I spoke to Alia Dastagir at USA Today a few weeks ago about Sexual Health Awareness Month. Here's a short excerpt – you can read the whole article here. (paywall)
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What is sexual health?
Governmental, non-profit, and professional organizations all have extensive, detailed definitions of sexual health. As a sex educator who works primarily with adults, I define sexual health not just as the absence of disease or distress, but as every individual having access to the resources they need to attend to every domain of their sexual and reproductive wellbeing, including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
The theme of this year’s Sexual Health Awareness Month is “Let’s Talk Pleasure.” How is our experience of sexual pleasure challenged by our culture? (I’m thinking about the prevalence of sexism, racism, homophobia and ableism)
Educators like me talk generally about the exclusion of a variety of people from being included in our sense of who “deserves” pleasure, but I want to talk about the impact of that on our brains. Pleasure is processed in the brain by just a handful of “hedonic hotspots,” and stress—including identity stress—can disrupt those hotspots ability to respond to sensations that, in a different context, it would. Students of neuroscience have all heard that “neurons that fire together, wire together.” Well, many of us have had our brains trained not to be able to notice pleasure. People of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA2+ people, and others have been raised in a culture that told them their bodies do not belong and they do not deserve pleasure, and their brains reflect that.
But I think it’s not a coincidence that pleasure-based activism now is led by precisely the people who were taught they don’t deserve pleasure: adrienne maree brown and Erika Hart, to name just two.
What are some areas of sexual health that don’t get enough attention, and why are they important?
There are so many, but two fundamental areas are race and disability. The bleak reality is that sex education in America originated in the eugenics movement, with sex education intended to help “fit” white people create families. Even “comprehensive” formal sex education is still grounded in ableist white supremacy. That shows up in our cultural discourse and even in sex research which overwhelmingly problematizes Black people’s sexuality, rather than treating it as a normal, healthy part their lives. That’s beginning to change, though I worry sometimes that racial justice in sex ed will get overlooked as reproductive rights and basic evidence-based sex education are eroded more and more.
And people with different physical, cognitive, and social abilities deserve sex education that supports their diverse needs. Sex ed needs to be accessible, of course, but the larger culture has to change, too. I have had women college students with physical disabilities tell me their doctors had never, not once, talked to them about how their disability might affect their sexuality, and certainly didn’t offer resources for expanding their access to pleasure. We still live in a world where people are offended by the idea that a disabled person is entitled to have children if they choose, much less recognizing that disabled bodies deserve pleasure too.
We’ve got a long way to go, and not everyone is on board with the simple idea that all people have the right to experience pleasure.
You can read the rest of the interview here.
I’ve got some great sex questions, as well as some stress and Burnout posts by Amelia coming soon. Watch this space! 🪐👩🚀
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