Graphic By Ella Sylvie
There’s never been a better time in history to be on the receiving end of an orgasm.
Attitudes about sex and sexuality have been evolving for the last 100 years in the direction of full sexual liberation. Despite that, many teenagers are left completely in the dark in regard to their own sexual proclivities. In theory, the highest percentage of my knowledge of sex should have come from my household or my school’s sex education program. According to a study conducted by the Journal of School Health, 48 states require schools to have some sort of sex education program, and my school was no different. My freshman year, the kids in my gym class gathered into the mezzanine for a slightly uncomfortable lecture about the importance of abstinence delivered by my-very-cool but also very-over-it physical education teacher. At the wizened age of 14, even I could see the inherent flaw in the stance that the school was preaching. Of course I had seen the scene in “Mean Girls” where Coach Carr tells his class that if they had sex in any way shape or form they would die, but I had written it off as hyperbolic — surely our teachers knew that my classmates would have sex anyway (in fact some of them already had).
My concept of sex was mostly that it was this foreign thing that some man would come along and try to force me into it and that it would be my job to keep that from happening. Most sexual education primarily target women as the sole actor in the decision of whether or not to have sex. Most communities believe that the purpose of sexual education is not to inform students on their bodies and what they can do, but to serve as a preventative measure for pregnancy. Aside from teen pregnancy rates still being prevalent (according to a CDC study, teen pregnancy is on the decline but is still more prominent in low-income neighborhoods), this outdated and ineffective method of education neglects the needs of LGBTQ+ students. LGBTQ+ students receive little to no sexual education oriented toward their needs because the mandate for sexual education does not include an intersectional curriculum. Schools are able to pick and choose who is able to access necessary information, which only exacerbates the gap between those who have been disenfranchised within the classroom environment. This lack of information is problematic because an improper understanding of sexual health can have devastating consequences. A study conducted by the American Journal of Epidemiology found that a number of STDs (including gonorrhea, early syphillis and anal warts) were statistically more common among queer men than their heterosexual counterparts. A similar study by the Journal of LGBT Health Research found that insufficient education is the impetus for a lot of these health issues which may explain why the CDC found that people between the ages of 15 and 24 are diagnosed with almost half of all new sexually transmitted diseases. By not educating students, schools leave them susceptible to increased rates of STDs, dating violence and risky sexual behaviors.
Sexual education within the school system is just one of the different forms of sexual socialization in an adolescent’s life. As a result of its insufficiencies, adolescents often have to turn to other sources to form their sexualization. For heterosexual men, this source is often pornography, which often depicts a harmful image of male-female sexual relations. Pornography often centers around the scopophiliac male gaze, creating a situation in which men are led to believe that sex involves a specific kind of mistreatment of women. Most heterosexual scenes find the woman screaming in heightened orgasmic glee as the man ruthlessly jackhammers into her. Anyone who has actually had intercourse could tell you that there is essentially nothing accurate about that. For members of the LGBTQ+ community searching for sexual scenarios that mirror their own personal experiences, pornography presents a fetishized version of what those situation will look like accompanied by demeaning taglines that have the propensity to create a negative internalization of their own sexuality.
With fanfiction, women and LGTBQ+ individuals can flip the script of unhelpful sexual education curriculums and the misleading depictions of sex in pornography, and learn how sex can be built on a premise of love, trust and mutual pleasure.
As a result of the lack of productive female or LGBTQ+ forms of popularized socialization (such as pornography), women and LGBTQ+ individuals often have to find other ways to undergo their sexual socialization. One popular form of this socialization is through fanfiction. Fanfiction stories typically romanticize and sexualize preexisting relationships in media. Fanfiction’s primary audience are the adolescent women and queer individuals who craft the stories, and thus they center around their pleasure. A reader can learn about the Gräfenberg Spot (aka The G Spot) from an “Adventure Time” fanfiction about a steamy night with Marshall Lee the Vampire King. Another reader could learn about the different forms of birth control and abortion from a particularly stressful Percabeth ficlet. From a story where Draco casts a love spell on Hermione, readers are familiarized with the clitoris (an organ largely ignored by sex ed curriculum). With fanfiction, women and LGTBQ+ individuals can flip the script of unhelpful sexual education curriculums and the misleading depictions of sex in pornography, and learn how sex can be built on a premise of love, trust and mutual pleasure.
While there is nothing wrong with watching porn or reading fanfiction, this can not be the basis upon which an individual’s full sexual education comes from. Despite the arguable usefulness of fanfiction in this respect, there are still numerous pitfalls to basing one’s entire sexual schema on the authorial whims of a 16-year-old on DeviantArt. When it comes to information on having safe sex, fanfiction is severerly lacking and should not be used as a source for accurate information. There is no mention of means of preparation or contraceptives that are important to maintaining one’s sexual health. It also has the potential to create false ideas about sex, such as the idea that it is very easy to bring any women to climax (which is simply not true as every woman is different). Furthermore, there is a romantization of more extreme forms of sex (such as CNC, ageplay, breeding) that can create an unhealthy mental image of what sex needs to look like in order to be fulfilling. There is anything inherently wrong with these kinks, but they should be practiced only with a full understanding of how to explore them safely which fanfiction does not often do. There is no mention of aftercare or safety precautions and sometimes the lines of consent are blurred in a way that is sensationalized, and thus sends the wrong message to impressionable youths. In the same way that the male gaze creates a harmful image of what sex looks like in pornography, fanfiction creates an unrealistic expectation of how sex should be that has shortcomings in other areas.
Luckily there are numerous organizations that assist in making up the educational gaps. One such organization called Sex Ed for Social Change (SIECUS) recognizes adequate sexual health education and access as a human right and works to make education accessible for all. The non-profit hosts webinars to educate students on things like bodily autonomy and sanitation, raises money to donate to schools, and makes calls for legal action when injustice (such as barring access to certain sexual healthy resources to teens) comes about. Another organization called Peer Health Exchange trains college students to go into underfunded schools and teach sexual health curriculum. Since the inception of the program, they have reached 133 schools in nine different states. For a more casual and contributive source, ScarleTeen’s online publication has a variety of different entries on various topics related to sexual education, orientation, and interpersonal and independent sexual relationships.
All in all, I am eternally grateful to the girls on Tumblr and Fanfiction.net for turning me into the sexual creature that I am today. Though I sit in reverence of their ability and worship the ground that they walk on, I recognize the need for new resources and education and so I continue to build upon what they have instilled in me to stay happy, healthy and sexually active.