Should Sex Ed Include Pleasure?

Yes, according to Dan Savage:

The letters you get from teenagers led you to write in American Savage: that “every teenager should be required to take a sex-ed class.” I imagine the curriculum would not be “abstinence only.”

Very different. And very different from what people who consider themselves progressive mean when they say “comprehensive sex ed.” I call that “sex dread education.” Because it’s usually abstinence plus: If you’re going to have sex anyway, my God wear a condom! Otherwise your penis will explode, or you will get pregnant and you’ll die. Reproductive biology is what we teach in most of our ‘good’ sex ed classes—these things nobody thinks about when they are having sex or trying to get laid.

So what do we need to teach in sex ed classes?

What we need to teach is pleasure. What really trips people up is, how do you communicate about your desires? What is consent and how do you obtain it, explicitly? What we have now is like a driver’s ed class where they teach you how the internal combustion engine works, but they don’t teach you how to steer, or brake or what the red octagon on the stick means. Sex for pleasure is difficult, and that’s what we have to teach.

Dan’s Ask Anything videos are here.