I've been thinking about this subject for awhile, and trying to ignore it, and thinking about it again. The Stubenville rape case has been on my mind, and, sadly, it isn't the first or last of its kind. This radio piece by 16-year-old Temitayo Fagbenle on social media and sexual shaming is a really thoughtful look and youth and sexual culture today.
Our current information overload has me often thinking about what we will teach LB about the pleasures and dangers of sex. The violent rapist/predator is something many of us fear, for our own children, people we love, and all other people. There are some bad people in the world, and all the good advice in the world can't protect from them, so I would say only "do everything you can to stay alive."
For the violence that occurs in the everyday world of house parties and dorms, there are the lessons my mom taught me: get your own drink, don't drink the punch. There are the rules I tell my students: stick with your friends, watch out for each other, if you're in trouble ask a specific person to help you in a specific way.
All those lessons, and more, are necessary, but how do we offer our children whatever little protective rules we have, while rejecting the powerful cultural lessons that sex is shameful, degrading, embarrassing, gross, or sinful?
I was raised in a reasonably sex positive family. While hardly libertines, my parents made it clear that they felt the strict rules of chastity with which they had been raised were silly, perhaps even harmful. They sent me to sex ed classes at the Unitarian Church, which at that time used a very straightforward program called "About Your Sexuality" (they now have a curriculum called Our Whole Lives). From what I remember, the classes focused on becoming comfortable discussing sex and asking questions. They also spent a lot of time making sure that we knew what both official and slang sex terms meant. If I didn't have much practical knowledge of sex, I had more theoretical knowledge than any of my peers. This is a nice piece from the NYTimes on what sex-positive education looks like today, and it sounds pretty similar to the olden times of my youth.
The key points that I learned, and that I would want to pass on are the importance of consent, and the importance of (emotional and physical) pleasure. For kids raised in a sex-positive environment, I think it's very important to teach not only that consent means not doing anything you don't want to do, but also that consent means not doing anything that your partner doesn't want to do. Our kids should know that if a partner has feelings (even suddenly new feelings) of fear, or guilt, or shame, or just not being into it, they need to stop. For youth, gauging whether a partner really wants to be sexual can require a lot of thoughtfulness, maturity, and self-control. For those reasons, it can be easier on teens if they delay sex, not because teen sex is morally wrong, but because sexual relationships come with many physical and emotional responsibilities. Similarly, I would say that if it doesn't feel good physically or emotionally, don't do it.
The internet and social media add another layer of issues. Kids who don't have moral shame about sex, can still be shamed by their peers who circulate naked pictures of them or talk about them using derogatory sexual language. Those realities create a lot of challenges for parents who want to raise sex-positive kids. I don't live my life defined by haters, and I wouldn't want to teach my child to do so. However, I also wouldn't want to teach her to be naive about the culture in which we live, one that often has harsh and violent responses to sexuality and to (particularly) women's bodies.
Perhaps being a sex-positive person in the US is just another form of sexual minority, and like being gay, I would say: some people hate us, but we don't define ourselves by their hate.
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