Permission for Pleasure
A podcast to educate and equip women with the information and confidence they need to express, experience and enjoy their sexuality. Cindy Scharkey RN, BSN, brings her 35+ years of experience as a healthcare professional to open the doors to healthy conversations about sex. This is a community where you can listen and learn to give yourself permission for pleasure. Visit www.cindyscharkey.com for educational blogs and newsletter.
Permission for Pleasure
Why Sex Ed Really Matters
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Silence is the enemy of sexual health education and most people go through life experiencing this silence. Join Dr. Kristen Mark and I for a discussion about why sex education really matters for our children, for adults, and for all of us throughout our lifespan. We can never truly have enough education about sexuality because we are constantly changing, as are our bodies and relationships. You’ll hear what the data shows about comprehensive sex education, how couples can navigate sexual difficulties, and the importance of pleasure as part of the conversation!
Kristen Mark, PhD, MPH, CSE is the Joycelyn Elders endowed chair in sexual health education and tenured professor at the Institute for Sexual and Gender Health in the University of Minnesota Medical School.
www.kristenmark.com
theabstinenceproject.com
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When we are providing youth with information and we're equipping them with accurate information, they will make informed decisions. We don't accept that here. We insert our morals and our beliefs into that and think if we tell kids about sex, then they're gonna go have sex. The data just don't support that. No, they won't, actually. They they have sex less if we tell them about sex.
SPEAKER_00Hello and welcome to season two of Permission for Pleasure. I'm Cindy Sharkey, your host, and I'm delighted you're here for this episode. We're gonna discuss a topic that's near and dear to my heart, and that is comprehensive sex education. I'm sure you may have heard me say, silence is the enemy when it comes to sex education. Well, friends, today's guest for life work is breaking that silence. We have Dr. Kristen Mark with us, who is the Jocelyn Elders Endowed Chair in Sexual Health Education, continued professor at the Institute for Sexual and Gender Health in the University of Minnesota Medical School. Her work examines the importance of comprehensive and inclusive sexual health education and sexual well-being throughout the lifespan. I love that. Welcome to the show, Dr. Mark.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me, Cindy.
SPEAKER_00You have a lot of research and projects going on. So you have an abstinence project going on that I would love to hear more about.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the abstinence project. I think when some people hear that name, they think, they initially think like, oh, that's not quite what I thought you'd be doing. But that's sort of the purpose. Um the purpose of the abstinence project is to expose the harms of abstinence-only sex education and um really promote comprehensive, inclusive sex education as the only viable option for sex education. And it's done through the art of storytelling. We find that when people are told more of a personal story when it comes to issues that they have strong opinions about or that they maybe don't know a lot about, then that personal story can go a really long way in bringing people onto a greater understanding, appreciation, even just empathy for a cause. And so we called it the abstinence project on purpose because we really wanted to make sure that when somebody Googles abstinence-only sex ed or when somebody Googles like abstinence, that they come across our site as one of the first places that they go in order to make sure that they know that there are actually harms associated with abstinence-only sex ed. And abstinence is certainly an important component of comprehensive sex ed. It just can't be the only message.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Okay, and how did you come to this work exactly? You know, just a few moments about how you came to this work and why it's important to you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think it's really important in large part because I mean, when I was growing up, we did not have comprehensive, inclusive sex ed. I grew up in Canada and there wasn't any of that there. I began teaching at a university level, and none of those students were getting comprehensive sex ed. Their first exposure to it was really in the context of my undergraduate course. Now I see too, now that I'm more mid-career, I still see that we aren't getting comprehensive sex education in the schools. So these are multiple decades long of a history of people not getting inclusive and comprehensive sex ed. So if they're not getting it in the schools, where are they getting it? The answer to that is really nowhere, actually. So we need to find out ways to integrate these messages about how to pursue a healthy sex life and how to pursue healthy relationships and how to express consent. And like sex education is far more than just like the behavioral act of sex, it encompasses so much more than that. And we need to be teaching young people about that to empower them to make decisions that are good for their own lives. So that's really what drove this project and what drove me getting into the sex education world. Additionally, a lot of people are really uncomfortable talking about this stuff, as I'm sure you know in your work. And I'm not. So I felt like um early on in my undergraduate career, I started to sort of realize, like, oh, a lot of people are really uncomfortable with this stuff. And I'm not, and I find it fascinating. So maybe this is a field I should explore.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm so glad that you did, Kristen. And this is such important work. And I I kind of have a saying of we're all homeschoolers with our children when it comes to sexual health education, really trying to encourage parents to be the sexual health educator in their home. And they can, they they really can do it, and their kids want it to be them. It is a little work to empower and give parents confidence to do so. Especially, like you said, when we all grew up with none.
