Our Sex (Mis)Educations

We learn about sex from a lot of different sources—parents, friends, classes in school, pop culture, and even pornography. But as adults, many of us have had the experience of realizing that a lot of what we’ve learned did more harm than good. "I feel kind of cheated," one listener told us when we asked for stories about your sex ed fails. "These healthy, normal experiences I was having that I associated with shame and guilt, I could have avoided had I had better education."

This month, Death, Sex & Money is looking at our collective sex miseducations: the bedroom baggage we’ve carried around for years, the things we wish we’d learned instead, and the stigmas we still can’t shake.

For a listener named Andrea, sex ed came from church. She grew up in an evangelical Christian community in Texas, where she was raised in the so-called "purity culture" that was popular in the 1990s. "I think the messaging [was] always that girls should behave themselves in a certain way," she told us. "Don’t be alone with a boy. Don’t dress in ways that might cause him to stumble [...] That message is burned into my brain." In the first episode of this series, Anna talks with Andrea about her on-again, off-again relationship with evangelical Christianity (including a period in her twenties when she worked for a church), and how she's still trying to find ease with sex and her body as an adult today.

But Andrea’s not the only one who’s trying to unlearn things she was taught about sex as a kid. When we asked you to tell us the most misguided things you learned about sex, we were overwhelmed by how much you had to share.

     "Don’t kiss a boy or you might get pregnant."

     "You have a limited number of orgasms in life."

     "If you engage in sex, you’re going to contract a disease and your parts are going to fall off."

For the second episode of this series, we’re bringing you a supercut of all those sex ed fails...so we can collectively free ourselves of them once and for all.

For the last episode of this series, we’re talking sexually transmitted infections...because they affect a lot of us. 1 in 8 Americans has genital herpes. 40 percent of adults have HPV. And while the number of new HIV cases has remained steady in recent years, rates of gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia are all climbing. But when we asked you for your experiences of living with an STI, we heard over and over again how alone you can feel in your diagnosis. “There was a lot of shame and a lot of, you're untouchable —you're unlovable,” a listener named Conor told us about his experience of being diagnosed with herpes in his twenties. In the final episode of this series, we hear about the shame that can surround an STI diagnosis, the awkwardness many of us feel when disclosing one to potential partners, and how some of us are trying unlearning the stigmas we’re taught about what it actually means to be sexually healthy. 

Also: How do you tell a potential partner about your STI? We want to hear from you!

To wrap up our month-long look at our sex (mis)educations, we revisit our conversation about the role that porn plays in your life. For some of you, porn has helped you explore your sexuality. For others, it's become a problem. Hear your stories about secret hard drives, fantasy plot lines, illegal downloads, titillating Tumblr feeds and giving porn up completely.

MORE RESOURCES

Looking for more information about living with an STI? Head over here. (There, you'll also find the email that Conor, from our episode on STIs, sends to potential new partners to help them learn about his herpes diagnosis. Thanks to him for sharing it with us!)

And last year, our friends at Radiolab produced their own series about sex and sex ed, called Gonads. As part of that project, they collected sex ed book suggestions from listeners and staff, about the books that helped them understand the birds and the bees.

Check out the full Gonads Presents: Sex Ed Bookshelf here! Here are a few highlights: