In a recent piece in Scarleteen Heather Corinna picks up on approaches to advice giving that will be familiar to many of us. Things like adding negative qualifiers, talking down to young people, moralising, or being ambiguous. They are all key no-nos in sex education, yet as you read through Heather’s account it’s obvious how very often we inadvertantly (and perhaps sometimes quite deliberately) couch our sex education messages in such a way that we undermine our practice.
You can read the whole piece here – it’s great for anyone working in sex education or sexual health, or if you are a parent or carer. You may find sharing this piece and discussing with colleagues may help challenge some of the bad habits that may be sneaking into our sex education practice.
After reflecting on Heather’s piece, agreeing with it, and worrying how many of the problems she highlights I’ve been guilty of, I thought of some additional bugbears. These are issues I’ve most commonly seen in media advice giving, but also observed in school-based sex education and sexual health care.
In no particular order my bugbears of prescriptive sex advice giving are….
“You should abstain, and if you can’t abstain be faithful and if you can’t be faithful then use a condom”
The ‘ABC’ approach to sex is one that was very popular for a long while in sexual health campaigns, particularly in developing countries. Some charities, NGOs, teachers and healthcare professionals still view it as cutting edge advice and promote it actively. My problem with it is partly the order it goes in which puts not having sex as better than having sex, and grudgingly goes from a ‘well you shouldn’t be doing it’ through to a ‘if you must then I suppose you should use a condom’. A message you’d think is aimed at children but is often applied to adults as well. On a practical level this advice also only works if you’re with a partner who respects your decision to abstain or be faithful – who doesn’t coerce you into sex or has sex with other people. As with Heather’s piece (linked above) there’s the additional problem of how long you should abstain for. Use a condom is fine so long as you both agree to do this, can access free or low cost condoms and know how to use them. Bizarrely the ABC message requires high levels of communication, respect, equality and trust. And yet it’s often promoted to people who are relatively powerless – women in gender unequal societies or young people.
Here’s what to do, not how to do it
Commonly found in problem pages this often also underpins a lot of sex advice given to young people by adults. You’ll list what someone should do – ‘talk to your partner’, ‘share a fantasy’, ‘spice up your sex life’, ‘use condoms’ – but give no information about how to do this. The ‘what to do’ approach lists activities but doesn’t explain why they may be helpful/important and gives no life skills about how you might put them into action. Sometimes this is explained as a function of media advice giving where you may be limited by time or word count, but often it is bad practice linked to a lack of skills on the part of the advice giver, or the general discomfort of the advice giver to go into detail. After all anyone can say ‘use a condom’ but it’s much more complex to talk in depth about how to talk about condoms, putting one on, where you get them from, and how to use them to enhance sex.
Expecting teenagers to put into action things we know adults struggle to achieve
While I agree getting people to think about how ready they are for sex is important, as is developing confidence and a sense of empowerment in relation to sex, I do feel the advice we give – even in our discussions of ‘sex readiness’ – expects a lot. Knowing where to get contraception, feeling able to ask for condoms to be used, enjoying masturbation, being able to say yes to what you want and no to what you don’t – all of these are great ideas. We encourage young people to see these and other instructions as things they need to be able to do before embarking on sex. Yet we frequently forget many of these activities are things that we, as adults, find difficult or perhaps don’t view as particularly important. Encouraging young people to think of the things they need to do to help them enjoy sex now or in the future as a discussion is undoubtedly more effective than a list of ‘shoulds’, and rather than just getting young people to think about whether they’re ready we might also encourage adults to do the same. Particularly adults that teach sex education or deliver sexual health services to adults or young people.
Here’s what I like, you’ll like this too (Aka ‘our sexual experiences are all the same’)
How often have you picked up a magazine that’s got a sex tip in it by someone who tells you what sex position, sex toy or erotic dvd is ‘best’ for giving you ‘mindblowing orgasms’ or similar. Pretty often such advice, although well meaning, is from someone who is telling you what they like – although it’s reported as what’s right/normal for all of us. This is partly due to some sex advisors only having their own sexual experiences to draw upon, and partly due to journalists (and some ‘sexperts’) simply not being aware of the wider research on sex that tells us about the diverse experiences of thousands of people worldwide. The unfortunate result is a lot of samey, heteronormative and often completely inactionable advice that makes you feel bad if it doesn’t work for you.