SPEAKER_01Right. So that's the problem with relying on parents, too, though, right? Because parents don't necessarily know what to teach. They don't know that content, they don't know how to go about it properly. Like the number of parents that I hear from who are like, I just don't even know where to start, or how many parents are really uncomfortable talking about it. And honestly, talking to your parents about sex is kind of hard if your parent is like squirming in their seat. So if we could, you know, find ways to educate parents and to make parents a little bit more comfortable with this stuff, that would go a really long way. And I would love to see parents be more comfortable with it and and kids want that from their parents. But at this point, I find that we just have a really long way to go in educating everyone to be able to get to that spot.
SPEAKER_00Well, and the education is not just for the kids. The older I get, and I'm in the over 55 crowd, right? So the older I get, the more I realize that the comprehensive sex education needs to just continue throughout our lifetime. Because as we age and change, we still don't have the, you know, as a nurse, I'll bring in things about, you know, what erectile dysfunction is versus just being dissatisfied with your your erections, right? Or I'm just using an example. It's like it's like so many people my age don't know anything past, you know, this, this, and this in high school and college, and then here we are.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, across the lifespan for sure. I mean, and even just look at attitudes toward people as they age engaging in sex, right? We see like so many negative attitudes around that. But wouldn't it be so great if we could have healthy sex lives until the day we die? Like that would be amazing.
SPEAKER_00I'm raising my hand over here.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Everyone should be able to have that, and that should be celebrated rather than something that we sort of stigmatize in our culture.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Uh, you spent some time in the Netherlands. I've heard you talk about that and their education. Did that sort of speak into the work you're doing now? What you did you teach over there?
SPEAKER_01I did, yeah. I create, I created a program, um, a sex education program that um allowed for my students. I was at University of Kentucky for 10 years before I moved to University of Minnesota. And my students at University of Kentucky would come and learn about the Dutch model for sex education, where they have comprehensive, inclusive sex ed from preschool onward every single year, and it's federally mandated. And so we learned from that system and what that looked like and how it was developmentally appropriate at each age and the strategies that they used in order to implement sex education in that way. And we tried to bring some of that back to the state of Kentucky, which is, as you can imagine, an interesting, um an interesting cultural context to contrast that against. I'm also I'm going to be running that program again in 2023 through University of Minnesota, um, where we'll do the same thing, where we take students there and learn about their model. Now, they're far from perfect. I would say they're doing a lot of things right, and their STI rates show that they're doing a lot of things right, their unintended pregnancy rates show that they're doing a lot of things right. Both of those rates are very low, um, comparatively speaking, especially to the United States. So they're doing a lot right, but I think learning from the places where they still need improvement is also really helpful in our learning. You know, how to get teachers on the same page and have all of them teaching similar content, how to make sure that all of the teachers are comfortable with the material. Not everyone is comfortable with this, right? Everyone has and brings their own personal beliefs to the table. And that can play a role in how they educate their students. So thinking about those types of things is really important when we um try and apply the Dutch model here is like what is also not working there, and what can we do to prevent that from not working here if we could get a better sex education system in place.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so tell me like two or three things that they are doing that you have noticed and want to bring here.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, certainly like comprehensive from preschool onward, starting really, really young, like before kindergarten. Um, and at that time, what sex education teaches is things like bodily autonomy and comfort with telling a trusted adult something that's wrong with your genitals or something that um if someone were to touch your genitals. So that teaches them that bodily autonomy piece and that consent piece that then travels with them throughout their the rest of their development. We don't get that in the United States. We don't learn about consent, period, let alone in preschool. Um, we don't learn about bodily autonomy, we don't learn about how to use the right words for our genitals, the the sort of um anatomically correct words for our genitals. That all of that stuff is taught from a very, very young age. And we see that that results in a cultural shift that we need to have here. Like that is a cultural difference between the Netherlands and the United States, is that they are very pragmatic about that. It's just like, yeah, that is my Vulva, and I, you know, know how to advocate for myself in who I do and do not want touching it, you know, and that's really powerful.
