A few months ago I had the pleasure of meeting the dynamic John Styn at SXSW Interactive.  I was fascinated by John’s Hug Nation.  Schools across the country are banning all physical contact between students - including hugs.  I find that teenagers need hugs - they need physical contact.  In fact, we all need hugs, regardless of our age, but teenagers are in a place of re-learning how to touch and be touched respectfully as they enter their adult bodies.  I wanted to do some investigating into how Hug Nation might fit into this, so I tracked John down with some questions.

Hi John!  Could you start off by introducing yourself a bit?  Who IS John Styn?

I’ll try.
A normal hug is when two individuals dissolve into a single loving embrace.
Hug Nation attempts this concept on a grand scale.
It isn’t a physical embrace, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
It is a gesture of intention. It is saying, “We are far more alike than we are different”
People meet in a chatroom at a specific time every week and take a couple minutes to recalibrate:
“No matter what you hear on the news, the vast majority of the world would rather hug you than hurt you.”
We hug ourselves, think of all the others also hugging themselves.
Plus we encourage people to hug themselves WHEREVER they are 1pm (pacific) on Tuesdays.  Or  release the energy later when they watch the archive.

That is a really interesting question.   I think it depends on the teen and their parent.  Can I ask a parent to answer this for me? 

But it began to stand for much more.  I see it as the color of hugs.  It has all the “love” of red, without it’s aggression.  Plus, we’re all pink on the inside.

Thanks, John!

Many Middle School students - okay, let’s face it, many Americans - have a hard time holding a serious conversation about sex using correct terminology.  Even among adult, many conversations about sex include a lot of insinuations, a lot of suggestive and knowing glances and meaningless phrases like “Well, he … you know … and then I was like, wow, so this is how it’s supposed to feel!”

But in order for us to have effective and meaningful conversations about sex with our partners, our children, and our doctors, we need to use specific terminology.

A friend was recently recounting to me a certain scene from a recent Jim Carrey movie, where for rather preposterous reasons Carrey must say “Yes” to receiving oral sex from an older woman, even though he doesn’t want to.  (For the purposes of this story, I am setting aside two issues that present themselves through this scene: stereotypical and offensive joking about elder sexuality and the undercurrent of male rape which is far too often ignored or, as in Yes Man, laughed at.)  Back to my story.  My friend was disappointed that this scene was included because she thought her 6th grade daughter would like the rest of it, but she felt that this scene made the movie inappropriate for her.  At least one of her friends, however, had seen the movie, and the mother learned had told her about the old-lady-oral-sex scene.  Another friend sitting by was surprised that 6th graders would get the visual joke - that they would know that oral sex was being suggested off-camera.

Now, do young teenagers who see this movie explicitly know what’s happening off camera?  Could they, as we say, draw a picture for me?  Maybe, but maybe not.  More likely they are cobbling together their sense that something illicit is being suggested - and that this probably means sex.  Even the group of moms sitting around talking about the movie were slightly discomfited when I used descriptive terminology in our conversation.  I wasn’t using the terminology to be salacious - just specific.

One of my first goals with any sexuality class, regardless of the age of the participants, is to help them move past this initial discomfort with even anatomical words like penis and vagina.  Middle school students, being the youngest that I teach in a classroom setting, often have the most difficulty with this process.

I am about to wrap up two of my middle school classes and I just started one a few weeks ago.  What is very noticeable to me is that the two groups I have been working with for many months are both full of kids who are more or less willing - if not always pleased - to say the required nouns and verbs to hold a complete discussion about sex.  And they do not giggle or blush or hide their face anymore when anyone else in the room uses those words.  These young people are ready to have serious discussions about different levels of sexual activity, STDs, and safe sex.  They have practiced saying “No” to sexual and romantic advances, and they have had in-depth conversations about what kind of relationship they need to have before they say yes.  They are, in fact, prepared to handle the next several years of their emotional, social, and sexual development.

