Good For Her, a woman-focused sex shop in downtown Toronto, is not your average erotic emporium, if only because it serves tea. Tucked away in a cozy converted Victorian, the store features all of the usual adult fare—vibrators, lubricants, flavoured condoms, X-rated books and DVDs—but what’s notably different is the tone of the place, inspired, it would seem, by someone’s zany, free-spirited aunt. Guided by a philosophy of inclusive, non-threatening, pleasure-focused sex education, Good For Her has become well-known for its great-sex workshops, which it offers in-store, on university campuses, and at bridal showers and private parties. The message is always the same: your body is a gift, people. Explore it. Take care of it. Enjoy it.
About a year and a half ago, Good For Her’s founder, Carlyle Jansen, started getting phone calls from an unlikely market niche: local high school teachers, asking if she would come by their classes and talk to the kids about sex. The fact is, the majority of public school teachers are never explicitly trained to teach sexual education. In many cases, it’s the rookies—perhaps trained in math or gym—who get stuck with it. “Sometimes they’d call because they don’t know enough about it themselves,” Jansen says. “Or they’re uncomfortable.” Teachers can find it unpleasant to make the leap from geometry to sexting. “They feel like they have to then talk to the kids the next day and have an ongoing relationship,” she says, “so it’s easier to bring someone in from outside.”
And so, happy to oblige, Jansen and some of her colleagues visited the Toronto classrooms and tried to get a feel for what students knew, what they didn’t know, and moreover, what they wanted to know. The more workshops they conducted—she guesses they’ve done 12 to 15 so far—the more convinced they became that high school students are navigating a huge information gap, and that in many schools, the current sex ed curriculum is woefully inadequate. “Kids are taught to death about all the bad things that can happen to them if they have sex,” she says. “They’ve said, ‘We’ve heard about sexually transmitted infections, we know you can get pregnant, but we want to know about pleasure and we want to know about healthy relationships.’ ”
In her workshops, Jansen urges teens to ask about anything and everything, from masturbation, gender identity and same-sex feelings to sex toys (which they keep on hand in case the subject comes up), why people like oral sex, and why that particular act should go both ways. She encourages them to role play in order to learn how to broach difficult conversations. For instance, how do you raise the subject of condoms in the heat of the moment? And what do you do if a boy says he won’t wear one? To help illustrate the “pleasure centres” portion of the lesson, Jansen and her colleagues bring in visual aids from the store, including a plush pink vulva puppet. “People laugh. They can’t believe it,” she says. “But they don’t know what a vulva looks like. Adult women don’t know what a vulva looks like.” To describe the male anatomy, they bring a dildo. “We usually bring one that is silver-coloured and we say, ‘This is the head of the penis. This is the shaft. These are the sensitive parts.’ ”
Soon, even more teens will be able to take part in the Good for Her version of sex ed. Jansen has helped launch the Sexual Health Education Pleasure Project (SHEPP)—a non-profit organization devoted to providing free, pleasure-based sex ed workshops for youth in schools and community groups in Toronto. Visitors to SHEPP’s newly minted website, Shepptoronto.com, will note that parts of the lesson plan sound more like the table of contents of Cosmopolitan than anything a high-schooler might traditionally learn in class: “The art of dating—in person, online and texting”; “Negotiating what you want—in and out of the bedroom”; “Pleasure centres and anatomy basics (what feels good, what doesn’t, and where to find it)”; and “Cool, safe, and hot sex.” The goal, Jansen assures, is not to urge kids to get out there and do it, but to present them with facts and choices so they can make informed personal decisions.
Now say you’re the parent of a 14-year-old, and your kid comes home one day and tells you that the owner of a sex shop came into her classroom, dildo in hand, and talked to the kids about ways to make their love lives “hot and sexy.” Are you going to breathe a sigh of relief that someone else is telling your kid this stuff, or is your inner Bill O’Reilly going to surface? Maybe you’ll want to know what, pray tell, was wrong with the old euphemistic puberty puns and plastic pelvises?
Like it or not, Jansen isn’t the only person pushing for more “pleasure” in sex ed. The fact is, while parents were looking the other way, and many do prefer to look the other way, a substantial shift has been unfolding in the world of sexual education. The old model of simply mapping out basic anatomy and issuing warnings about diseases is giving way—not only in pockets of Canada, but also in the U.S. and abroad—to a pleasure-focused brand of sex education, which emphasizes the healthy and fun sides of sex. Its growing network of proponents sees pleasure-focused sex ed as an urgent necessity in an age of sexting, Internet porn, and Disney heroines-gone-wild. It’s not about advocating sex, they say. Rather, it’s the belief that radical openness will demystify sex and help give teens the confidence to make smarter choices. “What we have found is, if you talk about how to prevent STIs, youth tune you out,” says Jansen. “If you talk about how things work and what are the different options, they pay attention. There are safer-sex messages implicit in what we say, but it’s within a package that’s more interesting to them.”
Recently, Oprah Winfrey drew attention to the subject when her show’s resident sexpert, Dr. Laura Berman—a staunch pleasure proponent—introduced her audience to the idea of “cradle to grave” sex education. By Grade 2, she said, kids should know the truth about where babies come from. By Grade 5, masturbation, orgasm and the mechanics of sex should be covered, and by Grade 6, kids should know about “safer-sex” options. Perhaps most controversially, Berman told the audience of aghast moms that when their daughters hit 15 or 16, they might want to consider buying them a clitoral vibrator to teach them the joys of exploring their own bodies. The rationale, she says, is that it’s an opportunity to boost self-esteem: “You’re teaching them about pleasuring themselves and taking the reins of their own sexuality so that they don’t ever have to depend on any teenage boy to do it for them.” (As outrageous a birthday gift as it may seem, some parents are listening. In recent years, Jensen has started to notice more mothers coming into Good For Her with their daughters, ages 13 to 16, for precisely this purpose.)
In the U.S., a Washington-based non-profit called the Coalition for Positive Sexuality provides information, resources and an online forum to teens, advising them that access to candid sex information is their right. Its “Just Say Yes” campaign says, “we’re tired of people telling us what we can and can’t do. There’s no preaching. No moralizing. Just the facts.” In addition to all the standard safer-sex information, CPS’s website offers suggestions for safe and fun ways teens can “get off.” The idea being that if you want to steer kids away from the riskiest types of behaviours, you have to provide them with fun, creative alternatives. (Among its suggestions: “suck, kiss, touch, bite, fondle, nibble, squeeze, and lick” and “look at sexy pictures and videos.” The list gets more explicit from there.) One of CPS’s promotional posters features three teenage girls whispering to each other, one of whom is holding an open binder filled with little plastic bottles. “The secret to great sex . . .” the tag line reads: “water-based lube!”
