Teaching pleasure in sex-ed
In this blog piece, Churchill Trust Fellow Katrina Marson outlines the evidence for a sex-positive approach to sex education in schools. She argues that setting the baseline expectation that sex is something everyone enjoys will meet standard harm prevention requirements while also paving the way for healthier relationships and wellbeing. See Katrina’s earlier piece for more information on her research into healthy sex education for all ages.
Source: Big Talk Education
In front of a class of ten and eleven-year-olds, a facilitator holds up an illustration of a young girl who has her hands in her underpants and is smiling: “This girl is exploring her own body, and it’s ok because she’s doing it in private – see how she’s in her bedroom and the blinds are closed?” This is Big Talk Education, which delivers relationships and sex education in primary schools across the UK. This class is being shown the illustration following a discussion about their right not to be touched by others when it is unwanted, and about their right to explore their own bodies. This illustration emphasises young people’s bodily autonomy, teaching that curiosity and self-discovery is normal and healthy.
Emma Jane’s piece I had the ‘other’ sex talk with my daughter – and you should have it with your kids too (ABC, 12 October 2019) describes the author’s parenting moment of having the ‘other’ sex talk with her daughter, the one about sexual pleasure, because it was lacking from the sex-ed delivered at school. Jane lamented the ‘orgasm gap’ between men and women (primarily in heterosexual relationships), and rightly advocated for the need to speak more about “how people actually enjoy sex”. Jane highlighted this significant deficiency in sex ed: the erasure of pleasure, especially female pleasure, which she fairly described as “[an] important [part] of a well-rounded sex-ed curriculum.”
I would go one step further and argue that it is more than simply important and goes beyond well-rounded – it is a critical success factor, without which we are doing more than depriving people of a life of enjoyable sex. We are exposing them to significant risk of harm.
When sex-ed is heteronormative and/or takes a risk-averse approach – don’t get pregnant or contract an STI – it becomes necessary to talk about male pleasure by explaining the ‘mechanics’ of the erection and ejaculation. Conversely, female pleasure rarely features in sex-ed, which is usually very deliberate. For example, Big Talk Education’s founder Lynnette Smith remembers an entire sex-ed curriculum in the UK was suspended and revised because it originally mentioned the clitoris – an anatomical reality. Here we see how, in the arena of sex, bodies and relationships, matters of fact and information become imbued with values. To censor the clitoris and the vulva, focusing instead on internal organs responsible only for reproduction, is to censor discussion about female pleasure. The clitoris does not warrant a mention when you can explain how to avoid pregnancy or an STI without reference to it.
This erasure of female sexual pleasure sends a strong message that it is at best irrelevant, and at worst shameful. By teaching young people that their enjoyment and pleasure do not matter, we set a standard whereby sexual experiences are not meant to be positive. And from “your pleasure is irrelevant”, it is an easy leap to “your autonomy is irrelevant”. By depriving young people (particularly, but not exclusively, young women) of agency, by saying that their pleasure is redundant and/or taboo, we risk teaching them that their role is to be nothing more than a passive party to a sexual encounter. Only there to facilitate the other person’s wants, needs and desires.
So why is “how people enjoy sex” so important for harm-prevention? It is common for sex education to be defined by harm-prevention, exclusively delivering messages of abstinence, or of pregnancy/STI risk-aversion. But even sex-ed lessons which seek to teach consent often do not go far enough. Alice Cruttwell, the public health curriculum adviser who created the award-winning Respect Yourself sex education programme in Shropshire, UK, calls it backwards reasoning. She describes it as a deficit model if sex and relationships are only discussed in terms of the presence or absence of consent.
We need to set the bar higher, so the base standard is that sex is something that everybody enjoys. By actively centring sex education on wellbeing and positive sexual experiences, it forms a stronger foundation from which to have the harm-prevention discussion. In other words, pleasure in sexuality should not be seen as an optional extra in sex education, it should form the basis of it.
Internationally, there are examples of positive sex education that emphasise the importance of enjoyment and wellbeing. For example, in Germany sexuality education is conceptualised as separate to sexualised violence prevention because there is recognition of a danger in framing discussions about relationships and sex only in terms of harm prevention. Instead, sex education there seeks to frame relationships and sexual wellbeing in positive terms, which will in itself help protect against negative or harmful sexual experiences. Sexualised violence prevention education then supplements that baseline focus on sexual wellbeing.
For many, talking to children and adolescents about sex and sexuality in a positive way seems inappropriate. For others, these topics are a matter for the home, and the nature of the discussion to be determined by the personal values of the family unit. But is the protection of young people from negative sexual experiences or sexual harm a matter of personal values? Or is it our duty to safeguard and promote wellbeing for all?
Comprehensive relationships and sex education must set a sex-positive standard, where wellbeing and enjoyment is an expectation. Beyond the messages themselves, one of the most powerful effects of this kind of education is that it normalises talking about sex. The benefits of this are obvious: removing barriers to healthy conversation about sex, such as embarrassment or shame, drastically improves young people’s capacity to articulate how they feel, or to say what they do or do not want, in a relationship or a sexual event.
Positive sex, wellbeing and pleasure should not be the ‘other’ sex talk, it should be the sex talk.
Katrina Marson is a criminal lawyer currently working in criminal justice law reform in the ACT. She is a Churchill Fellow, whose report ‘Ignorance is not Innocence’ outlines her findings of international perspectives, practical experience and insights on the design and implementation of relationships and sex education, and can be found on the Churchill Trust Australia website.
Twitter: @katrinaellen_zm
Posted by: @jrostant