In my class that just started, however, there exists a very different sexual vocabulary.  They are beginning to accept that sexuality is just another topic to be talked about, but giggles often still erupt when we answer their questions about orgasms (”cumming”) directly and honestly.

Looking over these three classes and almost thirty students, one thing I have noticed is that the students who are less sexually experienced are often more willing to talk honestly and directly about sexual experiences.  The students who have begun to experiment with sexual activities (if not intercourse) are far more likely to be giggly and immature about confronting the topic head-on.  This is one clear indicator, for me, about why young people must have comprehensive sexuality education before they begin to be sexually active: It is now, during this time, that they are most open to building their sexual vocabulary.  Because they have not had much to giggle about behind closed doors, they have not yet closed the doors.

Young people who are able to talk clearly about sex and sexuality have a higher Sexuality IQ.  They will be better able to look inward to determine their own desires and to cleave true to themselves rather than someone else’s desires.  They will also be better prepared to be clear with their partners about what they want - and what they don’t want.

All of these young people will need a booster-shot of sex education sometime in high school.  They will need to be reminded of how to speak honestly and openly about sex, about the intricacies of STDs, reproduction, and safe sex, and they will need the information directed to them in a way that respects their new developmental stage.  They could probably also benefit from a college level class on human sexuality to understand more of the historical context and psychology around our intimate relationships.  But even without these additional classes, the middle school students in my class have come to a place of uncommon sexual vocabulary which can come to their aid for the rest of their lives.

Bam.  My world just changed.  And so did the worlds of teenagers, preteens, and children across the country.

Instead of abstinence-only, Obama’s 2010 budget puts $173 million into teen pregnancy prevention money.  Now, while this is great (GREAT!) news, it’s not quite what I was hoping for.  Preventing unwanted pregnancies (teen or otherwise) is only a part of what good sex, comprehensive sex education does.  I’m hoping that Obama is just doing this as a mid-ground move, and that in the next few years that money will all be funneled directly into teaching our young people about safe, responsible, healthy sexuality.

Now if you will pardon me, I am going to go and be boggled by the possibilities.

(You can read more about the budget on Amplify Your Voice, you can see the whole budget at the White House’s website, and you can read the specifics of the Department of Health and Human Service’s budget in this download.)

I am so sorry to be so far behind on posts!  My presence here has been truly abysmal, but I promise there are good reasons for it - I am currently teaching five regular classes, the occasional one-time class, working on my book, and trying to keep my personal life in some sort of order.  Why is May always such a very full month?

I have three particular posts in mind that I am looking forward to writing:

1. My middle school classes start with students who skillfully maneuver their way around words like “sex” and “penis” - and often stop cold mid-sentence when they see a word like “oral sex” looming on the horizon.  Not all students feel this way, of course, but many do.  By the end of the classes, though, we are having full conversations using proper words.  It is a wonderful transition to watch!
2. Earlier this week I presented a one-time class to a group of foster kids.  They were amazing - interested, engaged, open, completely unembarrassed, and full of questions!  What a great experience it was for me - and I hope for them too.
3. Sexual harassment is prevalent in many middle and high schools - maybe even most of them.  But in two recent classes I led on the topic, the students started off believing that sexual harassment was not present in their schools.  Then I started asking what they thought sexual harassment was, and we talked in depth about specific examples of what constitutes sexual harassment.  By the end of the conversations, all of the students in both classes had reassessed their schools, to say sexual harassment was highly prevalent.  It seems that many young people know that sexual harassment is bad, but they don’t know what it really is, they don’t know why it is a problem, and they don’t know what to do about it when they do see it.  There needs to be major education on this topic that just isn’t happening in many of our schools - and I think I know why it isn’t happening.

Hopefully things will calm down around here over the next week or two, as four of my classes wind down, and I will be able to address these three topics and more!

Condoms offer incredible protection against unwanted pregnancy and STD transmission.  They are the idea contraceptive for responsible teenagers because they also provide STD protection.

