The Future of Sex Ed

Of course I had the second Presidential debate to race home to, completely spastically excited after giving my first lecture at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. It was part of the Wardell B. Pomeroy Lecture series, which, this trimester, focused on training future clinical sexologists on the history and evolution of sex education. I played the unanticipated role of “The Millenial” — really, I’m too old at thirty, but maybe, I’m just right to speak to the generation gap that the students were feeling. Or maybe it’s because I was talking about the Internet that I got branded with the youth label five years far past my demographic prime.

Somehow, I got away with telling a room of sexology students that the business of sexpertise was dead. And I think they trusted me, even, because no one came for my “millenial” head.

There’s right there my slides, and here’s my notes:

You’ve all seen these 50’s hygiene films, right? Like “As Boys Grow“? I love this guy at the end.

That style of sex ed hasn’t died, not really. You just don’t need to wait for a guy with a Super 8 camera to come crash your gym class. Here’s what five people made in Chicago over one weekend: The Midwest Teen Sex Show.

Wow, so — what happened? In sex ed moving online — into blogs, message boards, and video shows — sex ed has the opportunity to be conducted peer-to-peer, not just top-down from professionals. It’s definitely fast, cheap, and out of control — and that’s a good thing. It’s opening new ways to reach a new audience. At the Midwest Teen Sex Show, hundreds of emails come in from the tens of thousands of viewers. Nikol, Guy, and Brittney aren’t trained sex educators in a conventional sense, and yet they have the audience, and their audience needs them.

1994. Here’s how I got my first sex ed online, as a pretty precocious teenager. No one on alt.sex.bondage knew I was sixteen and living in a Catholic suburb of Boston.

Let’s talk about the 90’s, seriously? There was this notion that everyone online was just there posing as some sexual projection, like it was all the same three guys in raincoats with pink panties underneath. That nobody would want to be themselves, or want real information from real people. The Internet was understood as a fantasy playground, totally disconnected from one’s “real” self. This is when it was especially trendy to talk about virtual sex, teledildonics, and a lot of other nonsense that never came to pass or catch on.

Scarleteen was one ray of light in the 1990’s. Here’s what it looked like in 2000, and here’s the message boards today, over ten years after it began. Scarleteen proved that a sex educator could come up from her own community — in Heather Corinna, its’ founder. That a community could build trust, even when anonymous. Heather’s told me that some of those same users are still around today. It’s the model much of online sex ed followed, and rightly so.

2001. America does really get online. Maybe it was 9/11. Internet social scientists love to argue this point out. We still don’t know what it is, but all of a sudden, what were our personal blogs — and here’s my really embarrassing personal blog from 2001 to 2003 on Livejournal — were read by a much larger audience.

We started to see the impact our personal words had. That we didn’t have to segment ourselves to be read: that we could mix up sex, politics, health information, and random intimate day-to-day details, and be meaningful in a very different way to our readers. We gained their trust by seeming real in a very impersonal media landscape. Like this community for sex workers on Livejournal: there’s news, anecdotes, requests for advice, all in the same space.

Our community’s are all the stronger for this. There was no longer the need for a filter. Look at strap-on.org — questions about sex work, health, and relationships all mixed up together, all holding equal weight. I encourage you to spend some time in these spaces. You could learn a lot about what sex workers, or crossdressers, or queer kids, are really talking about — are really saying that they need.

I know this raises the question — if anyone can do this, who are the experts?

Here’s how Sex Etc. and ISIS (Internet Sex Information Services) use MySpace. As organizations, they’ve gone into the places where their community hangs out, and they’ve gone in with their organizational face on. That’s useful, and helpful. It lets them promote their work and wear their “official” hats.

But compare that with the MySpace pages of educator and media maker Audacia Ray and podcaster and superstar Sister Roma. Hanging out on Audacia and Roma’s pages is like getting to hang out with a friend. Following the links they give, watching their videos, flipping through their photos — you can learn so much about sex, with a depth unlike what may be taught in a classroom or workshop, and it has the weight of being communicated by someone you may feel like is already part of your community. Audacia teaches human sexuality at Rutgers, and Roma is a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence — they both have deep connections to sexual health and sex community. There’s a power in learning from people who wear that hat — of being a member of an organization or institution — but venues like MySpace let them be both professionals and approachable people.

Organizing w/o organizations.
educating w/o institutions

This is the boat a lot of sex professionals will find ourselves in: between roles, between clear organizational affiliations, but doing our work as the community allows and requires (and funding makes possible). There’s so much that individuals can accomplish together outside the rubric of a 501c3 or the academy: look at Wikipedia. Here’s what it says right now about sex education. We may not agree with everything in this entry, or may find it false. But the way its been written collaboratively shows where the disagreements about what good sex education are. We can step in and add to that conversation. The fact that it’s still controversial means there’s a huge audience for our work.

Okay, this is my favorite quote about what I’m trying to explain, and it sounds Buddhist or straight out of Marin County, but it’s not, it’s by Clay Shirky:

“We don’t often talk about love when trying to describe the public world, because love seems too squishy and too private. What has happened, though, and what is still happening in our historical moment, is that love has become a lot less squishy and a lot less private…

Now we can do things for strangers who do things for us, at a low enough cost to make that kind of behavior attractive, and those effects can last well beyond our original contribution.

Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material.”

Clay isn’t sex-positive. Well, he might be. I don’t know. But what he does for a living? Explain the Internet, to corporations and to students at New York University. But here, right here, in his quote about Wikipedia? It’s the ethic we’ve been fighting for: to share our knowledge, to recognize one another’s expertise, and to find a sustainable way to do that.

To me, this move, from top-down to peer-to-peer sex ed, and the evolution in general of how information is created and shared online, signals: the end of sexpertise. It never made sense for sex educators and clinicians to aspire to be the Next Dr. Ruth. In truth, the role of “sexpert” is largely one created by marketing, to create a job for sex educators. And in reality, most of those who consume sexperts advice don’t do so out of a reasoned choice: it’s just that the media told them, this is how to learn about sex, from a sexpert. Not that most people even believe there’s anything to learn about sex in the first place. The sexpert is more an entertainer than an educator. A personality. A way to make a living talking about sex in a world that doesn’t really know what to do with a sex educator anyway.

We don’t need that anymore. It doesn’t work anymore.

So, what’s our place in all of this? If there’s no need for “experts,” what do sex educators do, then? Online, anyway, our expertise is absolutely essential when it comes to the future of sex ed. That’s in Curation, Collaboration, and Community. We need to gather and explain what sites most impact us, and why. When we see that this job is too big for one educator alone, we need to be unafraid to collaborate with others to do it. And working together, we build trust and intimacy. We share ownership over this work. We build a commons of sex knowledge.

Two quick examples from my work:

RenegadeCast, a podcast created by and for sex workers in partnership with the St. James Infirmary, an occupational health and safety clinic for sex workers and their partners. Rather than create an online show for sex workers, we trained sex workers to make the show ourselves. We need to tell our own stories.

And I know, doing this — changing our thinking — it can feel awkward at first. This is Boffery. Boffery is a website that allows you to share parts of your sexual life and history with trusted friends and lovers, and to tell stories and share advice together in a protected place online. I didn’t anticipate I’d end up as the co-founder of a start-up, but now — given what still needs to be said about sex — I guess it all makes sense. I want to create a space where a community can recognize each other as the experts, as the one’s who say what matters about sex. We already have the answers. We just need a place to get down to it.