Saturday 28 January 2012

Shaping Our Show

We are in the process of generating material for our show, and we are currently basing it off of our own experiences. We would love for you to share some of your experiences with us!! This way, our show will not only reflect us and our perspective of the world of sex and it's education, but yours as well.

Our questions to you now are:

1. What was a question in sex ed in school that you always wanted to ask, but were afraid? Or asked and were made fun of? Or asked and didn't get a proper answer to?

2. Who taught you sexual education? Was it your teachers? Your parents? Your peers? Your internet?

3. How open/honest was your sexual education from your teachers/parents/peers?

4. Was sexual education awkward for you?

5. Anything else you want to share about your early experiences with sexual education?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

1. One of my best friends in high school asked the public health nurse why cum tastes salty. It was the best question anyone asked that day. And the answer was "well it depends on what they eat".

2. I learned the dominant sexual lingo from my friends, blow job, hand job, etc - I distinctly remember one of my friends saying about a hand job "you're supposed to shake it like a Sobe", which I don't think the Sobe company would approve of, but that image comes back to me every now and then. All of the health and physical descriptive stuff came from my mom, which she was sometimes disturbingly open to talking about, but I am ultimately grateful for that. I asked the questions, after all. Although when I found out that my parents had sex before they got married I was surprised THAT I was surprised. I guess I always thought... well. The person who came to talk to our class was a public health nurse, who I'm sure was required to be somewhat reserved and focus mainly on "health" type questions. She didn't seem like she enjoyed sex either. However, I am very disturbed by the fact that nobody talked about what CONSENT really feels like, looks like in your head versus in your body, and how there are layers of consent involving constantly checking in with the other person throughout the night. That you can say no at any point, even after you've said yes. That if it feels wrong in any way you can say stop. That in a lot of cases you're drunk so you should take that into account. And of course all the "content" available on the internet, including the pop-ups of live chats with women in your area, do not do justice to the event that is "sex". Or really de-mystify the ordeal.

3. Our teachers were terrified to talk about sex to the point where you wondered if they ever had it, apart from the sex they would have had to have in order to bring babies into the world. Of course, looking back, they were just really unclear about what they were allowed to say.

4. Sex-ed was hilarious. Awkward? Perhaps. But mostly hilarious. It would have been more awkward if people had really opened up and asked the questions they were scared to, because all of a sudden everyone is judging you based on what they think you have done or consider doing. Like anal.

5. Looking back, not many people talked about the psychological aspects of sex, as if talking vagina and penis is the only thing involved in the whole process.

Anonymous said...

1. The one question that I asked during sex-ed that really sticks in my mind was "What happens to all the sperm that doesn't make it to the ovum?" Luckily this question was asked in the form of an anonymous question box, so no one was laughing at me. The teacher looked confused and then simply stated, "it dissolves". I remember feeling extremely embarrassed, but also deeply unsatisfied with the answer. In my mind I imagined the vagina as a sort of sperm wasteland, a mass grave, a battlefield of lost sperm. “They dissolve” did not fully alleviate my concerns. Now I have experienced life on the other side and have had the privilege of teaching “family life”. The question that my students seemed most eager to ask me (in more than one classroom), “But WHY does the penis have to be erect to have sex?” Looking around the classroom I realized that all of the students wanted to know the answer to that one and that I had truly failed them in some of my earlier explanations. It is hard to describe sex out loud, in a way that feels appropriate, and professionally safe, and my insecurity definitely limits my ability to properly educate my students.