But condoms need to be taken care of: They cannot get too warm or too cold (like in a car), be rubbed about (like in a pocket or a wallet in a pocket), or be jostled among things (like in a purse or a backpack).  They also tend to not be very classy in appearance.  Safe sex and style-conscious people have despaired of how to carry the darn things around for ages.

I recently found the answer!  Just In Case, Inc. has fabulous little compact-like cases with a mirror that discreetly holds two condoms.  The cases will not keep condoms at a moderate temperature (still no car, sorry!), but they will keep them from getting jostled around in a purse or a backpack and will keep them stylishly tucked away from prying eyes.  Ranging from $16.95 for a sleek black model to $199.99 for one fully blinged, they’re a steal!

Just In Case is run by a mother-daughter team, Marsha G. Bartenetti and Rachael G. Sudul.  Marsha used to live next door to Dr. Carl Djerassi, an innovator of the birth control pill.  He often lamented that condoms had a bad rap, particularly among women.  Dr. Djerassi said that even with the wide availability of hormonal birth control, condoms are still a critical option because they offer unparalleled STD protection and protection against unplanned pregnancy.  He asked Marsha if she could do anything to change the way women view condoms.  So Marsha and Rachel set out to change the way condoms are viewed by women.  They want women to see condoms as within their purview rather than solely a man’s responsibility.  They figured that in order to do that, they would need to start with a stylish and safe way to carry condoms.  By normalizing women carrying and using condoms, Marsha and Rachel hope to increase STD awareness, particularly AIDS awareness, and reduce the stigma attached to carrying condoms.

I polled my college classes and the results were overwhelming: The students loved the little cases.  They were so excited to have a recommendation for a safe way to carry their condoms around, and immediately wanted to know where they could get a case of their own.

The primary question they had was about a comparable item for young men.  Rachel tells me that while they do have something in the works for men, but they wanted to start off by creating something for women.  Because condoms are so often marketed exclusively for men, they wanted to focus on bringing women into the condom market because condoms offer great birth control and STD protection for women too

Just In Case will go into the backpacks of every older teenager are young adult I know!

Just In Case is offering 10% off promotion for anyone who comes over from my site.  Type in the promo code “forteens” and your entire order will be 10% off.

I have a Middle School class starting next week, and still have a few open spaces.

This class covers a comprehensive sexuality program, and will focus on thinking deeply about sexual decision making.  We will start with some basics, including language, anatomy, gender, and the reproductive process and move into appropriate Internet interactions, contraceptives, STDs, and how to be clear about sexual, dating boundaries, and more.  The in-class activities will be fun and interactive, including interesting and developmentally appropriate media supplements, role-playing activities, and time for quiet introspection.

Recommendations from parents of my current and past students are available on request.

We will be meeting in the Central Austin area, Monday and Wednesday evenings for seven weeks.  If you are interested in your 12 through 15-year-old joining us, contact me ASAP so we can talk about the specifics.

If you are interested in this class for your child, but are not available at this time, send me an e-mail and we’ll arrange another class.

Last week my attention was mostly elsewhere.  Some of that attention was on writing a piece for RH Reality Check about creating and implementing effective sex education programs about sexual assault and rape.  A recent New York Times piece mulling over whether it is more appropriate to target education in gender-specific ways (i.e., for men how not to be a rapist and for women how not to be a victim), or to provide the same education to everyone regardless of gender.

The article irked me, frankly, so I was delighted when RH Reality Check asked me to write a response.  Among other things, I said:

Students’ misunderstandings and misconceptions about sexual violence only come up in the midst of hard conversations about relationships, personal goals, and sexual violence.  The gaps in knowledge and experience surface in response to oblique scenarios that initially left the students unsure of the “right” answer.  That is to say, these conversations were born out of real life scenarios where I stopped talking and let them muse.  After they got going, my students loudly argued their points to each other about what is right and wrong behavior, who holds responsibility for what actions, and how to keep them and their partners safe.

