variety: Don’t have sex or you will get pregnant and die. Well, shocker here, that was about the sum of the actual education I had when it came to sexual education. And it is honestly less than I had the opportunity to actually have. My first experience should have been in about fifth or sixth grade; however my mother had me excused from the class in favor of taking extra flute lessons. If the teacher wasn’t available on the day we were having those classes, I was put out in the hall to do extra class work. I’m not going to lie, it felt like a punishment more often than not, especially since I was the only one in my class going through that treatment at the time, that I know of. It did not do wonders for my self-esteem.
My first exposures to to sexual education were denied because my mother felt it wasn’t something people should talk about. I honestly couldn’t tell you what they discussed during those classes for that three month period.The only thing that I know for sure I missed would have been a conversation about transgender just before we went on our school trip that year. I was confused and didn’t really understand anything they were talking about.
And then we get to 8th grade. I was not excused this time, and I honestly would have put up a bit of a fuss if my mother had tried that time. But I also never showed her the work we were doing at those times to avoid explicitly that. Two years had made me a bit wiser to the fact that topics of sex made her uncomfortable. And this is where we get to the first introductions of “abstinence only.” One of the few classes we had about it (I think at 8th grade we had 3 or so?) was focused on how STI’s were transmitted. Only, I would argue that it was a terribly represented way to do it, because it implies that all sex is unsafe sex unless you’re having sex during marriage.
The activity we did was one where each of us were given cards that had something written on it. You had two people walking around with abstinence cards, and the rest had a card that had an STI on it. I remember feeling particularly lucky I had one of the abstinence cards; at the time I was catholic and firmly believed in abstinence only. Anyone who had that card could not shake hands with the other students in the class. Everyone else had to go around and shake hands with other students and would be given an additional card. The teacher used this to point out that if you had an STI and had sex with someone else, you would pass yours on, and vice versa. It was a fantastic spread of misinformation that was intended to scare students. Me, in my ignorance, bought in.
And then we hit high school. You had to have your second health education class by tenth grade. I waited until the last minute to take it; between my catholic upbringing of “sex is bad outside of marriage” and masturbation is also bad because you can’t have a baby that way, and also the horror story that was my last class experiences. I was wary at best and honestly not terribly interested.
But. Ironically, although I looked at this class with dread at the time, and now with some tentative amusement, it was probably the best of my three structured education experiences. This class didn’t try to scare me away from sex. We were cautioned against it, but basically told to put a condom on it if we were foolish enough to try it. She expected us to be foolish enough. We were teenagers. What else was there to expect?
And that was it for high school experiences. Youth group experiences told me the same thing, but further condemned any alternative thinking to sexuality. Gays were wrong and bad but “should be treated with love because they are only like that because something bad happened to them.” It was probably the most positive message I’d heard come from a church group on the topic. But honestly, it scared me; I was developing a crush on my best friend at that point. She didn’t reciprocate. But the idea that I was only like that because something bad happened to me left me feeling like I was broken. The overall message that I was getting at that time was a very negative one.
It didn’t change immediately, in college either. My first year, I joined a group called Mentor’s in Violence Prevention (MVP). We went to classes talking about a variety of topics that included talking about domestic violence, rape, and sexual assault on campus. I’d never had conversations about what consent even was, prior to that. I felt a bit in over my head at the time, but I threw myself in head first. I was as involved as I could be with everything I could get my hands on. I wanted to know more and I wanted to be a more positive role model for people in my life than others had been for me.
I helped lead a variety of different programs, and come spring, I got involved with Walk a Mile (WAM) in her shoes. I burned myself out hard that spring dragging WAM information around campus to all sorts of different places to draw more attention to the event and trying to get people signed up. I was intensely satisfied afterwards with the work I had done, although I had to promise myself to not burn myself out like that again, especially since I was taking heavy class loads at the time (I guarantee you this didn’t change, but the ways in which I burned myself out constantly did).
That following summer, I wanted to get involved with orientation on campus. Specifically, I wanted to help with a program No Zebra’s, No Excuses. The program was one I’d watched the previous summer during my orientation that showed visual examples of different violent situations, as well as sexual harassment and non-consent situations that students might find themselves or their friends in, and how to get proper help/offer help to a victim during and after those situations. During the week of practice leading up to everything, I had several conversations with some of my peers about my thoughts about earlier prevention methods, and how I thought that a lack of education led up to the increasing prevalence of rape culture. I offered my experience and commented that I was sure I wasn’t the only one. I had a woman that was working with our Violence Prevention center disagree with me that it wasn’t that frequent. At the time I felt she knew more than I did, and shut up. I didn’t agree with her then, and I certainly don’t agree now. And I am much more informed now.
MVP, while working with No Zebra’s, was also working on another program that summer. We wanted one that was going to be more fun than our usual topics, and something that was likely to draw people in during the optional breaks. We called it Yes Means Yes: A Guide to Good Sex. This was all about consent and how to have that conversation. It was incredibly popular. It was incredibly fun. It sat in the back of my mind for another year and a half, as I delved more into social justice issues, waiting to blossom.
And blossom it did, as I continued working with all those groups for another four (I spent five years in undergrade) years. I went to about a dozen conferences during that time. At first, I kept finding myself at panels talking about sexual health and wellness. That was true, even at The Conference of Masculinity that I attended two years to graduation, and was what finally convinced me (with only a year and a half to accomplish this) to add WGS to my growing list of minors. I actually got to meet one of my role models of the time at this conference: Jackson Katz’s the person that originally designed MVP. I attended peer conferences, where we traded information on how we handled education, and the panels I found myself at were talking about transgender issues, a panel on internal condoms (not going to lie, I was intrigued and converted), as well as panels talking about reproductive health and how to care for your sex toys.
I missed the opportunity to take the sex and sexuality WGS class offered my last semester, much to my frustration and disappointment. I had another class I had to take to graduate at the same time. But that last semester I did go to a conference on Reproductive Rights, that was extremely enlightening. It started to better make connections to other feminist topics than any of my classes had managed (intersectionality didn’t make much sense to me at the time. It’s still something that I struggle to fully grasp, if I’m being frank).
It was all of these things that re-affirmed in my mind that rape culture is informed and fueled by a general lack of sexual education of any kind. It was here that I decided that I wanted to do something to change that. And it took me a long time to sort out how. This blog is a building block of sorts for that goal. While it does hold me accountable for working towards my goal, that isn’t the primary focus of what I want to do here. I want to open a place for healthy conversations about consent, sexuality, body positivity and gender issues.