By now, most of you are passingly familiar with the saga that is the Small Town Sex Ed Tour. In brief:

I was scheduled to teach several free sex ed workshops at libraries in St. Mary’s, Charles, and Queen Anne’s Counties. And people. lost. their. shit.

I don’t feel the need to defend myself against most of the accusations that opponents have lobbed at me. In fact, plenty of the colorful ones are true.

  I trained as a professional pole dancer for 3 years, and it helped me survive periods of crippling depression. I do advocate for the

picture of bianca in bright pink top and peacock shorts doing a complicated move on a pole where her stomach holds all her weight. She is smiling and trying to look at the camera

Honestly, I wasn’t that graceful. But I was pretty strong.

decriminalization of sex work, and make a yearly donation to HIPS, an organization that supports sex workers to live full and healthy lives. I do wear the title slut proudly, I do advocate for full and inclusive acceptance of LGB and especially transgender young people, I talk about anal sex, I believe abortion should be legal and accessible and I don’t believe that we need to hide the complexities of sexuality from our young people.

To proponents of sex ed, none of these criticisms are new. As I said on Twitter last month, “The goal of sex educators cannot be to sanitize ourselves in order to avoid blowback.” No one is clean enough to teach these topics.

What I do think is worthy of address is the aggressive insistence that I did wrong by proposing a class that groups 12-17 year olds together; that “a real educator” would know “that allowing 12-year-old girls to participate in a sex talk with 17-year-old males” is inappropriate.

As an educator, I find it notable that every single time this critique was brought up, it talked about older boys corrupting younger girls.

Why is it that we cannot contemplate an age-diverse environment where older boys are not predators? Why are young women always victims? Why do we presume that men are aggressive, corrupting, and inappropriate, and women are innocent, pure, and vulnerable?

I arranged for my teen classes to serve 12-17 yr olds out of necessity. It would be cumbersome and logistically difficult to teach 2-3 separate workshops for different ages in a single night, the attendance would be low, and the young attendees could not be offered any anonymity in the questions they asked via anonymous question cards.

But I will stand by that decision on moral grounds as well. There is great diversity in our young people’s sexual development and experience that is not bounded by age. There are 12 year old girls in sexual relationships and 17 year old boys who have never contemplated the idea. There are 15 year old boys delaying sex until marriage and 16 year old girls who don’t know what masturbation is. There are 13 year olds of all genders who have been accidentally exposed to pornography and have questions. There is nothing inherent in age or gender that makes a mixed audience inappropriate. Nor, developmentally, is there a magic switch at age 18 that makes young people into adults who can handle sexually explicit material.

I love this scene in the (admittedly hokey, white-savior-y) movie Take The Lead. Dancing and sex ed have much in common in Banderas’ analysis: it is easier to point a finger at the problem (teen pregnancy rates, over-sexed media and pop culture) than to accept a solution that doesn’t look like the one you want. Sex ed is uncomfortable because it is unfamiliar, because it challenges us. It talks about things that scare us.

But restricting access to information because it makes you uncomfortable isn’t fair to our young people. They deserve answers. They deserve spaces where they can ask difficult questions and have them answered respectfully.

I talk about anal sex and porn and lube because, like Antonio Banderas in Take the Lead, I believe in teaching young people to have agency over their bodies. I believe in treating them with RESPECT. I believe that they are smart, capable, and considerate- that they can handle this information in the right context.

I want young people to know that it is safe to ask questions about sexuality, so that they can make informed decisions about their relationships and their health.

I want young people to know that pornography is entertainment, not a reflection of authentic adult sexuality.

I want young people to know that lubricant reduces tissue inflammation and makes you less likely to contract an STI. It also makes sex feel more comfortable, especially if you are nervous and your body doesn’t naturally lubricate.

I want young people to know that they have a right to their boundaries, and even if they’ve agreed to a sexual behavior once before, they don’t have to do it again if they don’t want.

I want young people to know where to look for accurate, non-judgmental information about sex.

I want young people to know they can make their own choices about their sexual lives. To be free of fear. To do what feels right and safe and authentic. To learn, slowly, by degrees, how to become adults.

http://www.somdnews.com/enterprise/spotlight/sex-education-class-a-no-go-in-southern-maryland/article_8c93be47-41e7-5f67-b6d4-df877af78d07.html