High quality sex education is not gender-specific, but gender-inclusive.  The girls in my college classes must hear their male peers say they are confused by unclear signals of interest, that they don’t know how to respond to or interpret them, in order to begin to understand why they have to say no or yes clearly.  The boys have to hear the girls talk about the social assumptions that are made about them to begin to understand why girls sometimes offer ambiguous signals.  Middle school students need to have the same conversation, only on their developmental level of sexual and romantic involvement.

We all, girls and boys, men and women, need to sit together and talk through our collective pain on this issue of sexual violence.  It is not something that anyone feels good about, but we can all learn from the task of being and feeling and hearing honestly from our peers about their experiences.

Go take a read of the whole thing, and the interesting comments that follow.

My Ph.D. is in Educational Psychology.  My time in graduate school was relatively evenly split between researching, reading, and talking about (1) how teenagers grow and develop, particularly around issues of sex and sexuality, and (2) how people learn, and how to support their learning in the most effective ways possible.  This prepared me pretty well to be a sexuality educator.

One of the parents in one of my middle school sex ed classes recently commented on a post from last week.  The parent points out that one of my students left class with a mis-informed understanding of HIV/AIDS.  Going back over the class in my mind, I can pin-point almost exactly how and when this student (who remains anonymous in the comment, but I know who it is) integrated the mis-information into his/her cognitive structures.

(This sort of thing is fascinating to me!  I guess I’m just a learning geek.)

Here’s what happened:

We were talking about STDs.  The students brainstormed all the STDs they could think of, and I wrote them on our make-shift board as they brainstormed.  They each had an empty grid to fill out along with me.  After naming the STDs, we went through each one, listing the symptoms (far too often there are none!), the permanent damage that can be done to the body if left untreated, whether there is a cure or not, and how it is contracted (oral sex, vaginal sex, anal sex, and whether condoms prevent the transmission or not).

Now, when looking at how people learn, it is clear that students need to think concretely about their mental models of ideas and concepts (i.e., name their ideas or list them out) before they are able to hear the correct information and change their mental models.  If a student holds an incorrect mental model, but hasn’t acknowledged that model clearly, hearing or reading correct information generally just distorts their mental models even more, rather than correcting them.  However, if they are clearly aware of what their ideas are, when they are presented with the correct information, they are far more likely to actually change that incorrect model to the correct one.

This reality of best practices education, combined with the realities of a classroom where students tune in and out while they take notes, get distracted by another student, get a drink of water, and otherwise put their attention in so many other places (which is just a reality of learning - no person can keep their attention steady for an hour or more!), means that one student can hear another student say incorrect information when they brainstorming their initial understanding, and then miss the instructor’s correction.  This is what happened the other day with this particular student’s understanding of HIV/AIDS.

And this clear misunderstanding on the part of this one student is why it is critical that classrooms go over material more than once.  And it is also why, with a topic as critical to the healthy physical and emotional development of the human being as sex education is, students need to take more than one class.  Sex education needs to be done over and over again, and within each class, the really important information needs to be repeated over and over again.  This does not mean that the classes are being done poorly, or that students are not paying attention, rather it is the appropriate and necessary educational response to how people learn.

I will be going over HIV/AIDS again - with some good interaction, activities, movement, and anything else I feel will support the knowledge - next class.  I expect the students to learn more this time, but not to take in everything I give them.  This is simply the reality of the teacher.

Because of this reality, I encourage parents to have their kids in an intense year-long sex education program in middle school and then again in high school.  They can either provide this education themselves (along with on-going, continuous conversation before, between, and after the classes!), or they can make sure their children get the classes somewhere else (again, along side continuous conversation at home).  Sex education is just too important to do anything less.

On of the activities I do with my middle school students is have them role-play saying “No” to sexual advances and requests for a date.  I do this not because I think they are in the thick of needing to say no to would-be-suitors and would-be-sexual partners, but because they will eventually be in the thick of it.

The need to say no is an issue that, for whatever reason, has been coming up a lot both in my personal life and in my professional life.  It is something of an art, really, being kind and yet crystal clear.

