- Hey guys, I'm here with my good friend Ani Easton Baker,
former educator turned documentary filmmaker.
You made a documentary called
"Who's Your Teacher?"
that you've been working on for quite a bit.
- I did.
(both laughing)
- I honestly really love this doc!
So you showed a cut to me
asking me for some notes and stuff
and I just thought it was so important and so needed,
you know, a documentary about the lack of Sex Education
in the school system right now.
I mean, I can definitely speak from experience.
I thought getting pregnant meant,
like, putting your nipples on somebody else's nipples.
The first time I masturbated I used a banana
'cause that's what I saw on TV and in film,
but I used a condom,
so I felt like I was having safe sex.
- I was gonna ask.
- Ani is also doing an entire series after this
about Sex Education.
I really loved this documentary
and honestly, I thought that you guys would love it as well.
So without further ado: WHO'S YOUR TEACHER?
- Okay.
So.
This is a compilation
of some questions that some 5th graders
in a Sex Ed class
wrote down and put into the question box
that their teacher set up for them.
I'm just gonna read some of them out loud because they are
both frightening and extremely entertaining.
"Is it danger to have a big breast
and the other small?"
Good question, the answer is no.
"What's pussy?"
"Where do the boys have to put their peanuts
when they do sex?"
"Why do the boys peanuts gets up?"
"Sex is sucking penis."
This one is written in all caps,
"SEX IS SUCKING PENIS.
WHY DO GIRLS HATE THIS."
Period.
"OUR YOU PREGNANT"
(upbeat music)
"Why is your pubic hair curly?"
"Can a dog have sex with a human girl?"
"Why is sex important?"
"If a girl has her period and she has sex
what happens to her?"
"What happens if you see a condom..."
"Why do boys get more power to do the sex?"
(questions overlapping)
"Is sex the most dangerous thing in life?"
That's my favorite one.
(upbeat music)
I would like to envision a world in the future
where there is a mandatory class in every grade level
that just teaches people how to be people.
And I don't think we should call it Sex Ed.
In 2016, after years of frustration
with the public school system,
I gave up my teaching position to explore the ways
that our nation's Sex Education is lacking.
Heavy on my mind was a question
about how a lack of comprehensive Sex Education,
combined with full access to information online,
was shaping our nation's youth.
Everyone's afraid of the word "sex,"
take it out of the equation
and call it Human Relations and start it in Kindergarten.
Because as a teacher,
I
saw firsthand
how there is literally absolutely no education
for people on how to be people.
And what they can and can't do
with all of their like,
raging feelings and anxiety
and fear and insecurity and hormones. All of that stuff,
how we relate to each other, later on becomes sexuality, it
definitely doesn't start as sexuality.
Why would you not want
your children or our nation's children to be more informed
about what to do and what not to do with their bodies?
Because the feelings are natural
and they're going to happen
whether we educate them or not.
Teachers and parents
are no longer the primary source of information,
as it goes right now.
Kids are just using the internet to find out
about their curiosity about sex.
Interestingly enough, I started this project
like a year before the #MeToo movement started to unfold.
Every single story that I saw break
during the #MeToo movement
struck me as
the by-product of
lack of education.
And I think the people that are afraid
of more education are just also victims
of being undereducated themselves.
The more information from educated professionals the better.
Sex Ed, or as I'm now going to refer to it from here on out:
Human Relations,
is not going to
create an interest inside of a person
that doesn't already exist.
Sex right now, the topic of sex is so taboo
and treated with such shame and fear
that it becomes a fear-based
vitriolic, ugly topic.
(upbeat music)
So, when I started working
on this project a couple of years ago,
I started, I set Google alerts for Sex Ed laws in America
and Sex Education
and started compiling some articles
that were pertinent to the topic
and just sort of reading
about how people felt across the nation,
other teachers, parents, students.
This conversation is
happening
everywhere.
There are a lot of pushes toward better Sex Ed.
There are a lot of pushbacks,
specifically by our current administration
who wants to go back to "abstinence only,"
but it's definitely a hot topic right now.
"Sex Education Allows Campus Betterment, Studies Show"
"Are We Lying In Sex Ed Class?"
I have found the answer to that question to be Yes.