One size fits all
The evil twin of ‘here’s what I like’, the ‘one size fits all’ approach to sex education takes no account of diversity. Messages are delivered to us as though we’re all white, straight, middle class, educated, able bodied, young, affluent, confident and motivated to enjoy safe and positive relationships. If you look at a lot of sex/health advice giving in media and education you’ll notice there is nowhere near enough information that truly addresses inequalities relating to gender, health, education, income, sexuality or culture. Often such topics are interpreted by sex educators as ‘difficult’ or ‘radical’ so are avoided. If such topics are touched upon they’ll be either a small addition to an otherwise mainstream approach, or be constructed as problematic and depressing.
Evidence is boring As mentioned, some sex educators work from a perspective of what works for them. That might be in terms of what gives them pleasure, or what messages they feel are appropriate to share based on their religious or political views. While there’s no problem in knowing what you like and embedding pleasure in your educational messages, nor basing your research/teaching around your own experiences or beliefs, there is a problem is this is all you do. If you’re not aware or not able to look at the evidence behind what you’re teaching you may well miss what’s new in the area, ideas that reflect difference and diversity (see above), or a wider world view than your current focus. Consulting evidence not only broadens what we teach, it helps us reflect on what we talk about and ensure we’re not just speaking from the ‘university of life’.
Learn to like it/make yourself do it
Recently I read a well known sexpert telling a female reader that they needed to make themselves have sex with a partner because, having entered into a marriage with them, the deal was to provide sex. Even if you didn’t feel like doing it. That’s a fairly extreme example but there’s still often a trend in self help sex books and sex features in the media that implies if you’re not keen on something you must make yourself learn to like it. Whether it’s swallowing semen, deep throating a partner, have a threesome, or have sex when you just don’t feel like it the overall theme is that you should at least try. The underlying message is ‘if you don’t do this your partner may leave you’. Alternatively the advice implies that if you’re not trying something then you’re a prude or obstructive or that if you don’t ‘use it you’ll lose it’. Of course it’s difficult to know whether someone isn’t keen for good reason and might actually like something if they gave it a go with a partner they trusted, or whether it’s someone who’s already feeling coerced that you as an educator continue to pressure. Before we tell people they should make themselves do something it may be better to focus on what it is they’re contemplating, why they object to it (or feel compelled to do it), and what is the most comfortable decision for them to make.
Sex = health and health = sex If you listen to many sexperts and some sex educators you’d think that we can only talk about sex in medical terms. Instead of frank talks about desire and sexual activity we hide our coyness in the language of hormones, biology and blood flow. And in the case of hormones in particular often overplay their importance without truly understanding how they work. Anything too difficult for us to explain within the media or our sex ed classes we refer on to family medicine/general practice (even though we know such services are not best placed to deal with general sex issues), or we pass on to counselling (which might be good but may often not be appropriate). We don’t focus nearly enough on finding ways people can empower themselves or find answers to their questions or solutions to their problems. We spread all sorts of misinformation about how particular foods like pumpkin seeds or goji berries can transform our sex lifes, or suggest sex is a way to reduce wrinkles or burn calories. Undoubtedly your diet can impact on your health (as can many other factors like poverty, education and genetics) and health can impact on your sex life. But making sex into purely a health related topic often means we focus on it in limited and negative ways/ Perhaps unsurprisingly many sex educators (particularly teachers in schools) opt to frame sex in the language of health and biology as a means of avoiding topics they find difficult like desire, sexual activity, confidence and negotiation.
Boundaries, what boundaries? Talking about sex is undoubtedly important, and clearly something people want to know about. But it worries me that some sex educators (in the media and particularly in school based settings) take little or no account of boundaries. This can be related to the ‘one size fits all’ approach mentioned above, or could be as simple as not changing lesson plans to different age groups, or realising that one person’s desires, values and experiences will be very different to another person – regardless of age or experience. The key here is to identify what people want to know, not assume what they should know, and be respectful of their boundaries. Something that offers a challenge to those of us who want to promote pleasure yet requires reflection to ensure we don’t give advice that offends or excludes.