The other day in my college class, we were talking about developmentally-appropriate sex education at different ages.  I mentioned this middle school activity on how to say “No” that I do with my middle school students.  The students are broken up into two equal groups: A and B.  The first time through, randomly-drawn students from Group A ask randomly drawn students from Group B out on a date, and the Group B students must respond first with a “Yes” and then with a “No”.  (Yes, this means that sometimes girls are asking out girls and sometimes boys are asking out boys and sometimes it’s a cross-gender thing.)  The group talks about the clarity of both the question and the response.  Was it clear that the person asking was talking about a date and not just a friendly outing?  Was the person who responded clear about their level of interest?  Particularly when declining a date, people are prone to giving an excuse about why they are not available at that particular time or for that particular activity which can extend hope for another time/activity.  Instead, we work with the middle school students on clearly stating their romantic interest in the asker, while being as kind and gentle as possible.  After we’ve gone through the class this way, we switch and Group B asks and Group A responds with a yes and a no.

My college students immediately were focused on the activity itself rather than the developmental stages of sex education.  One student said, “Oh my god, you’re making the world a better place.”  Another student said, “I still don’t know how to say no without making up an excuse!”  Of course we put our discussion about age-appropriate sex ed on hold and talked about how to say no.

There are, of course, lots of ways to say no.  Some of them more kind than others.  Here are ways of saying no that are problematic, all for one reason or another:

• I may be single, but I still have standards.  (Too cruel.)
• I’m busy that morning/day/night.  (An excuse - implies that another day/time would work.)
• I have a boyfriend.  (Also an excuse - implies that if that relationship ends, the responder would be interested.)

So while it’s become something of a cliche recently, responding with something along the lines of:

• I’m just not that into you.

is really the kindest way to say no.  It’s clear.  It’s honest.  It’s to-the-point.  And someone who has opened themselves up to you deserves that.

Have you talked with your kids or students about how to say no kindly and honestly?  And if you have talked about it in theory, have you talked about the specifics of what that means, what words they should say?  Because saying, “Say no kindly” is a whole different ballgame from having them practice coming up with words when they are looking at someone who is asking them out on a date - even if it is just a roleplay.

The parents.

I want to make it very, very clear that I strongly believe that the parents are the first and primary sex educators for their children, and in an ideal world would continue to be the primary sexuality educators through adolescence.  Most of what I do is help parents learn how to be open and honest with their kids about sex.  This is the path I have dedicated my professional life to!

Yesterday’s post about a trip that I took a group of middle school students on to buy condoms garnered many comments.  Many of the early comments were angry, name-calling, incorrect-fact-providing, assumption-making rants.  I did not post them.  The comments eventually evolved into a very interesting conversation about religion and parental rights.  If you weren’t still reading into the evening yesterday, highly recommend you go take a read of the rest of the conversation.

But now I want to address one substantial assumption the early comments made: That I do not support parents educating their own children about sex.

Who should do sex education?  Parents should.  And parents do.  All parents, regardless of intent, educate their children about sex through their words, actions, reactions, body language, and so much more from the very beginning of life.  The way we, as parents and adults, interact physically with each other and with our children starts the sex education process on an informal level at birth.

When parents are ready and want to take up the scepter of formal sex educator and perform those duties, it is wonderful!  It takes a substantial amount of self-knowledge to be able to talk openly with your children about their developing sexuality, and I applaud people who manage to walk that path!

However, as parents, we cannot do everything.  We cannot fill every pair of shoes our children need filled.  Sometimes we don’t feel comfortable in a particular role, or do not feel knowledgable enough.  Sometimes we do not have the kind of relationship with our children that would allow us to fill a particular role.  This is where I, as a sexuality-educator-for-hire, come in.

Parents who want me to talk with their children want the full, comprehensive sex education that I advocate for.  I have never had a parent ask me to do less.  Generally parents who want something else go to someone else.  I am very up-front about what kind of sex education I know works well, what kind of sex education has been shown to work well through research and many years of experience.

Ideally, I help parents provide this kind of sex education themselves.  But I am always happy to provide it when that avenue, for whatever reason, isn’t completely available.