Believe it or not only 24 states make Sex Ed mandatory
and only 13 of those states
require that their Sex Ed be medically accurate.
Beyond that, when researching whether or not
the current curriculum includes LGBTQ+ issues,
I found very disappointing results.
One of the articles that I came across
really stood out to me
because it was written by a French adult film star,
her name's Nikita Bellucci.
She says, she's "fed up with educating kids online"
and "she fumes over families lacking Sex Ed."
And she basically goes on to say that
because there's such a lack
of appropriate and comprehensive information,
she's been thrust into the role
of pseudo educator.
And she gets messages from young people all the time
asking her questions like,
"I want to do this, how do I go about it?"
Or, "This is happening to my body,
can you give me information about that?"
Because she's not afraid to talk about sex
and people in the school system
who are supposed to educate are afraid.
There is a profound lack of information across the nation.
Young people are educating themselves about sex by Googling.
And since porn comes up when you Google sex questions,
adult film stars are becoming educators
whether they choose to or not.
So I reached out to six adult film stars directly
about the types of internet messages they receive
from undereducated young people.
We also talked about what their own Sex Education was like
and about what they think
about the state of Sex Ed in America right now.
(keyboard clattering)
- A lot of people reach out to me
for information because I work in the sex industry.
I've had people that I've gone to school with,
I've had fans,
I've had
a lot of different people just ask me for information.
Sometimes I get things that are a little bit more personal
and have to do with
their mental state and their emotional state and
different things about their sexuality
whereas other times I have people
coming and asking me for advice on sex
like what positions are best,
what type of lube to use,
how to have anal sex safely,
you know, just different things.
I get asked a lot.
I actually am very surprised
by some of the questions that I get.
I've had people questioning their sexuality,
like, I have a friend who has a girlfriend
and he's also interested in males,
but he was asking me, he was like, "Does this make me gay?"
- [Ani] Right.
- I'm like, no, I mean, if you like both,
that makes you Bi that doesn't make you gay and
for me, I feel like that's a little bit like, cut and dry.
It's pretty out there,
it's very straight forward,
but a lot of people don't understand that
because those things don't get discussed.
- People have
reached out to me via DM or email
asking me personal questions about,
well, "What do you think about this?"
And like, a sexual preference thing
and at first I'm looking at this question
from this grown-ass man and I'm like,
who the fuck cares about what I think about pegging?
Why are you asking me this?
And then I realize,
beyond not being educated, not everybody is
as curious or has access to the things that I did
and maybe I'm someone that they feel comfortable
with just even asking,
so I kind of took it back to that and, "Okay,
I can answer some of these questions."
(keyboard clattering)
Honestly, I remember at the age of 5,
stumbling across my dad's Playboys in his office
and I was like enthralled, I was fascinated.
I couldn't stop going into that room
and looking at those women.
I connected with them.
Like, I wanted to see them,
I wanted to be them.
I kept wanting to be around them.
I just, I couldn't get enough of them.
- I actually learned about sex
at an extremely young age by mistake.
So one day my dad was napping
and I knew how to work the VHS player
and I couldn't read yet.
I accidentally put a porno in because he didn't put it away.
He had a movie just sitting on top,
no box or anything.
I thought it was one of my Disney movies.
Yeah.
- It wasn't for a while 'til I-
'cause we didn't have internet at my house-
this is still before, you know,
all you kids, you have internet on your phones,
we didn't have that.
So this was before I could go fucking fact check this shit
and I remember like thinking of that for a long time until
I saw a porno and
then I got more information from
what, at least a female body looked like, from porn.
- It was probably about age 12.
Curiosity and desire and
sort of
seeking
like a reciprocal
attraction
with my friend who lived across the street.
And so she and I like,
we didn't talk about it like a sex thing,
it was just a game that we were playing,
but it was totally like we both like knew.
And so we kind of messed around a little bit.
- Well, I suppose it would start at,
you know, probably the kind of cliché age like,
sexual awakening probably around like 10.
You know, first you just feel the butterflies in your tummy.
So I guess maybe that was a little bit younger
maybe 8 or 9,
but then at 11, you know,
you start figuring out
what to do with those feelings.
(upbeat music)
- I remember the class in 5th grade.
I remember the class in 5th grade
because none of us were taking it seriously.
