Growing up my first exposure to sex came from the steamy scene from Godfather by Mario Puzo which every girl in my class had dog eared from the school library and steamy porn videos i stumbled across on my tv through the cable operator post 2am. Yes, remember those days of a local cable operator who you paid to receive channels. I say this was my influence because no one in my family spoke about it. My exposure to sex in the family context was the shenanigans we would do to ‘trouble’ the newly married couple on their first night. I knew people did private things and I just assumed it was what the people did in the porn videos I had seen.
What a tunnel! I never thought of my exposure as being anything but an accurate description of what happened between 2 adults and sometimes more than 2 people in the bed. Today, I realise the fallacy of that belief and also recognise that, although I had early exposure, it was still a very curated exposure. The porn I saw was light and not as damaging as the content they have on sites like PornHub, which I came across in my 20s. After this, the world of sex did not look as 2 dimensional as I had earlier thought. It was not only about not getting pregnant, keeping your reputation or even contracting AIDs.
Now it was about preferences, violence, subjugation, rape and child abuse, right at the click of a button.
Through my 20s my friends and I would huddle in coffee shops and over glasses of wine sharing stories of our sexual experiences. Some of these were exciting, but many brought to light the issues we were having. Many of these issues were not because of a partner, but because of our own values around sex being quite skewed. We had been brought up to believe it was wrong, dirty and not something ‘good girls’ did. However, even though we were now all married women, we were not entirely able to shed that feeling of wrongness, to develop healthy attachments. The men didn’t feel like they could ask for help and the women didn’t feel like they could ask for pleasure. What this led to was a series of marital issues which I can trace back to the lack of conversations around sex and a healthy value system to support it.
I already knew when my kids were really little that I would need a lot more support and resources to navigate having these conversations with them. I could not depend on the universe to teach my children about sex, and most importantly about their own safety. We were living in Gurgaon at the time, where women’s safety and the male gaze is something that even a little girl was already extremely aware of.
Constant awareness and vigilance is important for safety, but how does it allow for pleasure? As a mother I didn’t want my children’s only exposure to sex to be about safety.
I knew too well that as an adult, in consenting relationships, sex is not only about safety but also about pleasure and important in creating a foundation for their future romantic relationships.
In fact, the state of proper sex education world over is so poor that -
Only 34 % of young people globally can demonstrate any knowledge of HIV prevention and transmission. Two out of three girls in some countries actually have no idea what is happening to them when they begin menstruating! These are some of the reasons why there is an urgent need for quality comprehensive sexuality education (CSE). - According to an article published by UNESCO.
There are over 2.3 million people older than 15 years old with the HIV infection. This is about 31% of the total population infected with AIDS/HIV, in India.
Even poorer is the state of prevention of other STIs with numbers below 20% for both genders (according to studies by IIPS and Population Council, 2010).
Did you know that 8% of all surveyed unmarried young women are not even aware of a single means of contraception and protection?
Safety concerns don't end at STD’s… Nearly 50% of boys and girls, both, experience sexual abuse in their childhood/adolescence, in India, according to a survey by the Ministry of Women and Child Development. It is the responsibility of parents & adults to empower these young people with the knowledge and tools they need to protect themselves against this abuse.
With safety being at the top of the list of reasons to have these conversations with your children, they also need information about their own bodies, about anatomy and the concept of “safe touch”.
Children who have been educated about sex are likely to take educated decisions when it comes to their sexual activities, and are able to protect themselves against unwanted advances / pressure from other people.
At the end of it all, society would be well advised to remember that sex is a natural part of human life, even beyond the need of reproduction. Animals in the wild are born with innate instincts that guide them when seeking mates, but the human experience of life is so vastly different and intricate, with value & culture differences from population to population - so we cannot be expected to figure all this out on our own!
This workshop is born out of the explorations & contemplation of a young woman - myself, right from when I was just 12 years old. It is a topic I have flirted with and wondered how to adequately capture, with the goal of bringing up a generation that feels comfortable and safe when talking or thinking about sex, or any other sensitive topic, for that matter. A generation that is as comfortable saying no as it is saying yes. One that holds sex as just a doorway to intimacy, not as intimacy itself. The idea is not to change anyone's value or belief system. There is as much respect given to those who value their virginity as there is to those who value their sexual activity.
These sessions are designed to help us - the parents - understand what exactly we are navigating. Since we don't have a prototype for this conversation, since we were never really spoken to - we don't have the words or understanding of what to say and when to say it.
These sessions will help parents create their unique roadmap that they can refer to, whenever they are feeling lost, over the next many years in their parenting journey.
The topic of sex can not be limited to an anatomical discussion. It is about creating trust, exploring values and understanding safety and consent. In this workshop, we cover not only tools that will support us through these difficult conversations, but we will also dive into our own feelings & values that surround these subjects.
Register Now for THAT DIFFICULT TALK
20th & 27th November, 4th December at 10:30am
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