sex ed (part two)

I did not have an exact plan for this mini-series, so I don’t know at this point if we’re going to have a part three, etc. In the meantime, here’s part two, after this photo I took walking from the Met to the Upper West Side on Monday.

What the adults do/did not tell us is more significant that what they do/did. STIs are important to know about. So are condoms. So is consent, although I don’t remember that being taught to me as a teenager, it was something I learned about in college.

The things that were never talked about - pleasure (that we deserve it), masturbation, any kind of sex that’s not procreative - are assigned a certain weight to them that morphs into shame and taboo when they’re relegated to darkness, or maybe worse, when they’re talked about in the open in ways that are derogatory at best.

Abortion is one of those things. Our parents may consider themselves pro-choice, they may vote accordingly, they donate to Planned Parenthood. But how do they talk about women? How do they talk about bodies? What do they say about female celebrities and their relationships, their break-ups, the rumors that orbit them? Do they blame women for male behavior, do they slut shame? Have we been taught to recognize that language, and have we been given the tools and the skills to push back against it?

Abortion stigma teaches us that people who can get pregnant don’t know what we really want, because if we did, we wouldn’t want to become un-pregnant. We would feel that being pregnant and giving birth is the most important thing a woman can do, motherhood is our entire purpose. Trusting our instincts is an act of revolution, in every context, and particularly when it comes to our bodies and our decisions about them. That ability doesn’t come from air around us, in fact, it’s the opposite. The adults in our lives, the people responsible for showing us how to make our way in the world when we’re small and new, have everything to do with how we learn it.

Action item: Consider what you learned as a kid about topics that could be labeled taboo - what were they? What did you imbibe about them from the adults around you? How did you develop your own opinions?

Next time: TBD.