We were all like, we were split between boys and girls,
so the boys' group and then the girls' group.
And
like everybody was just laughing
and giggling and telling jokes
when the diagram came on
with the like, floppy dick cut in half
and we were just like (giggling)
and like, none of us were taking it seriously.
We were just like, oh, this is so fun.
Let's fuck around and play in the hallways
and go to the bathroom
and share what we're learning.
"Learning." Not really.
And it was just silly.
There were only
biological health classes after that.
Never did it ever go back to sexuality.
- Even in high school, I did health class
and I remember what I learned from that was,
I saw a video of a woman giving birth
and also:
"You have sex, unprotected,
you'll get AIDs and die."
- Porn is fantasy,
for adults.
We don't look at any other
form of fantasy media,
whether it's action movies or horror movies or whatever,
we don't turn to that to teach us life skills.
We don't ask The Fast And The Furious
to teach kids Driver's Ed, right?
It's a really common example
that we love to give in porn, but it's true.
Like we don't place those demands
on any other form of media but somehow with porn,
we expect it to be instructional.
And that's not the point of most porn.
There certainly is some porn
that exists to teach people about sex
and it, I think it does a really good job.
But
when it comes down to it,
this is a problem that society has created
and it's a problem that society
is going to have to come up with a solution to.
(keyboard clattering)
I didn't have an adult that I spoke to.
There wasn't really a grown up.
It was just my friends.
That was sort of where I got
a little bit more of my sexual understanding.
Like I would talk to my friends about sex
because they'd already had sex and they were my age
and I trusted them.
And so that's where I got,
I would say most of my actual information.
They were not very reliable people,
either. I mean, they were teenagers.
- Ideally it would always help if you had someone older
who would give you the information
and that you could actually bounce things off of like,
"I feel a little weird
because I get boners in P.E.
and I'm trying to figure out do with my shorts.
My shorts make it feel good
'cause they're made out of that basketball material,
and so I don't know what to do."
"Are the girl's gonna laugh at me?"
"Is my dick too small?" You ask him.
Or for girls, you ask her.
So.
(keyboard clattering)
- I'd have to say the biggest downside
to young people using porn
to learn things would probably be
the fact that
they just don't learn about the personal side of it.
I feel like porn is
very separate with emotions.
It's not as emotional, it's not as much about love.
It's more about just fucking, having fun.
You know,
I feel like it could fuck you over relationship-wise
in your personal life if you
just expect it to be an in and out type of deal
instead of having the love
and the passion and the feelings behind it.
And a lot of the times in porn,
it's all about the lust and about random hookups.
It's not about creating an actual bond
and exploring each other sexually
on a romantic or sensual level.
(upbeat music)
- It depends on how you look at it.
I would say it's not fully instructional,
but I would say that it can teach people a lot of things.
- There's very few sites
or very few places you would wanna go to porn
and think that's reality.
That's what you get most time from porn,
at least the way,
looking from, me young, before I got into it,
I would look at this and be like,
okay, I need to go as fast as possible
and as hard as possible 'cause that's what makes girls cum.
It's not.
(keyboard clattering)
- People are growing up not knowing themselves,
finding themselves in porn
because that's the only area they see a transgender person
or that's the only area they see
gender-fluid people having sex.
Like if they feel gender-fluid,
there's unique porn and stuff out there like that,
but there's no like, regular TV shows
or images where people are interacting,
going to coffee together, being like, "Hey, what's up?"
Calling each other They,
so they understand this is regular behavior.
That's part of
bad education too.
- Maybe they're never gonna think about Mark Twain again,
but they're definitely going to live in their bodies
and be just bombarded
by sexual imagery for the rest of their lives.
They're almost certainly gonna have sex
a lot more than they're gonna think
about Mark Twain going forward in their lives.
There's just so, it's so much more impactful,
it's such a big part of their identity
that to just gloss over it and pretend it doesn't exist,
it's harmful to kids
and it's doing them a huge disservice.
(upbeat music)
- [Ani] Nina Hartley is a legendary adult film star
who has been imbuing her films with education
since the start of her career in the 1980s.
Her unique perspective and her desire to educate
solidified her
as an individual, with a powerful voice.