Sex is something you achieve, not experience You’ve seen the headlines on the glossy magazines about ‘best ever orgasms’ or ‘ultimate orgasms’ or ‘great sex tonight’ or ‘blow his/her mind’. Much of our current media sex coverage presents sex as something you achieve, practice and perform. And there’s a whole industry of sex products (toys, lingerie, erotica and ‘sexpertise’) to accompany this. While there’s nothing wrong with wanting to experience pleasure, the aspirational approach to sex doesn’t advocate adventure, exploration or experimentation. Instead it makes sex into something that must be worked upon in a set format with ‘proper’ sex involving intercourse and only finishing with the guy’s orgasm (in the case of heterosexual sex – presented as the norm in most media/self help guides). Perhaps unsurprisingly this approach filters into wider sex education with teachers anxious to know how to address it, panicked over what they see as our ‘sexualised’ culture, and often presenting sex as intercourse ending in orgasm. Our challenge is to check how often we present sex in such a formulaic manner and find other ways to talk about it.
Back to Heather Corinna who concludes in her piece “Of course, my favorite approach is avoiding generalized statements like this at all and instead having conversations where I can simply first ASK (or be told) if someone does or does not want to have sex right now, then give more information, and ask more questions, then tailoring what I am saying to what they state their needs and wants to be: if we start there, and work from their answer, it’s pretty easy to sidestep all of the problems with these kinds of phrasings. I think it also makes it easier for us to focus as much on what we should be doing as we’re focusing on what teens should.”
I agree and add to this the same applies when working with adults.
For all of us who work in sexual health and education it is often easy to slip into bad habits, particularly when people are asking you to tell them what to do about sex/relationships. Although reflecting on the messages we share is time consuming and can often feel threatening and annoying, such activities are essential to making the advice we share useful, applicable and accessible to all.
Why ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’ doesn’t work in sex education (whatever age you are)
In a recent piece in Scarleteen Heather Corinna picks up on approaches to advice giving that will be familiar to many of us. Things like adding negative qualifiers, talking down to young people, moralising, or being ambiguous. They are all key no-nos in sex education, yet as you read through Heather’s account it’s obvious how very often we inadvertantly (and perhaps sometimes quite deliberately) couch our sex education messages in such a way that we undermine our practice.
You can read the whole piece here – it’s great for anyone working in sex education or sexual health, or if you are a parent or carer. You may find sharing this piece and discussing with colleagues may help challenge some of the bad habits that may be sneaking into our sex education practice.
After reflecting on Heather’s piece, agreeing with it, and worrying how many of the problems she highlights I’ve been guilty of, I thought of some additional bugbears. These are issues I’ve most commonly seen in media advice giving, but also observed in school-based sex education and sexual health care.
In no particular order my bugbears of prescriptive sex advice giving are….
“You should abstain, and if you can’t abstain be faithful and if you can’t be faithful then use a condom”
The ‘ABC’ approach to sex is one that was very popular for a long while in sexual health campaigns, particularly in developing countries. Some charities, NGOs, teachers and healthcare professionals still view it as cutting edge advice and promote it actively. My problem with it is partly the order it goes in which puts not having sex as better than having sex, and grudgingly goes from a ‘well you shouldn’t be doing it’ through to a ‘if you must then I suppose you should use a condom’. A message you’d think is aimed at children but is often applied to adults as well. On a practical level this advice also only works if you’re with a partner who respects your decision to abstain or be faithful – who doesn’t coerce you into sex or has sex with other people. As with Heather’s piece (linked above) there’s the additional problem of how long you should abstain for. Use a condom is fine so long as you both agree to do this, can access free or low cost condoms and know how to use them. Bizarrely the ABC message requires high levels of communication, respect, equality and trust. And yet it’s often promoted to people who are relatively powerless – women in gender unequal societies or young people.
