Sex Education is a Family Value

Do you ever think back to all the things you wish you’d known about sex or gender when you were growing up?  Have you ever considered how different life would be if you always felt confident that your body was attractive enough to turn someone on?  There were probably a litany of facts about sex you wish you’d known growing up.  Consider how much have you learned about sex the hard way, through failed experiments and embarrassing misfires.  What a mess.  There is nothing virtuous or enviable about being naive and unprepared for the reality of owning a sexual body of any gender and not having a clue how to please someone else.

Of all the things we learn growing up, all the areas of life we find challenging and intimidating, sexuality seems to be fraught with the most fears, the most psychological complications, the most blunders, and the most bewilderment and heartache too.   Sex isn’t just confusing to young people starting out.  Adults the world over, including people who’ve been married several times or have had multitudes of partners, lead secret lives of sexual misery, never having achieved the sex life they wanted, never overcoming body-image or weight-shame issues, and never dispelling their anxieties about the things they want and the way they want them.  I know because I’ve worked with thousands of adults on problems and mistakes and emotional misery that stem primarily from a lack of sex education and the sense of helplessness that ignorance brings.

The traditional attitude has been that sex is almost like a mystery cult.  You know, the way it was treated by pre-Christian cultures.   The idea that there’s something scary supernatural about sex, that it must be treated as a secret behavior subject to strict rules, has been lodged so firmly up Western culture’s ass that, in 2017, sex is still considered forbidden fruit.  Or sleazy.  Or inappropriate for public discourse.  On the Internet, every public conversation about sex ends in snickers and controversy at best and a loony dismissal of scientific facts at worse.  In America, we even censor sexual-health facts in schools and try to squelch sex education on college campuses.

No wonder so many people get rich off other people’s sexual stupidity.  They know people worry about how we look, how our sexual juices smell and taste to other people, and whether we can perform well enough to please our partners.  Whether it’s New Agers pimping jade eggs, televangelists who want you to send money so they can shriek about sexual sinners from their mansions, unethical doctors who want to give you nips and tucks so they can buy yachts and Teslas, they are all selling the same big sad bag of anti-sex prejudices.   Little dollar signs flash in their eyes when they smell your sexual unhappiness.  They gleefully press their sticky fingers on your shame buttons with one hand while holding their palms out with the other.  If they see you are lost, they find ways to herd you so they can milk you like goats.  Quacks prey on straight people’s sexual insecurities much the way “conversion therapists” prey on LGBTQ people, attacking them where they are most vulnerable and guaranteeing miracles.

Are you ashamed of your labia?  I’ll turn you into a Barbie doll so your vulva looks childlike in a bikini! they say.  Need more lead in your pencil?  Take our secret herbal pill we won’t admit is made mostly of oregano.  Want a better orgasm?  Get this outrageously expensive yet scientifically dubious injection.  Sexually unconventional?  Lock that shit down for God and then you’ll feel better.   Charlatans will lie straight to your face and tell you that they know the truth about sex.  But they don’t know and they don’t care about the larger picture of how their treatments can do more harm than good.  They don’t give a shit about what’s normal for humans.  They are not interested in helping you to feel good about yourself.  They certainly are indifferent to the depressing aftermath of their sickening scams or the problems that result from suckers believing their hard-sell.

The vast majority of the world’s adults only have one diagnosable disorder.  It’s called sexual ignorance.

Scalpels, pills, injections, and prayers may all have their place in reproductive health but that place is not between your legs unless you have a diagnosable medical malady.   Yet, today, just as in medieval times, many adults fall prey to magical thinking from sex quacks. “Oooh! Shove a wasp nest in my patootie!  Why not?”  Here, let Forbes magazine tell you why not.  With the rare exception of people with legitimate reproductive health issues that impact their sexual desire or performance, the vast majority of the world’s adults only have one diagnosable disorder.  It’s called sexual ignorance.

Ignorance of sex is the single biggest cause of human sexual misery.   The tragedy of that is that it all of it is avoidable!   Sexual misery — from internal conflicts and insecurities about what’s normal to performance issues that result from shame and inhibition — can be alleviated, if not fully remedied, through the knowledge we already have acquired thanks to the biological and sociological sciences which have changed the face of sex in the 21st century.

Let’s not even talk about the blow-back I got from writing Different Loving and stating that BDSM/fetish sex was normal.  When I built the first truly scientific case for the benefits of masturbation (in Sex and the Self), it was hard to find people who even believed me.  LOL I briefly became the Internet’s favorite jerk-off doctor because people found it so amusing that sex studies were showing masturbation is good.  Now, six years later,  thousands of places have published their own research on the health benefits of masturbation, transforming the sexual landscape for Millennials.  Instead of all the frightening and absurd myths about jerking off (from hairy palms to burning in hell), science offers the comforting fact that it’s not just normal sexual behavior, it actually makes us healthier humans.  Masturbation serves an important biological purpose throughout our lives, from our toddler years to our dying days.   In your teens, it helps you prepare for becoming a sexually mature adult.  Regular masturbation in adults (or at least regular orgasms) maintains and improves our sexual function overall, reduces our risk of strokes and heart attacks by 40-60%, lowers the risk of reproductive disorders and cancers, staves off depression and keeps your skin younger looking.  And, by the way, regular orgasms increase longevity.  Why don’t they teach us that in school, instead of that bullshit about repressing your sex drive until you are ready to explode? There is no virtue in sabotaging your own body.  That’s just ignorance.

