Sex Education class may be something your remember vividly from your school days – but maybe for all the wrong reasons?! We talk to podcaster Melody Thomas from The Good Sex Project about what’s still lacking in the curriculum.
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If you remember anything from your sex education classes, chances are, you can recall them being pretty awkward and… maybe a little terrifying? Lots of us were pretty much told that if you had sex once, chances are you would get an STI and die. Or, you’d get pregnant and then your life would be pretty much over anyway.
Thankfully, the curriculum has come a long way and there is a lot more informative and helpful information that is shared. But, a lot of people think it still doesn’t go far enough – and one of those people is Melody Thomas, the host of The Good Sex Project podcast, which returned for a second season this month (If you haven’t listened to the first season, give it a go too – it won Gold at the New York Radio Awards this year).
Melody says there’s one thing that the school curriculum currently doesn’t cover, but it really ought to:
Pleasure.
This season of The Good Sex Project starts off with episodes really delving into pleasure, and why it’s actually so essential for healthy humans to experience regularly. “As the world grapples with huge challenges, the pursuit of joy and pleasure can feel trivial,” says Melody. “But pleasure improves cognitive function and creativity, and aids human connection. Considering some experts say loneliness can pose deadlier health risks than smoking, pleasure isn’t just desirable for humans – it’s vital.”
But pleasure isn’t something that’s brought up with young people when discussing sex – often it’s just explained as a way to make babies, rather than something that adults also do to feel more connected to one another – and yes, feel pleasure.
“Why that’s important is, I talked to so many young people – but also adults and people who are raised in purity culture where you know, sex ed wasn’t comprehensive and there is, additional extra shame and taboo in there – and people put up with a lot of pain and discomfort in sex when they’re older, and a lot of the time they think that that’s just how sex is supposed to feel,” she says. “So they don’t seek help, they don’t seek solutions, they don’t talk about different ways to do it, because no one ever told them it was supposed to feel nice! And especially, for women, that you know, sex is something that they’re supposed to enjoy too! I think that should be an important message – that people have the expectation that sex is going to be a connecting, positive and rewarding experience so that they don’t settle for anything less.”
Besides pleasure, there’s obviously a few other problematic things about sex ed classes – particularly those of the olden days – or even just the very recent past.
“For a lot of people, consent wasn’t part of their sex education,” says Melody. “For many, there wasn’t any kind of conversation around what healthy relationships look and feel like. I’ve talked to a lot of young people who have been in really toxic relationships early on, or relationships with power dynamics that weren’t quite right with, perhaps with quite older partners. And those kids just had no idea that it wasn’t ideal. They hadn’t been set up to expect anything different.”
From there, Melody also worries about porn and digital safety, gender and sexuality, as well as disability inclusive conversations. “A lot of people from those communities are left out of the conversation entirely,” she says. “They kind of get this memo that sex isn’t for them. There’s really a lot that’s missing!”
Melody says that the new and improved curriculum is pretty good – it’s just made tricky by the fact that it’s up to the individual schools as to what is taught exactly and some teachers will have varying levels of comfort with the material.
“There are people who think the curriculum goes too far because it talks about gender identity and sexuality which some people like to get up in arms about,” she says. “But there are of course a lot of varying opinions, and lots of people who instead think it doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t include pleasure, and I’m in that camp,” says Melody.
“Pleasure is always missing. We’re not talking about really young kids here that it would be good to discuss it with – I’d understand people might not want to talk too much about it with five year olds, of course. But I think as people get older it is important to know that sex is supposed to feel nice and feel good and be a way to connect with people.”