O. is for orgasm – Broadsheet – Salon.com

A big story in this month’s edition of O. magazine starts out with a sex educator in the basement of a church teaching a room full of students how to masturbate in public. “It’s nice just to be touched at all,” says one woman. “It made me wish someone else were touching me,” says another. OK, disclaimer here: For the purpose of the exercise, the students were merely touching their own hands with their eyes closed. And everyone in the room was over the age of 18; most were over the age of 35. Still, the fascinating question provoked by this piece on adult sex education is this: What would sex ed look like if one began from the rather obvious premise that everyone in the room would have sex and that the goal is to give each person the best means to ensure they enjoy it as much as possible?

My first (admittedly unnuanced) take upon first reading this piece was to say: See what happens to people who first learn of sex in a culture of fear? Fear of teen pregnancy leads to sexless marriages, ill-advised hikes on the Appalachian Trail, and the subsequent demise of the American family!

That, of course, is the flamethrower in me talking. The adult sex-education courses described in the piece are run by the (fairly liberal) Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church in Christ in Austin, under the very unsexy sounding moniker OWL (which stands for Our Whole Lives) and deal quite specifically with some of the issues around sex that come up in mid-life, such as: “How do I enjoy my sexuality if I’ve lost a breast to cancer? How do I manage being a parent and a sexual person? Can I feel sexually satisfied if I don’t have a life partner?” These questions, says Michael Tino, a Unitarian minister who also happens to have a PhD in cell biology (yay for science-based sex ed!) don’t come up in the high school gym for the very simple reason that “Teenagers don’t have them yet. Most of what affects our sexuality happens in adulthood — long-term relationships, breakups, parenthood, illness, sheer exhaustion from managing life.”

via O. is for orgasm – Broadsheet – Salon.com.

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