As a sex therapist, I’ve observed (barring reproductive health diseases and personality disorders, which have different profiles) that the adults most likely to have performance issues fall into one of two camps.  In the first are people (ciswomen in particular) who never masturbated because they thought it was wrong for women to do so.  They never learned the fundamentals of their own body which means that, in adulthood, they don’t actually know how to get off.  In the second are people (cismen in particular) who masturbated but felt guilty and dirty about it, and chronically worried it said something bad about them.  Both camps grow up to feel disempowered and ashamed of their own genital function and sexual performance.  Both camps end up with relationship crises over sexual intimacy and behaviors that are normal to others but which they’ve forbidden themselves out of shame.  Long before they came to me, many of them also fell for one scam or another in hopes of a “quick fix” for what ailed them.

You cannot remove sexual biology from the human equation.   We are who are because we are sexual.  We fall madly in love with people because we are sexual.  We crave intimacy and affection because we’re sexual.  We’re crushed when we’re romantically rejected because we’re sexual.  Women are moodier than men because of estrogen.  Men are more aggressive than women because of testosterone.  Yeah, you get the idea.

The science of sex isn’t as abstruse as the myths about sex.  It isn’t informed by religious rhetoric or urban legends.  It’s just, you know, facts.  Stuff that has been studied and proven true.  A wide range of sciences has now liberated once-unknown truths from the age-old human swamp of prudishness, lies, and ignorance.   They prove that body-positive, sexually intelligent choices result in happier, healthier, longer lives.

That’s why I think that sex education is the answer to most of the world’s sexual misery.  Armed with facts, you and your children can come to peace with authentic sex and gender identities, and learn to accept that diversity is normal.  Armed with facts, you can know what to realistically expect at every stage of life and what sexual health problems to watch out for.  Armed with facts, you can become alert to consent violations and protect yourself against predators.  And, of course, sex ed is key to reducing STI transmission, bearing healthy children, and building a thriving, sexually fulfilling relationship in adulthood.

 

WE OWE IT TO THE NEXT GENERATION TO MAKE SEX EDUCATION A FAMILY VALUE

Why should your kids go through the hardships of sexual ignorance?  If you could choose, would you choose to raise a sexually healthy child?

The science is in, ladies and gentlemen.  The facts about sex are your friends.  It’s up to progressive adults everywhere to make sex education a family value.  It’s time for all parents to step up to the plate to protect their kids and teach them the positive and evidence-based facts as only a patient, loving parent can.

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably read my comments already on all the studies proving that abstinence-education has been a massive fail.  You probably also know that the new administration has slashed funding for sex ed, reproductive support services for teens, and abortion here and abroad.   This is happening at a time when new strains of old sexually transmitted infections are showing resistance to existing drugs, when HPV is pandemic in the US, and when HIV is on the rise among drug addicts because they don’t have a clue how AIDS is actually transmitted and still think it’s a “gay” disease.  That is how dopey we are, as a culture.  Tragic ignorance is killing people,  and maybe even your own kids one day if they aren’t prepared for the challenges of modern life.

And that’s why sex education and sexual health must be a family value.  It’s all about helping humans thrive.  It’s about enjoying better health and having more fun during the years that you have on earth.  It’s about sparing your kids and their kids the stress and vulnerability of ignorance.   It is more important today than it’s ever been to do that for them.

My new Ebook, A Parent’s Guide to Progressive Sex Education, will be the first in a series of mini-books I’ll be working on over the next two years.  This first book is written for parents who are ready to take on the responsibility of ensuring their children’s’ sexual health.  It takes you step-by-step through the process of creating a progressive, ethical, and science-based home-schooling plan to take the power of love and sex-positive parenting to new levels.  I can’t wait to share it with you.   It will teach you how to protect your child’s sexual health. It will teach you how to affirm and empower them to feel good about their natural bodies.  It addresses the tough questions kids have about porn, LGBT issues, and reproduction.  It will show you how to teach your kids about predators and how to become your child’s ally in sexual safety and health.  It’s about making sure your kids don’t turn to adult porn for their ideas about how sexual relationships work.  It’s about giving your children a gift that keeps on giving:  the gift of knowledge. 

 

 

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A Guide For Parents

Gloria’s new guide for parents who want to take a proactive approach towards teaching their kids about sex.

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