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1/ people always ask me: “how do I become a sex educator like you?” and I always want to answer that question by asking another question—why exactly do you want to be a sex educator? and what are you actively doing right now to decolonize your own sexuality?
2/ people think that sex education is easy—particularly because of what they observe on the internet: the sensual selfies, the dildo collections, the overuse of words like ‘pleasure’, ‘sensuality’, ‘orgasm’, and they try to replicate it because they want the fun parts of sex ed
3/ but sex ed is not always fun or pretty. it’s hard, grueling work—not because of what we do for others but what we’re ultimately healing, challenging, decolonizing within ourselves. real sex ed starts with you first & foremost, and many of y’all aren’t doing that deep work.
4/ what you’re doing is observing bits & pieces of what pioneers within this field have done (people who’ve been doing this for decades), taking the things that can quickly be touted as being “sex posi”, and then replicating it for your own gain. and it shows.
5/ people (your clients, followers) are often intuitive enough to see these bastardizations; they can trace the origins; they can sense that you don’t yet have the depth that gets accumulated over years of inner work to help lead them through their own traumas and reclamations.
6/ we don’t need anymore yoni egg peddlers or dildo slingers or imitators. we need people whose sex education involves actively dismantling deeply entrenched systems of oppression that drive the need for sex education in the first place. & many of y’all don’t have that range.
7/ it’s understandable—that work is hard, tiring, scary. it involves getting super familiar w our trauma, internalized isms, w the purity, whorephobic culture all our sexual identities have been founded on. doing that work for ourselves is hard, nevermind leading others thru it
8/ true sexual liberation goes beyond sensual selfies & instagrammable videos of one dancing w dildos (literally anyone can do that). it’s about getting to the root of how white supremacist patriarchal capitalism dislocates us from our power, our pleasure, our bodily autonomy.
9/ it’s only in working to excavate that root & tending to our personal healing that lasting sexual liberation can happen. we need sex education because those systems of oppression exist. the work must have a foundation in uprooting those systems. otherwise what is it for?
10/ all that I’m talking about here has nothing to do with academia or degrees, with certificates or thick books (though those can help). this is about core values, personal accountability, & deep study that can only be found in the personal journey of our own sexual healing.
11/ anyone can read a book or talk about orgasms—but do they embody the work? do they put their body where their politics are? do they walk their talk? and if so, what specific actions are they taking within that walk?
12/ I implore budding sex educators to interrogate within themselves why they’re feeling led to this field, to really pick apart the reasons why, and to ask themselves how they’re going to contribute to dismantling the -isms within their education work.
13/ also: give props and gratitude to the sex educators you’re inspired by and have been out here doing this unglamorous work for decades. they have pioneered these paths with their philosophies and frameworks that you are tripping over yourself to walk on.
14/ never forget that you wouldn’t even be contemplating getting into sex education if it weren’t for them. and lastly—don’t judge a person’s sexual education prowess by their follower count. some of the best sex educators in the world are the ones you’ve never heard of.