Here’s what to do, not how to do it
Commonly found in problem pages this often also underpins a lot of sex advice given to young people by adults. You’ll list what someone should do – ‘talk to your partner’, ‘share a fantasy’, ‘spice up your sex life’, ‘use condoms’ – but give no information about how to do this. The ‘what to do’ approach lists activities but doesn’t explain why they may be helpful/important and gives no life skills about how you might put them into action. Sometimes this is explained as a function of media advice giving where you may be limited by time or word count, but often it is bad practice linked to a lack of skills on the part of the advice giver, or the general discomfort of the advice giver to go into detail. After all anyone can say ‘use a condom’ but it’s much more complex to talk in depth about how to talk about condoms, putting one on, where you get them from, and how to use them to enhance sex.
Expecting teenagers to put into action things we know adults struggle to achieve
While I agree getting people to think about how ready they are for sex is important, as is developing confidence and a sense of empowerment in relation to sex, I do feel the advice we give – even in our discussions of ‘sex readiness’ – expects a lot. Knowing where to get contraception, feeling able to ask for condoms to be used, enjoying masturbation, being able to say yes to what you want and no to what you don’t – all of these are great ideas. We encourage young people to see these and other instructions as things they need to be able to do before embarking on sex. Yet we frequently forget many of these activities are things that we, as adults, find difficult or perhaps don’t view as particularly important. Encouraging young people to think of the things they need to do to help them enjoy sex now or in the future as a discussion is undoubtedly more effective than a list of ‘shoulds’, and rather than just getting young people to think about whether they’re ready we might also encourage adults to do the same. Particularly adults that teach sex education or deliver sexual health services to adults or young people.
Here’s what I like, you’ll like this too (Aka ‘our sexual experiences are all the same’)
How often have you picked up a magazine that’s got a sex tip in it by someone who tells you what sex position, sex toy or erotic dvd is ‘best’ for giving you ‘mindblowing orgasms’ or similar. Pretty often such advice, although well meaning, is from someone who is telling you what they like – although it’s reported as what’s right/normal for all of us. This is partly due to some sex advisors only having their own sexual experiences to draw upon, and partly due to journalists (and some ‘sexperts’) simply not being aware of the wider research on sex that tells us about the diverse experiences of thousands of people worldwide. The unfortunate result is a lot of samey, heteronormative and often completely inactionable advice that makes you feel bad if it doesn’t work for you.
One size fits all
The evil twin of ‘here’s what I like’, the ‘one size fits all’ approach to sex education takes no account of diversity. Messages are delivered to us as though we’re all white, straight, middle class, educated, able bodied, young, affluent, confident and motivated to enjoy safe and positive relationships. If you look at a lot of sex/health advice giving in media and education you’ll notice there is nowhere near enough information that truly addresses inequalities relating to gender, health, education, income, sexuality or culture. Often such topics are interpreted by sex educators as ‘difficult’ or ‘radical’ so are avoided. If such topics are touched upon they’ll be either a small addition to an otherwise mainstream approach, or be constructed as problematic and depressing.
Evidence is boring
As mentioned, some sex educators work from a perspective of what works for them. That might be in terms of what gives them pleasure, or what messages they feel are appropriate to share based on their religious or political views. While there’s no problem in knowing what you like and embedding pleasure in your educational messages, nor basing your research/teaching around your own experiences or beliefs, there is a problem is this is all you do. If you’re not aware or not able to look at the evidence behind what you’re teaching you may well miss what’s new in the area, ideas that reflect difference and diversity (see above), or a wider world view than your current focus. Consulting evidence not only broadens what we teach, it helps us reflect on what we talk about and ensure we’re not just speaking from the ‘university of life’.
