How did Emily wind up a sex educator?

PS: See you in Austin next month

We’ve got a really fun announcement and a super interesting podcast for you this week. Emily is hard at work writing more newsletters as we speak.

Do you believe sex ed is important? Do you love pajama parties? Can you get to Austin, Texas?

Emily will be the special guest at UNHUSHED’s 7th anniversary bash! Emily and Karen Rayne will be on stage answering your sex questions live and in person. Tickets benefit UNHUSHED and local bookseller Reverie Books. (You can even bring your books to be signed.)

Will she bring her NY Times pajamas? SUSPENSE. Tickets here.

Emily was recently on the Second Life podcast with Hillary Kerr.
(Apple Podcasts, Spotify)

It’s a really interesting interview that goes into the how and why Emily wound up as a sex educator and what led to her writing Come As You Are. It’s a little different than Robyn’s post about getting into the field. Here’s a short excerpt of Emily’s origin as a sex educator:

So when you were doing all of this peer health education, what was that piece of it like for you on an emotional and intellectual level?

Yeah. One of the cues maybe that I was, like they say, not like the other girls, my very first day on campus before classes even started, I rode my bike from my dorm to the library. I found my way to the sexuality section of the library, and I took a book off the shelf because it was simply the biggest book on the shelf, and it was The Hite Report on Women's Sexuality.

And I sat in the library and I read The Hite Report. Nobody told me to go do this. I was just interested.

But, you know, isn't every 18-year-old at least intellectually like, what's going on with this sex thing? For a long time, it's been true that about half of people who get to 18 have had a sexual relationship, and about half have not. I was among the half who hadn't.

So my interest was all intellectual at that point. And as we got trained, it turned out that I found it easier than even most of my fellow trainees to transition into like, yeah, we can just talk about vulva, scrotum, penis, clitoris. We can just say these words like we're saying elbow, toe, forehead.

They're just parts of the body.

They're just words.

And we don't have to have a physiological reaction to the fact that we're talking about sexual body parts. So one of my very first experiences in my training was to go home and get a mirror and look at our genitals. Even though I was not raised with any like explicitly shameful messages, just sort of like the ordinary American sexual shame, which is like shame light.

Even I, when I like took off my clothes and went to look, I had the sense that I was going to confront an enemy. And it's just your own body. And that's the thing.

It struck me so hard, I burst into tears as soon as I looked at my own genitals. And I was like, it is just a part of my body. And that moment actually, that first weekend of training as a sex educator, I returned to it over and over because the moral of the story, after all of these years of research and training and experience, over and over, the answer is your own body is the ultimate source of wisdom about your sexuality.

And when you can create a loving, compassionate, positive relationship with all the parts of your own body, that's how you can hear what your body wants you to know.

There’s a whole lot more. Listen to the full interview here.

That’s all for now. Back soon.

–Your friendly neighborhood Marital Euphemism who takes responsibility for any and all typos in this post.

PS: Don’t forget to check out the UNHUSHED party. Karen and Nyk are some of Emily’s best friends and they do really important work.

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Questions or comments? Please email my very tiny team at unrulywellness@gmail.com

Feel free to say hello on 📷 Instagram and 🤖 Facebook – I don't always reply but I read everything.

Signed copies of Come As You Are and Come Together can be obtained from my amazing local bookseller, Book Moon Books.

Stay safe and see you next time.