People always talk about the scene in Mean Girls where the coach says,
Don’t have sex.
Cause you will get pregnant, and die!
And, unfortunately, that’s kind of what’s going on in Gwinnett County.
Anything with the word sex is it is seen as taboo.
The sex ed that I experienced was shaming, misogynistic.
Most parents don’t know that crisis pregnancy centers are coming into public schools and
teaching their children sex education.
A lot of us grow up within the church.
And church is not just something that we go to on Sundays, it’s our community.
Religion and church is such an ingrained part of life in the South,
those lines often get blurred.
As someone who has been teaching sex ed for a long time, people often think about sexuality
as something you just kind of pick up as you go.
But that assumption that we have, that we don’t need to talk about sex, people will
just figure it out, kind of sets people up to have negative health outcomes.
What your regular lay person would say are just shitty situations.
Being someone who was sexually abused going into sex ed, I don’t want to be dramatic
and say horrific, but it really was horrific.
During the lessons the teacher said,
“See? This is what happens when you get used up, you stop working.”
Having lost my virginity, having been abused, I thought oh my gosh, I’m used up,
I don’t work anymore,
They don’t call it a virginity pledge anymore,
they call it a “Freedom Pledge.”
The implication, of course, being that if you are not a virgin, then you're incapable
of having a healthy relationship.
Or working towards a goal or being in control of your life.
This is a really nasty message.
Consent wasn’t in my vocabulary,
but that wasn’t the only thing that wasn’t in my vocabulary.
Boundaries were not in my vocabulary.
I didn’t know that if I felt uncomfortable about a situation, then I was able to say no.
My first relationship was not the most healthy relationship
a 14 year-old girl could have experienced.
I was pressured into doing a lot of physical things.
I remember sitting in class, feeling very ashamed.
Feeling very dirty.
I can teach somebody how to put on a condom correctly, but if I haven't taught them how
to talk to their partner about whether or not they want to use condoms, if I haven’t
taught what other methods are available and why they might want to choose them, and if
I haven’t taught them how to check in with themselves about what they’re comfortable
or not comfortable with, I haven’t really helped them.
The exercise that sticks out in my mind the most, is our health teacher, he had us all
suck on Jolly Ranchers.
He had a plastic bag being passed around and we had to take the Jolly Rancher out of our
mouth and put it in the bag.
Then he said, “Now, ok eat a Jolly Rancher!”
And everyone was like, “Ew, nobody wants to eat a Jolly Rancher!”
And he said, “Yeah, well, imagine if that’s a woman’s vagina.”
I left those lessons thinking that I was worthless.
That was sort of the beginning of the movement, if you will.
I’m the co-founder of Gwinnett Citizens for Comprehensive Sex Education.
GCCSE is an organization that we founded in order to attempt to change the sex ed curriculum.
In Gwinnett County, our curriculum is an abstinence-only curriculum and leaves out medically accurate
and scientifically accurate information that we feel kids need to be safe.
The next step was changing the curriculum.
Our goal was to have ten young ladies who had gone through this curriculum speak to
the school board directly.
The school board is 100% white and all over the age of 65.
We have people making decisions for our kids that don’t represent them well.
Having been abused, I left those lessons thinking that I was worthless and I was useless and
this was somehow my fault.
The lessons were a huge contributing factor of why I kept quiet about my abuse for 10 years.
I had lower expectations going up to the podium.
But once I was up there, I thought maybe some of the school board members would be open
to a dialogue, but there was none of that.
From there, it kind of went downhill.
I don’t know if you guys have seen the picture of Dr. Christine Ford testified in front of
the judiciary committee.
I related a bit to how she might have felt, just a little bit.
And not seeing anyone that looked like me, I knew that no one understood.
Nothing at all has changed.
If anything, they have dug their heels in more.
On a broader level, it’s certainly a big part of our national conversation about consent,
sexual assault and the Me Too movement.
What can we do about Me Too?
How can we resolve the situation?
And my answer is: comprehensive K through 12 sex education!
A lot of these kids don’t know where the line is.
And they don’t know how to talk about it.
They don’t know how to say that they don’t know.
This is a serious problem.
There are eight states in the United States who require that consent even be mentioned in sex ed.
Comprehensive sex ed isn’t just a pipe dream.
This curriculum actually changes peoples’ lives for the better.
I think Georgia should mandate schools to have comprehensive sex education because if
I had comprehensive sex ed, I think a lot of things would have been different.
I don’t even think comprehensive sex education should be a controversial topic because it’s
about learning about yourself and loving yourself, seeing and loving yourself as God loves you.
So if one person is able to not experience some of these experiences that I’ve had
in my life, then that’s really enough for me.