Learn to like it/make yourself do it
Recently I read a well known sexpert telling a female reader that they needed to make themselves have sex with a partner because, having entered into a marriage with them, the deal was to provide sex. Even if you didn’t feel like doing it. That’s a fairly extreme example but there’s still often a trend in self help sex books and sex features in the media that implies if you’re not keen on something you must make yourself learn to like it. Whether it’s swallowing semen, deep throating a partner, have a threesome, or have sex when you just don’t feel like it the overall theme is that you should at least try. The underlying message is ‘if you don’t do this your partner may leave you’. Alternatively the advice implies that if you’re not trying something then you’re a prude or obstructive or that if you don’t ‘use it you’ll lose it’. Of course it’s difficult to know whether someone isn’t keen for good reason and might actually like something if they gave it a go with a partner they trusted, or whether it’s someone who’s already feeling coerced that you as an educator continue to pressure. Before we tell people they should make themselves do something it may be better to focus on what it is they’re contemplating, why they object to it (or feel compelled to do it), and what is the most comfortable decision for them to make.
Sex = health and health = sex
If you listen to many sexperts and some sex educators you’d think that we can only talk about sex in medical terms. Instead of frank talks about desire and sexual activity we hide our coyness in the language of hormones, biology and blood flow. And in the case of hormones in particular often overplay their importance without truly understanding how they work. Anything too difficult for us to explain within the media or our sex ed classes we refer on to family medicine/general practice (even though we know such services are not best placed to deal with general sex issues), or we pass on to counselling (which might be good but may often not be appropriate). We don’t focus nearly enough on finding ways people can empower themselves or find answers to their questions or solutions to their problems. We spread all sorts of misinformation about how particular foods like pumpkin seeds or goji berries can transform our sex lifes, or suggest sex is a way to reduce wrinkles or burn calories. Undoubtedly your diet can impact on your health (as can many other factors like poverty, education and genetics) and health can impact on your sex life. But making sex into purely a health related topic often means we focus on it in limited and negative ways/ Perhaps unsurprisingly many sex educators (particularly teachers in schools) opt to frame sex in the language of health and biology as a means of avoiding topics they find difficult like desire, sexual activity, confidence and negotiation.
Boundaries, what boundaries?
Talking about sex is undoubtedly important, and clearly something people want to know about. But it worries me that some sex educators (in the media and particularly in school based settings) take little or no account of boundaries. This can be related to the ‘one size fits all’ approach mentioned above, or could be as simple as not changing lesson plans to different age groups, or realising that one person’s desires, values and experiences will be very different to another person – regardless of age or experience. The key here is to identify what people want to know, not assume what they should know, and be respectful of their boundaries. Something that offers a challenge to those of us who want to promote pleasure yet requires reflection to ensure we don’t give advice that offends or excludes.
Sex is something you achieve, not experience
You’ve seen the headlines on the glossy magazines about ‘best ever orgasms’ or ‘ultimate orgasms’ or ‘great sex tonight’ or ‘blow his/her mind’. Much of our current media sex coverage presents sex as something you achieve, practice and perform. And there’s a whole industry of sex products (toys, lingerie, erotica and ‘sexpertise’) to accompany this. While there’s nothing wrong with wanting to experience pleasure, the aspirational approach to sex doesn’t advocate adventure, exploration or experimentation. Instead it makes sex into something that must be worked upon in a set format with ‘proper’ sex involving intercourse and only finishing with the guy’s orgasm (in the case of heterosexual sex – presented as the norm in most media/self help guides). Perhaps unsurprisingly this approach filters into wider sex education with teachers anxious to know how to address it, panicked over what they see as our ‘sexualised’ culture, and often presenting sex as intercourse ending in orgasm. Our challenge is to check how often we present sex in such a formulaic manner and find other ways to talk about it.
Back to Heather Corinna who concludes in her piece
“Of course, my favorite approach is avoiding generalized statements like this at all and instead having conversations where I can simply first ASK (or be told) if someone does or does not want to have sex right now, then give more information, and ask more questions, then tailoring what I am saying to what they state their needs and wants to be: if we start there, and work from their answer, it’s pretty easy to sidestep all of the problems with these kinds of phrasings. I think it also makes it easier for us to focus as much on what we should be doing as we’re focusing on what teens should.”
I agree and add to this the same applies when working with adults.
For all of us who work in sexual health and education it is often easy to slip into bad habits, particularly when people are asking you to tell them what to do about sex/relationships. Although reflecting on the messages we share is time consuming and can often feel threatening and annoying, such activities are essential to making the advice we share useful, applicable and accessible to all.
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