What if We Got Teens to Talk About the Positive Sexual Experiences They’re Having?

Sexvangelicals is a podcast about the sex education the church didn’t want you to have.

And by “the church”, we include policy making systems that colluded with the church to develop federal programs like:

1. The Title V Abstinence Only Until Marriage program, started in 1996, which attempted to establish abstinence as the “expected standard” for all school-age children by highlighting how bearing children outside of marriage has significant consequences and teaching children how to reject sexual advances. A fear-mongering, no-centric sex education plan.

2. The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which, from 2010-2018, favored funding programs that taught abstinence-only education.

3. Sexual Risk Avoidance Education, which teaches youth to advocate for themselves, centered around “voluntarily refraining from non-marital sexual activity” and preventing other youth risk behaviors.

How do we know that sex education is effective? What are our options for measuring effectiveness?

One option is to create a high volume of diverse content options—the comprehensive sex education model. For instance, the CDC, in 2014, created guidelines that sex education needs to include the following 16 items:

1. How to create and sustain health and respectful relationships

2. Influences of family, peer, media, tech, and other factors of sexual risk behavior

3. The benefits of being sexually abstinent

4. The efficacy of condoms

5. The importance of using condoms consistently and correctly

6. The importance of using a condom at the same time as another form of contraception to prevent STIs and pregnancy

7. How to obtain condoms

8. How to correctly use a condom

9. Communication and negotiation skills (editor’s note: This is a fairly broad topic)

10. Goal setting and decision making skills (see editor’s note from above)

11. How HIV and other STIs are transmitted

12. The health consequences of HIV, other STIs, and pregnancy

13. Influencing and supporting others to avoid or reduce sexual risk behaviors

14. The importance of limiting the number of sexual partners

15. How to access valid and reliable information, products, and services related to HIV, STIs, and pregnancy

16. Preventative care that is necessary to maintain reproductive and sexual health

Depending on how you interpret items 9 and 10, there are some important topics that the CDC left out that Julia and I will refer to in future content. But in terms of “comprehensive” sex education, this is a good start.

The problem: According to Kelli Stidham Hall and colleagues, less than half of high schools, and less than 20% of middle schools cover all 16 proposed sex education topics. They discovered that schools spend an average of 6.2 hours of instruction dedicated to human sexuality per year.

Another option for measuring effectiveness is to use ancillary statistics to determine a program’s effectiveness. US sex education typically relies on two sets of data, on top of stats on which states and counties accept funding from which programs:

1. Teen pregnancy rates

2. Teen STI rates

*Note: A third important measure, sexual violence, typically gets assessed for in university students, not high school, and certainly not middle school students. Another topic for another day.

These are important statistics, in and of themselves. For instance, teenage girls who get pregnant and deliver children are more likely to have less sociological upward mobility, be that through financial, occupational, or social success, and knowing which communities have higher pregnancy rates can inform where to target valid and reliable information, products, and services related to HIV, STIs, and pregnancy.

However, these two rubrics communicate failure. Something “didn’t go right”. Condoms weren’t used. Consent wasn’t given, either through overt manipulation and violence, or, more commonly, because the sexual participants didn’t have the skills to explore and communicate what they want.

If we create a model that uses failure as its rubric for success, we invite moralizing judgments from students, parents, teachers, and administrators. This reinforces the likelihood of shame experienced by the individual. And more importantly, it stifles conversations between teenagers about healthy sexuality, either by moving the conversation underground or by having teenagers talk about sexuality from the perspective of individuation: pushing against the rigid sexual norms promoted by the adults.

Plus, we still don’t know what actually works. We don’t actually know how teenagers are having positive sexual experiences.

Peggy Kleinplatz writes about “optimal sexuality” in her book Magnificent Sex: Lessons from Extraordinary Lovers. She asks folks to describe the physical experiences, communication patterns, relational contexts that accompany peak sexual experiences, and encourages readers to practice the skills named by her research participants.

Her subjects? Sex therapists and couples who have been in a relationship for over 25 years.

What if we were to ask teenagers the following questions?

1. What’s a meaningful sexual experience that you’ve had in the last year?

2. How did you and your partner communicate before and after that made it meaningful?

3. What are ways that you and your partner made decisions about what to do sexually?

There are limitations to this approach, sure. For instance, the subjects in Kleinplatz’s study have hundreds, if not thousands of sexual experiences to rely on, while teenagers most likely have fewer experiences to rely on. The neurological capacities of a teenager means that their processes for negotiating sex will likely be different than a fully formed adult brain. This isn’t necessarily a negative thing; it’s more of an acknowledgement that the processes that teenagers use to negotiate sex will likely be different from the ways that folks older than 50 use.

However, we could use this information to develop educational tools that provide teenagers with specific skills that can increase their likelihood of having positive sexual experiences. If we talk about sexuality in a more positive way, combined with the information from the afore-mentioned CDC recommendations, perhaps teenagers will be less likely to rely on “sexually risky” behaviors. Teen pregnancy, STI, and sexual abuse rates would all drop, as a result.

So how do we ask teenagers about the positive sexual experiences they have? Well…here’s where things get a bit tricky, especially given the fact that teenagers talking with other teenagers in unstructured spaces (at least in the US) is generally an unsafe process.

Parents: Develop conversations with your teenagers that focus on the positive choices they’re making, the things they’re learning about the world, and the ways that they’re making decisions. Go past “How are you doing?” Most teenagers (and people, for that matter) answer that question with the monosyllable “Fine”.

Amy Schalet’s Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex, provides an excellent foundation about how to create dialogues and structures that make sexuality something to explore, rather than something to rebel against.

Therapists/Mental Health Professionals: At this stage (again, at least in the States), the onus of this project may be on our community. Small groups tend to provide safer spaces for folks to talk about sexuality and other vulnerable things; large-scale sex education programs, with content taught to 30+ students at a time, tend not to work. Please consider hosting groups with teenagers about positive communication and sexual comprehensiveness that give teenagers the space to talk about what worked as well as what didn’t.

Please share with us experiences where teenagers in your lives (your children, your students, etc.) were able to talk positively about their sexual experiences. Our expertise is working with adults who missed out on sex education and catching them up; we’d love to partner with folks who are actively modeling healthy dialogue around sexuality with teenagers and parents. Knowledge about the structures and communication processes of these spaces is imperative to revamp the sex education process for American youth.