“The Good Parts”: The Real Sex Ed

There has been a lot of discussion of limiting children’s access to sex ed. But that may not be possible. Sex ed is all around us. The most you can limit is your engagement with their education. And why would you want to limit that?

My First Sex Ed Classroom: A Slumber Party

In first grade, my friend Megan had a sleepover party for her birthday. It was the first sleepover party I was allowed to go to, and I was very excited. I’d gotten a brand new sleeping bag for Channukah just a month or two before, and I hadn’t even used it yet. It was green–my favorite color. I packed my overnight bag (without help) and rolled my sleeping bag (with help) and we set off on a snowy evening to Megan’s house where I joined a group of very excited first and second grade girls in the upstairs rec room. 

Megan’s mother had a few activities planned for us–we decorated cookies, had pizza and cake, and did an art project. But most of the evening was spent upstairs. Without grown ups. In fact, unless we were doing an activity downstairs or someone was bringing more snacks upstairs, the adults stayed away from the party. 

Megan’s two older sisters did hang around with us for part of the evening. They were in junior high and were very grown up. We were in awe of them. 

What Can be Shared and What Cannot

Slumber parties are legendary for the lessons learned there. This one, my initiation into that world, taught me my first dirty jokes. Ones which I told my own children when they were old enough. But there was something even more important I learned that night. A lesson that carried through for a long, long time and would be applied over and over again.

Party games and whispered secrets taught me about which “dirty” things you could share and which ones you had to keep secret. 

Reading Forbidden Magazines

A few years later, I was on a playdate at a friend’s house. I was about 9 or 10. In fourth grade. We’d learned from someone’s older sibling about Playboy magazine. Playboy had naked pictures. And naked pictures were guaranteed to be exciting. That might have been the end of it. Except…Kerry’s father had a subscription to Playboy. 

Kerry told me about the magazine. She also told me that she knew where her father kept them. And that she was absolutely, positively not supposed to go into the box in the closet where they were stored. Is there a better way to encourage a child to open that mysterious, hidden box than to tell her that she’s not allowed to go into the box? It was as if someone had dared us to take one.

And so we did.

We didn’t get caught. And we never told any of our other friends what we’d done. The kind of bravery involved in taking the magazine just because it was forbidden would certainly have gained us a high degree of admiration among our peers. And the fact that what we’d taken was a magazine with actual naked people in it (and not a National Geographic–something we’d have been able to find in the school library)? That would have just elevated our status.

But somehow, we knew, that was an experience not to be shared. It took many years before I told anyone about that magazine–long after it happened. And the first people I shared the story with weren’t people who I went to school with, or who knew people from my school. It was definitely a story not to tell. 

“The Good Parts”

Two years later, in sixth grade, the gifted and talented section (about seventy five of us) read The Diary of Anne Frank. The Diary consistently appears on the American Library Association’s lists of most frequently banned or challenged books. Because it’s “pornographic.” Because in it, a teenager wrote about discovering her body. And about masturbation. But it was part of our sixth grade language arts curriculum that year. Some of us had read it before, and almost as soon as it was distributed to us, word began to spread about “the good parts.” It’s such a vivid memory for me that I still remember that one of “the good parts” was on page eighty-something. 

That book was one where the details were widely distributed. Yes, distributed in hushed voices, in small groups. But still shared among everyone. It was information that trickled from the kids who had previously read the book to those who were looking at it for the first time. No matter how popular you were. It was information widely shared and distributed without hesitation. 

Why is One Book Sharable and another Book Not? Why is One Topic Admissible and another Topic is Not?

I don’t know what made this book fall into the “sharable” category. Was it the fact that a whole class was reading it? Was it the kind of “explicit” material–printed words, rather than pictures? Obviously that part of the book wasn’t discussed as part of our class assignments. Even if “the good parts” were some of the parts that we talked about the most. Outside of class.

Of course, being a class of sixth graders, the open discussion of masturbation was mixed with revulsion. As we shared information, we also talked about how gross it was to do that. We treated the discussions of masturbation with the same revulsion as the discussions of menstruation.. Outwardly, at least. I’m sure some people were intrigued, or curious. Perhaps even titillated by the words on the page. 

