This is important but sadly quite the uphill battle - but I am definitely not suggesting that it shouldn't be done. Supporting healthy sex education involves teaching and learning how the major dominant and controlling forms of the media try and influence our perspective on sex altogether. I think it's a sort of never ending series of lessons through one's life in which people have to protect themselves from potentially damaging influences like the tropes found in movies, ads that fetishize and glorify certain skin tones and body types, etc etc. Which begs the question, why do we live in a society that our academia and our education is trying to teach us personal ways to enlighten ourselves and better ourselves, such as that found through learning healthy sex education, but the larger mechanisms of control in our world are subliminally influencing us to give into and be mandated by them instead? Shouldn't these things be congruent?

I think this just simply highlights the legacy of victorian-era institutional oppression that we are still trying to overcome.

Lately when I think about and observe some of my younger family, as well as my friends that are just now raising kids, I look at how their tolerance, their acceptance, is widely different than my generation in terms of "approval" of the LGBTQIA+ community. I often wonder how American kids just now being raised will be accepting (or maybe not accepting) in the next decade, maybe in the next 20 years too. I also wonder to what extent new mothers and fathers of this generation are really delving into sexism and cis/hetero expectations, because I truthfully fear that they may be paying small lip service to the issues. Cisgender folk, I would argue, require putting more effort to teach their kids about diversity and inclusivity because for them it's something outside of their experience, whereas LGBTQIA+ parents can naturally bring these topics up because it's personal. What will the future generation look like, will they be just slightly more accepting or will things push further in an inclusive way in the next 10 years or so when this generation's kids start to enter their teenage years?

Creating a health-positive norm is extremely effective and ought to be employed universally. I think the various methods of control in our world (the media, the political apparatus, and other agents of social control, even each other, as Foucault argued) would much rather believe that the decision making process for things in general should be left for a few set of people. It's not surprising that in actuality, teens are more likely to be responsible and conscious about making appropriate and safe decisions for themselves once they are given the proper knowledge regarding sex. On a broader sense I think that also applies for other "issues" in our society, too (example: encouraging people to become politically active participants so that they may make a conscious effort to be responsible for deciding who their elected politician are). We have been taught to fear things, and to be kept in the dark about certain things like knowledge about health sex, in order to be controlled by them. If learning about healthy sex (and what it entails) might make us demand more of the people around us, then it's likely to tilt us in a certain direction to demand more of the world around us too.

I think that it is rather interesting that parents feel that discussing the pleasures of sex makes them feel like they are condoning sex. I think that this portrays the deeply entrenched mechanisms that have successfully taught our culture to shy away from, instead of celebrating and confronting sex for what it is and what it can be. What would our society look like if we finally lifted the veil that we have regarding all of these forms of sex related insecurities? Hiding conversations about sex-as-pleasure happens a lot even within couples, too. I think it's hard enough for some couples to talk about sex and satisfaction with each other, they may never even get to a point where they can discuss it with their kids because of their own personal insecurities regarding the topic.

Hey guys. This is a test for us to see how hypothesis highlights & how annotations show up. You can comment, respond, etc in this example that I "annotated" to get a hang of using this chrome extension here if you'd like.