She is also an author and an activist
and she has an Honorary Doctorate
from the Institute For Advanced Study
Of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.
I am fortunate to have been able to receive her feedback
on sex and Sex Ed
and to get her take on why both subjects scare people
so gosh darn much.
- It's like putting spinach in your brownies,
I was always putting Sex Education in my movies.
I love the idea of rebranding Sex Ed
as Human Relations because
Sex Ed makes it all about genitals
and genitals are the least of it, they're the last of it.
All the things we can do with in the bedroom
are a deck of 52 cards,
let's take out the two most dangerous: a penis in a vagina
and a penis in an anus, and put those cards over here.
Now we have 50 cards
of things we can do
that don't result in death and babies
and stressing you out for finals.
Can we find a way to express our sexuality
in a way that does not also increase stress,
fear, worry, and All The Things?
There is first a social intercourse,
the face-time,
the human training.
How do I state my needs?
How can I hear your needs without being upset?
How can I say... The best answer
when someone says, "No thank you" is,
"Thank you for taking care of yourself."
That's the answer.
"No" is complete sentence
and should not have to have any pushback from that.
As we're becoming sexually confident people,
we are going to make mistakes.
We're gonna get our feelings hurt.
We're gonna be absolutely humiliated
and mortified and want to DIE
for whatever reason.
And know that that's part of becoming
a sexually literate person.
If you wanna remain a technical virgin
until you're married, fine.
But then in the meantime...
Okay, we're gonna save the penis and the vagina thing
for our special day, but what can we do before then
that helps us learn to be with each other
and learn to...
What do we dislike?
Is there books we can look at together?
Are there other ways that we can
develop being intimate with each other
without putting a penis into a vagina
which if you say that's special -okay-
but to go from nothing, nothing, nothing,
okay: WEDDING NIGHT. It's a recipe for disaster.
If you talk to a lot of people
who are raised in very conservative religious homes,
their wedding nights were horrible.
(keyboard clattering)
The most detrimental thing
about continuing on the path now in regards to Sex Education
is that it's not working.
It is not reducing violence.
It is not reducing unintended pregnancy.
It is not reducing STIs.
It is not reducing trauma.
It's not reducing ignorance.
It's not reducing isolation.
It's not reducing alienation.
It's not reducing self-loathing.
The mind-body split
goes back thousands of years.
The idea of: the spirit
is somehow clean and holy in the body's base.
But,
even though I'm not Christian,
I have a friend who is and she says,
"You know, God can make people.
God can make anybody he wants.
God can make it come out of your ear.
God can make come out of your nose.
God chose,
God CHOSE
a woman's vagina
to introduce his son to the world.
Why do we hate that body part so much?"
(keyboard clattering)
- One of the really important pieces of the puzzle to me
in highlighting all of the reasons why
we have to make Sex Ed more comprehensive,
is talking to people who are already doing that
with the power that they have.
So, I'm gonna go talk to a woman
named Lynda Nguyen
who in the wake of the #MeToo movement
founded an organization
called The Magic of Psalm
which exists to create curriculum for young people
to understand their bodies,
to understand desire,
to understand the concept of boundaries and consent.
And she's rolling it out
in schools right now.
I am really eager to talk to Lynda,
as a former educator myself,
about what it's like on the front lines,
educating kids in a complete way.
I was able to catch up with her,
she's in town in LA for a few days.
We're gonna go talk to her now,
let's see what she has to teach us.
- I've been doing this work
with training women and training leaders for a long time
to really come to terms with their own body,
with their own women's empowerment
their sexuality and everything too because
I didn't come into my own sexual empowerment until my 30s.
And it took me a long time
because I never had the adequate education.
So there was a lot of insecurity, a lot of fear
and a lot of like, not knowing if this body was even mine.
So you know, "Do I owe you something for that
gift that you gave me
or that lunch that you brought me?"
And so just those kinds of like really limited beliefs
hindered me from really
being in my own body,
really owning my sexuality and everything too.
And with a lot of the #MeToo movement,
I realized that I've been doing this work all along
but I've been working with
a lot of 40 and 50 year old women.
So the root of it is to really help educate the young ones.