Judy Blume’s Deenie

The Diary of Anne Frank wasn’t the first book I’d read that contained a (brief) description of masturbation. Judy Blume’s Deenie owns that title. Another frequently challenged book. I remember shock and embarrassment the first time I read the (very mild) description of what Deenie did. The book contains some very brief, and vague mentions of Deenie masturbating in the bathtub. There’s also a scene where the PE teacher talks about masturbation, explaining that it’s a normal thing for people to do. 

Deenie was another one of the books that wasn’t passed around. I don’t know why. I got it from the library at a time when many of my classmates were also reading Judy Blume’s books. I’d accidentally been issued a library card that allowed me adult borrowing privileges, even though I was a kid, and Deenie was shelved in the part of the library where you had to be allowed to borrow from the adult section. Why did I keep that one to myself? Perhaps because she was already a popular author among my peers. Maybe because it was a library book. Or because it was from the teen section of the library, not the kids section. Somehow I just knew to keep it to myself. 

Judy Blume’s Forever

But Judy Blume’s Forever was different. When I was In junior high, I found a copy of that book on the bookshelf at home. It was tucked up in a corner, on a shelf that I wasn’t sure I should be exploring. I hadn’t been told explicitly not to go there, but it was definitely one of those books shelved well above my eye level. The kind of thing a parent would do if they didn’t want a kid to notice the book. But I did notice it. And I couldn’t pass up a book by one of my favorite authors. 

Published the same year I was born, Forever is the story of Katherine and Michael, two high school seniors who meet, begin dating, and have sex. Unlike the typical high school sex trope, no one dies in this one. No one gets pregnant. But the book, with its vivid descriptions of Katherine seeing Ralph (the nickname given to Michael’s penis) for the first time, and of her first time having sex, were exciting. It had too many “good parts” to mark all of them.

I passed it on to one friend. And then another, and another. Until the spine was cracked and pages in my beat up paperback copy were wrinkled and loose. It was a book that was talked about for weeks and weeks as this one copy was shared among us. There was something thrilling about the subterfuge. 

A year or two after finding Forever, something else happened. Another book. A book that changed my life in ways I could never imagine. 

Erika Jong’s Fear of Flying

I needed something new to read. I wasn’t in the mood to reread any of my usual favorites. And I didn’t feel like making a trip to the library that day. So I went to raid my mother’s book collection. Among the classics and corseted seductions, I found Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying.

And that’s the beginning of how I learned about the clitoris from Erica Jong. 

Fear of Flying was written in 1973. The book is older than I am. It’s about the search for yourself, about owning your sexuality and learning to be in control of your own life. It’s not a book that most fourteen year olds would grasp the point of. I certainly didn’t. But I did get a very in-depth education about sex. Body parts. The things people can do with others. I wouldn’t realize it for many years, but it was through this book that I began to discover the power that owning your own sexuality can have. 

But that was a book that I definitely didn’t share with anyone else. `

As Our Kids Grow Up, Sex Ed Comes Full-Circle

I am thinking about these moments more and more now that I have children of my own. Especially now that they’re getting older. I can remember a moment, years ago, sitting with my oldest, as they told me about their day, where I can remember thinking that when I was their age I had real, vivid memories of my own life.

And I think about the things I was doing at the ages they’re at now. Often when I do that, I find myself wishing and hoping that they make better choices than I did–that they’re more secure in their own identities and feel less compelled to please other people. 

When I used to Teach Sex Ed Classes

And I think about the kids I worked with. The peer educators. The kids I had in my HIV prevention workshops, where we talked about sex and drugs and decision making.

I probably won’t ever forget the day a sixth grader came to me and asked me for an HIV test, because she was afraid “you could get sick from sucking on a boy’s thing.” She was right. You can get sick (and not just with HIV) from “sucking on a boy’s thing.” 

But there was also lots of misinformation and mythology to contend with. In a world where (assumed) sexual experience is an indicator of status, where social pressure and media combine to encourage sexual activity, making sure that kids are empowered to make the right choices for them (even if that means saying “no”) is difficult. 

And let’s not forget that this sixth grader’s sex ed was probably the “good parts” of books and the misinformed opinions of classmates. Oh, and Google.

