sex ed (part one)

I got back from California two weeks ago, and as usual, I managed to forget how weird the process of returning to normal life is, how relentless and gorgeous and chaotic residency is, and how it forms such a strange bubble that is really like nothing else.

While I was gone, the fourth anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which leveled Roe v. Wade and handed the states control of abortion access, came and went. We can still get abortion pills via the mail, for now.

For the next couple of weeks, we’ll be taking a look at what a lot of us have learned about sex and bodies, and how that leads us to hold stigma about abortion.

(Re: the photo - Every residency I find piece of visual art that obsesses me, and I have to pay a visit to it at least three times before the artist takes it down. It’s almost always work by Barbara Clark, like this one, “The Room that Couldn’t Contain Them.”)

I do not remember what we learned about sex during high school health class, which was taught as part of gym class. What I do remember about it is being uncomfortable (probably why I didn’t retain any information), and also glad we were at least inside and not being forced to play Ultimate frisbee, which we had been told we had to master before college, lest we have absolutely no friends.

It seemed to me then, and it still makes sense now, that there were multiple tiers of learning about sex. There were the scare tactics we imbibed from adults (fine, I do have a vague memory of learning about STIs in that high school health class), and the actual, practical information we got elsewhere, from friends who were more motivated and/or more experienced, and also, in my case, from a copy of Forever, by Judy Blume (published in 1975), which I found in our basement. In an interview, Blume said her daughter asked her to write a book about teen sex in which no one dies or is punished. Before giants like Blume and Norma Klein, literature, and media in general, about sexually active young women was truly bleak.

The book is stacked with important information that I desperately needed. Katherine, Forever’s protagonist, visits Planned Parenthood at the behest of her grandmother, who is a huge fan, for birth control and other information about safer sex. She has a friend who gets pregnant, gives birth, places the baby up for adoption, and gets an IUD because she “has no intention” of giving up sex. Katherine and her boyfriend have sex, and it’s bad, and then they have sex and it’s fun. They talk to each other about it. And spoiler: no one dies or has their dreams deflated or is perpetually shamed.

Books were the primary way I learned about the world, particularly things I couldn’t talk about with other humans. Forever answered my questions and supplied me with new ones. It fortified my instincts that people should be able to access birth control and abortion and not be forced to deal with the “consequences” of sex. You could have sex in high school and still go to college, you could break up with your first boyfriend and have sex with other people because you aren’t chained to the idea that sex ruins you. You can have a baby and place it up for adoption and continue on with your life. Judy Blume believes we deserve that, and we should, too.

Action item: How did you learn about sex? Were there any books that were formative in your sex education? If the answer is yes, consider posting about them on social media, including what they taught you.

Next time: More sex ed.