Sex Ed: Let's Talk About Pizza

In honor of TEDxUofM today, I wanted to share a video that came up on my Twitter feed about what teens really want to know about sex.

There have been a number of times in our discussion in which the topic of sexual education has come up. What our parents taught us. What we learned in school. What our peers may have unwittingly revealed to us. Surprisingly, most of the class seemed to receive a pretty informative education either from their schools or their parents.

Personally, I was pretty lucky as far as my formal sex education. I moved halfway through middle school to a school that was much more open to sex education than the district I had come from. My teacher was a spunky little Italian woman who was open to questions about just about anything. And almost everyone in the class was more than willing to ask. By the time I entered high school I knew that abstinence wasn't the only option and pregnancy wasn't the only thing to worry about.

On the other hand, I have a number of friends who attended private religious schools or conservative public schools who only heard the abstinence spiel (cue the crazy Christians from Parks and Rec) and lucky survived their first sexual experiences unharmed.

The Ted Talk by Al Vernacchio discusses different ways to talk about sex and how the "baseball method" is problematic in that it is "sexist, heterosexist, competitive, goal-directed, and can't result in healthy sexuality developing in young people or in adults." He instead opts for a metaphor about pizza according to three aspects: the trigger for sexual activity, during sexual activity, and the expected outcome of sexual activity. You have pizza when you want it (internal desire), pizza is all about pleasure (many options, different is good, you can stop eating when you want), and you eat pizza to be satisfied, not to win.

He applies the pizza model to education in that we should be teaching people to "think about their own desires, to make deliberate decisions, to talk about it with their partners, and to ultimately look for not some external outcome, but for what feels satisfying."

In class we had a discussion about what we wanted to see on television for sexual education based on the assessments in the article "Entertainment Television as a Healthy Sex Educator: The Impact of Condom Efficacy Information in an Episode of Friends" as well as the clips we watched in class and came up with a an array of educational information about protection, birth control, STDs, and pregnancy that we wanted to see more of. I think Vernacchio is on the right track also has a point though. Media has the opportunity to demonstrate healthy sexual relationships where people express what they want (or don't want) out of sex and can turn down sex, even with a person they've already had sex with on multiple occasions, if they feel uncomfortable. This is another chance for positive edutainment that may even present some new interesting and complicated storylines.

References

Al Vernacchio: Sex needs a new metaphor. Here's one... (2013, July 15). Retrieved March 20, 2015.

Collins, R., Elliot, M., Berry, S., Kanouse, D., & Hunter, S. (2003). Entertainment Television as a Healthy Sex Educator: The Impact of Condom Efficacy Information in an Episode of Friends. Pediatrics, 1115-1121.