“Is sex good?”
This is a question I received anonymously from a grade 7 student during a consent workshop last year. The workshops were designed to teach youth about sexual activity, healthy relationships, and negotiating consent with a partner. This included a role play between facilitators, where we took turns giving or denying consent for a high-five, handshake, and a hug. We review the F(reely given)-R(eversible)-I(nformed)-E(nthusiastic)-S(pecific) model of consent, and then apply it to various scenarios. We talk about coercion, and how to recognize if you might have been coerced, or if you are coercing someone else. We talk about feelings, albeit in a limited way, including how it might feel to be rejected and how to respond in that scenario. We also talk about the consequences of harming someone, and how they might feel if we crossed a boundary.
This is a nebulous question, and I struggled to answer it. Partly, I was alarmed that a student who had sat through an entire session with me, ended up leaving wondering whether sex was “good.” I wondered what “good” means to this student – are they referring to a moral good? Maybe they are wondering about pleasure? What do they mean when they refer to sex? Are they referencing the entire spectrum of sexual activity, or penetrative sex? Most importantly, how, as a community educator, should I respond to this question? Can I respond to this question?
It left me wondering whether I have any response. Is sex good? If we are referring to sexual activity, then yes, it can be, sometimes. Generally, it should be. But people engage in sexual activity for many reasons, not strictly pleasure, and it can also be a site of anxiety, discomfort, vulnerability, neutrality, hurt, and in the worst-case scenario, trauma. This is the turbulent and unpredictable terrain that educators are trying (and often failing) to prepare students for in sexuality education classrooms.
In hindsight, I can understand why this student might be asking this question following a consent workshop. Likely, this question arose from the student’s own perception of sex in media, influenced by their peers, their parents, and their teachers, in combination with the workshop we had presented. While the workshop does address pleasure – briefly – and generally indicates that sex should be enjoyable for everyone involved, we spend more time talking about potential risks, and reduce sexuality to a set of mechanical or static objectives. Sex should be pleasurable so long as you know the F-R-I-E-S acronym, so long as you follow the appropriate steps to assert your yeses and noes, so long as you avoid coercion, so long as you are not using substances – the list could go on. It follows that if you perfect these strategies, you will have a purely joyful, exciting sexual experience. Of course, as anyone who has spent any time exploring their sexuality knows, this is untrue. This model of teaching youth about sexuality obscures so much of what it means to explore and express our sexualities.
I do not want to discount consent education, such as the workshop discussed above, outright. These types of lessons provide value to students for lots of reasons. When I go into a classroom, I recognize that this may be one of the first opportunities a student has to ask honest questions about sex and sexuality. There are some moments in the classroom that I am absolutely thrilled by, like when students answer each other’s questions, co-creating a safe space to discuss sex and sexuality. I have witnessed young students bring up issues such as trauma and self-image and I have had students speak passionately about their own perspectives on sex and relationships. While the curriculum is limiting, the possibilities for how content is received by students is manifold and provides an opportunity for the skilled facilitator to engage with emotions, ethics, and ambiguity in the sexuality education classroom. Furthermore, there is a risk to not including these lessons in formal education settings; students need an opportunity to receive information about communication skills, healthy relationships, different forms of sexual activity, and consent, all of which are covered briefly in this session. It is important to acknowledge that the sexuality education classroom described above is an idealistic imagining of sexuality education. For these types of conversations to happen, the educator (and the student) has to be open to the messy possibilities that sexuality as a topic, brings to the classroom.
The opportunities for students to access sexuality education outside of the sessions provided by the community organization I worked with were varied. While some schools had dedicated staff, who were committed to providing the most comprehensive sexuality education curriculum they had the resources for, other schools felt that our two one-hour sessions were sufficient to tick the violence prevention box. Furthermore, as suggested by sex education scholars (1), even progressive sexuality education is rooted in ideas of risk, health, and science, implying that if students have the “right” information about sexuality, they will make the “right” decisions, thereby protecting their sexual and moral health. This is a particular gap in sexuality education, that classroom teachers have the responsibility to address.
