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Invisible Part 3 — Description

Parts One and Two are here.

A grateful tip of my hat to modern sex-educators like Laci Green and Erika Moen. (Both links talk explicitly about sex and sexuality, and thus are NSFW!) Not only has their work helped me finally identify my own sexuality , and redefine my understanding of consent after I was assaulted, but they’ve also helped correct years of deplorably inaccurate and downright damaging sex-education at my school.

RANT INCOMING

It is ridiculous, troubling, and in some cases potentially dangerous how little I know about my own body. Misinformation, inaccurate, biased and in some cases almost superstitious material was presented as fact. (No, the hymen is not something that needs to be “popped,” no, sex is not “supposed to hurt,” and no “trying to enjoy rape” is not a valid form of combating rape culture. Thank you, 6th grade sex-education, for the garbage. You can light it on fire.)

It is sad that many of the “facts” I was presented were not refuted until I was in my mid-twenties doing panicked independent research just to understand something basic and commonplace that my body was doing. To this day I’m still learning important and relevant health-related concerns regarding my own reproductive system. The kinds of contraception available, how menstruation works beyond the obvious bleeding and pain part, health problems BESIDES STDs that can occur and the symptoms therein. Even how my body works beyond diagrams of internal pieces that I cannot connect or relate to my external body.

Not to mention the shame, shame, SHAME attached to everything from a woman experiencing pleasure to a woman wearing make-up. And the constant emphasis that men are uncontrollable, blameless animals. The complete omission of asexuality from the discussion, as well as different kinds of sexuality in general. The omission of trans* identities. In its place, nothing but gruesome and endless photos of “the dangers of STDs,” yet nothing about how to have safe sex, consensual sex, or positive and healthy sexual relationships. The educational system taught me about my own body with far less care to facts and critical thinking than what it was willing to give to a single Shakespearean Sonnet, or how to find a library book.

Of course, this is the same school system that emphasized that the Civil War was caused by little more than States Rights, which somehow were presented as completely disconnected from slavery, and neglected to mention that people like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman even existed. In fact, my history classes conveniently forgot that any minority ever did anything meaningful at all.

Never stop educating yourself, kids. The more you learn, the more you’ll realize how ignorant you still are, and how much more there is to what you’ve been told. That’s certainly been the case for me.

/RANT