Hi horny readers! Thank you so, so much for reading ADULT SEX ED, a newsletter about the stories behind our sexual beliefs—where they came from, who invented them, and why they stuck.
I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a filmmaker, writer, and performer. A while back, I started to ask myself a question: why do we think what we think about sex? Expect investigative articles, weird sex history, and sharp humor, delivered to your inbox every week. Ready to plug the holes in your education? Okay, let’s go!
In the past several weeks, two countries revealed new, but very different plans for sex education.
In the UK, new guidance for the Relationships, Sex and Health (RSHE) program will help teachers tackle the “growing influence of the manosphere and incel culture.” How will the new guidance do that? By explicitly warning students that strangling or suffocating a partner during sex constitutes an imprisonable offense. These government-backed materials are intended for 14- and 15-year-olds, and the fact that they need to exist is appalling. Still, they’re confronting the issue head-on.
Across the pond in the United States, there’s been a very different sex ed update. The Department of Health and Human Services is canceling millions of dollars in teen pregnancy prevention grants and redirecting that funding into programs that align with the president’s priorities. What must sex ed programs for teens focus on to tap into these new federal funding streams? Read the requirements here if you wish, but I’ll lay out some of details below.
For girls, there’s no mention of birth control. Instead, they’ll learn about “the advantages and disadvantages of ovarian suppression.” In other words, medical misinformation about how dangerous the birth control pill is. Teenage girls will also participate in very special counseling sessions: “In addition to biological education, programs supported under this initiative are expected to incorporate reproductive goals counseling that helps adolescents reflect on their goals related to relationships, childbearing, career, and future family formation.”
I had sex education at 15 years old and was in no way ready to discuss my childbearing goals.
If the sex ed goals for girls sound like a Handmaid’s Tale fever dream that somehow includes zero pregnancy prevention, don’t worry—the boys may actually have it worse. “Programs should also address how repeated or artificially stimulated arousal may affect neural development and behavior over time.” Your grandmother may have told you that masturbation would make you go blind, but telling teenage boys it might permanently fuck up their brains is a bit more intense.
For what it’s worth, this is what ChatGPT thinks RFK Jr. would be like as a high school sex ed teacher:
None of this is exactly surprising. RFK Jr. is notably obsessed with men’s testosterone levels and sperm counts, claiming on more than one occasion that today’s teenage boys have half the sperm count of a 65-year-old man (there’s no evidence to support this). Far-right commentators have been pushing the “NoFap” movement for years, promising to help people overcome addictions to porn and masturbation.
There’s an actual NoFap website that promises to help you “get a new grip on life,” which is hilarious but, unfortunately, not a parody. On the homepage, one user writes, “Amazing that a forum like this exists as a support group for people without even having to leave their homes.” I assume that if you’re struggling to stop jerking off to porn, having to leave your home would actually be a plus.
If you want to lose every boner you might ever have, you can watch a conversation between Andrew Tate and Tucker Carlson about the NoFap movement (I won’t link to it). In that interview, Tate defines the goal of abstaining from masturbation as the pursuit of “male excellence.”
In many ways, this is actually a return to the original roots of American sex education. As I wrote in The Complete History of Sex Ed in the U.S. (abridged), one of the earliest iterations of sex education emerged in the 1830s, when religious leaders like Reverend Sylvester Graham traveled the East Coast on anti-masturbation lecture tours.
Does that sound fun?
Fun fact: Graham also invented the graham cracker, believing that bland food would prevent people from cracking one off. This was a surprisingly popular theory at the time, shared by the equally problematic health guru John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of Corn Flakes. May we all finish into a bowl of bland cereal in their honor.
All of this goes waaaay back. Early Jewish and Christian theologians linked masturbation to the end of the human race. Onan, the second son of Judah, makes a brief but memorable appearance in the Old Testament. God commands Onan to have sex with his dead brother’s wife, but he’s not into it. He pulls out and ejaculates on the ground, so God strikes him dead.
Onanism didn’t just apply to men, of course. At various points throughout history, people believed that women also produced a reproductive “seed” that was ejaculated during sex. Before doctors decided that jilling off was the cure for hysteria, many believed female masturbation might bring about the end of civilization itself.
Fortunately, most medical professionals agree that masturbation is a completely normal part of life that won’t fuck up your brain development. Whether you’re a lady who likes to flick the bean, glaze the donut, or buff the muffin, or a gentleman who likes to whack off, beat your meat, or receive a visit from Pamela Handerson, you’ll be just fine.
Hopefully the kids in these new federally funded sex ed programs will be, too.
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