The Communist Otter

glycerineclown:

One of my life goals is to design a sex ed course that actually teaches kids how to have physically and emotionally healthy sexual relationships, how to understand the way men and women relate to sex differently, how gender and sexuality works, how to be aware of their bodies, and how to make the right choices for themselves and their partners. Learning about STD’s and condoms is good too, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the most important thing. 

But we have a fear in this country of talking with kids about sex as if it’s something that actually happens. I’m in college now, and I’m a shut-in partly because I’m introverted but mostly because we live in a rape culture and because one in three college women are sexually assaulted. But if we preach abstinence-only education or close to it, we can’t talk about rape as if that’s something that exists. We’ve been raised in a culture that is saturated with sexual imagery, but we’re not taught how to relate to it in a healthy way. We’ve been raised ignorant. And when I look at the numbers, and I look around at my friends, and the girls I go to school with, the girls in my dorm building, I have to wonder what they hide.

I look around at young women who have been taught all the things they have to do every day to protect themselves, all the choices they have to make every day to make sure they’re not attacked, and they had better not screw up, better not make a mistake or they’ll get blamed for someone else’s action because in this country we make excuses for the penis and point fingers at the victims. Police still ask what you were wearing at the time, as if wearing a skirt means that an attackers’ crime is lessened.

How many of those young men who rape girls at parties or in their own homes, the majority of whom actually knew their victims, had teachers that talked to them about sex as if it’s something that actually mattered? How many of their teachers explained to them the full meaning of consent? How many of them had an adult talk to them about how to separate what happens in porn from reality? How many of them had someone stand up to them when they make a rape joke?

Because I tell you the fuck what, if a guy ever legitimately tried to have “surprise” sex with me, I’d punch him in the nuts and yell, “SURPRISE.”

But I’m more confrontational than a lot of my friends. I’ve never been afraid to have a voice, to stand up for myself or others. I have far better self-image and self-esteem than a lot of my peers. And that shouldn’t make me safer. It doesn’t make me safer, but it means I won’t be silent.

I want comprehensive sex education to look like this.

I want to make Schrödinger’s Rapist required reading and discussion. 

I want teens all over the world to have real discussions with each other in classrooms so that they won’t be too afraid to talk to their partners.

I want girls to understand and be proud of their bodies the way that society desperately, desperately doesn’t want them to be. I want them to be able to say with confidence, “I do not have internalized misogyny,” — something I am sad to say, I cannot do.

I want boys to not be afraid to have emotions, to be able to listen, to not have to worry about hypermasculinity, and to not see the feminine as less than.

I want my worth to not be based on my sexual output or lack thereof.