Recognizing that sexuality education cannot be reduced to prescriptive lessons on what-to-do and what-not-to-do, educators might engage with students in ways that fold the raw, vulnerable, and ambiguous side of exploring and expressing ourselves and our sexuality into lessons.
This does not mean that sexuality education should be passionate or exciting. Students still need lessons on anatomy, sexual function, and puberty. However, I suggest that educators might also draw on diverse resources to introduce the more complicated aspects of human sexuality, such as literature, art, music, and film. Furthermore, sexuality education classes could, and indeed should, include conversations about personal values, ethics, and religion. The landscape of sex and sexuality is rapidly changing for youth, in ways that a curriculum simply cannot keep up with. But we can equip students with the critical media literacy and ethics skills they need to navigate their worlds in ways that align with their beliefs.
Scholars and educators have been doing the creative work of re-imagining sexuality education for decades. For example, Sharon Lamb explores what it might mean if ethics were a basis for sexuality education curriculum (2), Jennifer Nash offers a lesson plan which encourages students to question media representations of Black women by using the “selfie” as a tool to think critically about self-representation, foregrounding humor and irony when studying visual culture, and leaning into studies of sonic culture to complicate black sexual subjectivities (3). Ana Carolina Antunes and Cloe Butler demonstrate the value in creative curriculum, through a discussion of a workshop they ran with students of refugee and immigrant backgrounds, which involved creating and decorating penises and vulvas out of craft supplies (4). While sex education is often presented as a “serious” subject, Louisa Allen documents the way that teachers can be open to humour as a pedagogical strategy in the sex education classroom, thereby drawing on laughter to connect the theory to the embodied nature of the lesson (5).
We can also imagine alternative mediums for presenting information about sex and sexuality. By drawing on literature, film, music, and other creative representations, educators might be able to grasp more of the ambiguity that is lost in the traditional curriculum. As an example, Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele have a recently published graphic novel about the history of sexuality in the West (6). My vision for this work is that it might be incorporated into a history class, thereby stretching the boundaries of the sexuality education classroom in ways that align with the human experience of sexuality which generally permeates the hallways of public school. It is important that we think broadly about the tools we use to teach youth about sexuality.
This is not a definitive guide to teaching sexuality education. In fact, such a guide would be antithetical to the expansive vision I have for sexuality education. Rather, the works presented are intended to inspire sexuality educators to think more creatively about what sexuality education means and what it might look like in practice. Acknowledging that students learn about sexuality from a broad range of sources, including the media, their family, friends, online, through novels and poetry, community organizations, and their own fantasies, we can recognize that in-class education is only one piece of a broader sexuality education puzzle.
Sources
Lesko, Nancy. 2010. “Feeling Abstinent? Feeling Comprehensive? Touching the Affects of Sexuality Curricula.” Sex Education 10 (3): 281–97 Maitland, Hannah. 2022. “When the Facts Are Not Enough: The Limitations of Fact-Checking Sex Education Controversies.” Sex Education 0 (0): 1–10. Gilbert, Jen. 2018. “Contesting Consent in Sex Education.” Sex Education 18 (3): 268–79.
Lamb, Sharon. 2013. “Toward a New Ethical Focus.” In Sex Ed for Caring Schools: Creating an Ethics-Based Curriculum, 44-51. New York: Teachers College Press.
Nash, Jennifer C. 2016. “Pleasurable Blackness.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education, 261–278. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Antunes, Ana Carolina, and Cloe Butler. 2022. “Pompomed Vulvas & Glittered Penises: Exploring Gender through Play.” Sex Education 0 (0): 1–9.
Allen, Louisa. 2014. “Don’t Forget, Thursday Is Test[Icle] Time! The Use of Humour in Sexuality Education.” Sex Education 14 (4): 387–99.
Barker, Meg-John, and Jules Scheele. 2021. “Chapter 1: The Invention of Sex.” In Sexuality: A Graphic Guide, 14-53. London: Icon Books. EBook Version