Transcript

Dear Sex Ed textbook;

I'm pretty sure my ovaries aren't the size of chicken eggs.

…and I'm certain they aren't lodged up against my ribcage.

You showed my reproductive organizes taking up my entire abdomen, such a huge part of what made up the physicality of 'me'.

But those parts only usually take up the size of a grapefruit, when it's not growing something.

You showed my torso, full of large, open cavities deep inside, empty. You only showed them filled with things that aren't me.

But I'm already full and complete, and I am not full of empty spaces.

Your neat and tidy tiny labia made me feel messy and ugly and wrong.

You never did explain what you meant by 'pleasure organ', though, did you? I would have liked to known about that…

Sex Ed Textbook, I feel like we could have been friends, but you always made so many assumptions about who I was.

You always assumed I was white, pink and fair between my legs.

You always assumed I was a woman because I have a vagina.

You always assumed I would be having sex with penises.

You seemed awfully certain about the story of my life:

Prologue:
When you go through puberty
When you get your period

Narrative:
When you have sex with a man
When you get pregnant
When you give birth

Epilogue:
When you enter menopause

fin.

Sometimes you talked about having sex
DON'T DO IT UNLESS YOU'RE 100% completely SURE YOU'RE READY

or STI's
DON'T GET THEM

or contraception
DON'T HAVE SEX WITHOUT IT

But you didn't tell me about choice. You were a book about my body, and you gave me no choices at all.

Your certainty about what made up my body and what would make up my life made me feel confused and frustrated and undone. you spoke with a voice of medical, social, and historical authority. You billed yourself as a factual anatomical and biological information source, but you were actually a perscriptivist manual on how to be a woman.

But my sexuality and gender now, in theory, in action, in intention, and in execution, are not included in your pages.

It took me years before I realized that you were just another part of a system of sexual policing designed to work against me, not for me.

So, textbook, I'm done with you. There are better options out there now, but I have the feeling you and your incarnations are still being handed in classrooms, and left on nightstands by parents, and checked out in libraries, and accessed on websites.

And the more I think about you, the angrier I am at you. As a human, a sexual being, a queer person, and an information specialist, your reinforcement of the passive violence of normativity insults me.

So, Sex-Ed textbook, I guess I'm writing this letter just to say:

FUCK YOU

Dear Sex Ed Textbook

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Robot Hugs

New Comic! *** This comic discusses sex education. It includes general and detailed nudity/anatomy, and should probably be considered NSFW. Alright, so this happened, for like 2 metres. It's almost universally acknowledged that the sexual education we received from any administration was incomplete, incorrect, and/or harmful. I think when you look at the physical artifacts of that education, a lot of the problems can be examined. Representation and language are important, though when we talk about these things we are often accused of 'making a big deal' out of something that is 'only' a picture or a word. But these things hold power, and it is unacceptable to employ them without careful consideration to the implicit messages they convey. So many of these books make assumptions about who we are, who we will fuck, whether we will choose to have sex - they almost always represent their subjects as white, cis, hetero, with socially 'typical' bodies, neat and tidy and labelled. I'm not even asking that one source represent the vast array of people it is attempting to address, but even a fucking footnote here or there would be a big improvement. I believe that it is possible to convey the important information about bodies and sex that people should know while maintaining and respecting their autonomy. The medium is the message, and a language medium of absolutes and declarations about sex, sexuality, gender, and bodies, reenforces a message of control and power. I'm not claiming that information using contraception, avoiding infections, and being self-aware about one's sexual needs (or lack thereof) are not important messages. My concern is the absolutist language around this information, because these things are choices, and they must be communicated as choices. Responsible sex/body education involves educating people about their options so they have the ability to choose what is right for them. ALSO: this comic specifically deals with harmful education resources aimed at women (such resources incorrectly assuming people with vaginas==women). I don't have a lot of personal experience around education towards men/people with penises, though I would argue that many of the same issues of representation and choice remain. As an anecdote towards that, though, I asked MZ what kinds of messages/language he recalled from his grade school sex education, and he told me that the boys were separated from the girls, taken to a different room, and taught about football statistics. He learned about condoms/safer sex from MTV. So that's a depressing datapoint.