Books were my Sex Ed. For my Kids, it’s Google.

I can look back at my own growing up experiences and think about how books influenced me. What they taught me about shame and sex and censorship. About what to keep to myself and what to share. And then I look at the kids I’ve worked with over the years and at my own kids and their friends, at the world they’re growing up in. And it’s a different world. I see that all the time with my own kids. 

When I was a kid, we went to the library for answers. To the encyclopedia. Our first experiences with pictures of naked people were National Geographic magazines of topless women from places that, at the time, seemed impossibly far away. 

It’s different now. And we all need to learn how to navigate that. Kids and the adults around them. As adults, we don’t necessarily know what we’re doing, or have all the answers. But that isn’t the first time this has happened. There were generations of adults who had to learn how to parent their kids through the challenges newly presented by the invention of the telephone. And the television. And now it’s cell phones, the internet and the ever changing social media landscape. 

Adults are Only Comfortable when we are in Control

When we’re children, we expect that we don’t know things. Even when we’re embarrassed to admit to other kids that we don’t know everything, in our hearts we really do know that there are things we don’t know. But as adults, there’s a different feeling about admitting, even to ourselves, that we don’t know something. Or that we’re scared or uncertain. Fear of humiliation or embarrassment is a strong deterrent. As is fear of being seen as weak.

We have to learn to sit with that fear. To acknowledge what our fear is telling us. To untangle what’s really at the heart of it. As I’ve grown more disabled, and dealt with the ongoing COVID pandemic, one of the things I’ve had to work to embrace is radical acceptance. It’s okay to not be okay. When I give myself permission to not be okay, I release a lot of the extra stress. And when I release that stress, instead of trying to manage it, I clear up all that mental and emotional space to focus on solutions. On what I need to do to move towards being okay.

And that’s what we need to do here. Acknowledge that we’re uncertain about how to navigate messages about sex with our kids. That their experience learning about it and how to navigate the social pressure around it is very different from ours. We certainly share the experience of whispering about it with our friends, but while my Gen X peers and I had encyclopedias and National Geographic magazines, and many Xennials and Millennials had some access to the internet, what kids have now is much more complicated. 

Sex Ed is Easier Now than Ever. And Harder Now than Ever.

I’m grateful in so many ways that my kids and their friends have access to information that would have been nearly impossible for me to find if I’d gone looking for it. Things that might have helped me avoid some of the shame and fear (often related to being a queer kid) that I experienced growing up. Things that might have meant I didn’t make choices to prove that I wasn’t queer. Or ensure I wasn’t perceived as queer. Things that might have meant I spent less energy on seeking the approval of other people, and more time loving myself. (Thank whatever mysterious force gave me my summers at camp where I discovered there was a world in which I didn’t have to seek that kind of toxic approval.) 

Sometimes I’m nostalgic for the way we shared books as kids. I still share books with friends–trading paperbacks, swapping recommendations, joining discussion groups. And the books still have good parts. But there’s an element of danger that’s gone. The idea that things are off limits or should be kept secret isn’t there in the same way. Keeping spoilers from each other doesn’t have the same level of excitement or dread as discovering a juicy sex scene that’s like nothing you’ve read before and the tornado of feelings about whether to keep it to yourself or tell someone about it so you can talk about it together.

Sex Ed isn’t Easy. But it Helps to Keep an Open Mind.

I’ve learned so much not just from reading books, but from talking about books with other book lovers. Not every lesson we learn is easy. There are many times I’ve broken down in frustration over trying to learn something new, whether it was multiplication tables, a difficult piece of music, or even a complicated knitting technique. My oldest used to say, “I can’t know that,” when they were frustrated over something they hadn’t quite gotten the hang of yet. But there’s a very powerful word there: “Yet.”

I’ve told my kids “Yet is one of the most powerful words you know.” And when they wondered why, I said: “Because when you add it to something like ‘I don’t know,’ you open up the possibility for learning all kinds of new things.” As adults, we have a lot to learn about guiding the kids around us through a world that’s different from ours. The only way I can start to do that is to acknowledge that sometimes I don’t have the answers yet. But I can look to books and to the internet to help me find them.