And so we stepped into the high schools
and we decided to create a curriculum
that is not only comprehensive,
medically accurate, but also restorative
so that we're not judging or shaming
but we're just delivering this education
in very unbiased,
very clear, and like, just fact of the matter kind of way.
Luckily, in our generation moving forward,
I feel like now the teachers are speaking up.
They're saying like, no,
you go out there and you tell the boys
or you tell your child that that's not acceptable
and that you can say No.
And that even if they gave you a gift
or they bought you lunch or you went on a date,
you know, you don't have to have sex.
You don't have to go where you don't wanna go.
And even if you kissed them,
you still can step away and go,
"Thank you so much, I'll see you tomorrow."
The eight women that I work with,
they happen to be in my larger community
and the majority of them are Sex Educators,
Yogis,
counselors, coaches, professional coaches,
and one of my founding members,
she is a Principal.
In five years, I want to see our core curriculum,
the two, at least--
the comprehensive Sex Ed and
medically accurate Empowerment Training
to be online,
digitally distributed,
nationwide, globally if possible,
and also the other core curriculum too
which is the Sexual Harassment Communications.
I wanna make sure that we're funded
and we're supported
in a way that can sustain us as leaders too
and to bring this and to pitch it to the Districts,
to pitch it to the different communities
and networks and stuff so that we can
just give this away for free if we can.
That's the whole point of the nonprofit is that,
help us now,
so that eventually we can give this away
to the students and to the survivors
who might need to know that they're not alone.
What are we gonna do now?
Instead of just crying online,
we gotta go out there and make something happen.
I cannot see a downside of educating people
to understand their body.
I see a downside of educating them
that it's wrong to talk about their body.
We've seen it, we've witnessed it.
I've experienced it personally.
So
this education will empower everybody.
And we'll heal ourselves,
we'll heal our grandparents,
we'll heal our generations next and stuff
and just we need to start healing ourselves
both the men and the women.
And we need to have this conversation in a very,
fact of the matter, very transparent, very authentic way
where, "Actually I don't even know what I'm doing,
but I'm confused and this is what I'm feeling in my body,
so let's talk about it."
- When I was 7 years old
I thought I had sex with my Raggedy Ann doll
because I had recreated the chest-kissing
from the sex scene in the 1991 Ron Howard classic,
BACKDRAFT.
My dad was watching it on VHS
and I was so mesmerized by that sex scene
on top of the firetruck
that I reenacted it with my doll that night.
And the next morning I woke up
filled with so much shame because I had had SEX.
How could I have had sex?
Sex was for Billy Baldwin
and Jennifer Jason Leigh, not for me.
So I moped around so intensely that morning that my mom
finally asked me to tell her what was bothering me
and I burst into sobs and confessed
that I had, in fact, had sex... with my Raggedy Ann doll.
So this led to my mom openly laughing at me
and then explaining sex to me
which was just the bare minimum mechanics
of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman.
You know, a penis enters a vagina,
ejaculation leads to a baby
and that's all there is to it,
so don't ask any more questions.
And that was the entirety of my Sex Education because
sex before marriage was a sin in my household.
So I was shielded from any further information about it
and public school taught me basically nothing else.
Everything I know now about my body
and my rights and my hormones,
my emotions, my sexual orientation,
I've had to learn the hard way.
And these lessons, when learned the hard way,
cause so much damage
to mental, physical, emotional and psychological health,
which makes life
a lot harder than it has to be.
We have the technology,
the information
and the ability to educate thoroughly.
So, I hold the radical belief that
comprehensive education about our bodies
should be a human right.
And in the meantime, while we wait for that to happen,
I have some ideas for how to educate better right now.
Who's your teacher?
I'm Ani Easton Baker, stay tuned.
"What would happen if the male has a narrow urethra
and he still tries to give birth?"
And then we're on to, "If a man fucks with a cow,
does the cow scream if she's a virgin."
Period.
"Do you like bing pan--ished?"
"Do you like being punished?" is what this question says.
- [off camera] Whoaaaa.
"If the vagina bleeds,
can you die?"
Yes.
Yes, you can.
What does
"tossing salad" mean?
Correct use of quotations. Should be mentioned.
"Why don't boys get monthly visits like periods?"
Same question.
Also on the back it says,
"Can I fuck you hardcore?"
(off-camera laughing)
(upbeat music)