SPEAKER_00When you say pragmatic, Kristen, do you mean there isn't so much of the shame piece?
SPEAKER_01Totally. There's not so much of the shame piece. There's also, you know, they know that the data are clear that when we are providing youth with information and we're equipping them with accurate information, they will make informed decisions. We don't accept that here. We insert our morals and our beliefs into that and think if we tell kids about sex, then they're gonna go have sex. The data just don't support that. No, they won't actually. They they have sex less if we tell them about sex, because that curiosity is satisfied by having the information at hand. Whereas if you if they're left to figure that out themselves, if they're left without that information, then that curiosity, they explore that and they want to know more information. And how do they find out that information? Well, they talk to their friends about it and they experiment and they try and find out themselves. The pragmatic piece is that the Dutch know that, and obviously I'm making broad strokes here, not every single Dutch person is like this, and there are plenty of these folks in um the USA, including myself. But like if you were to um, you know, provide that information, then they know that that information is powerful and that that information actually, even if they're uncomfortable with it, will improve the health of the nation. And that is that's the piece.
SPEAKER_00It's interesting because I'm thinking even if we could normalize the curiosity for kids, the curiosity for teens, the curiosity for young adults. I mean, the curiosity is normal. It is the way we're wired, and especially kids. But I'm just listening to you say, you know, to give education to uh satisfy the curiosity instead of maybe unhealthy behaviors or unhealthy sources or you know, all of that. That's fascinating to me, that piece of it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and isn't it wonderful that we're curious? Like that's such a wonderful component of the human experience. And why don't we sort of um cultivate that and allow for us to explore that? In the Netherlands, for example, their science museum is called the Nemo Museum in Amsterdam specifically. The Nemo Museum has an entire floor dedicated to puberty and sexual and gender and relationship development. And this floor is in type is in is meant for teenagers to go and explore and find out more information. There's a section that's closed off a little bit that is um more sexually explicit, and you have to be 14 years old in order to enter that section, but 14, right? Because that's you know, the normal age within which kids start to really have curious questions about sex. And in that section, there is more sexually explicit things like um they have a recording of someone orgasming during masturbation, and they explain what masturbation is and why someone might want to orgasm, all scientifically sound. And a 14-year-old or up can go in there and put headphones on and can listen to someone orgasm and can know what that means. And that is just incredible to me. I mean, we would never have anything like that here. They also have all of these sex toys on display, and they have all of this, like it's just sexual pleasure is a human right, and they acknowledge that there. And we just don't here.
SPEAKER_00Well, sexual pleasure is one of the big pieces that's left out of sex ed in the United States for sure. It's I think it's a lot of why I'm doing what I'm doing, right? With the permission for pleasure podcast. I find that that especially women don't have framework for pleasure as being, you know, any part of their education. And then there's not a real understanding about what that means for them and what's available to them. And so you're you have done some you've done some work in this area, Kristen, specifically on pleasure.
SPEAKER_01Right. We just published a paper. Um, so the World Association for Sexual Health just um released a declaration for sexual pleasure in um really declaring sexual pleasure as a human right and as an integral component of sexual health and sexual well-being. And so, in a special issue of the International Journal for Sexual Health, we published a paper that looked at what empirically is happening with the integration of sexual pleasure in the context of comprehensive and inclusive sex education. The answer to that is not much. And we proposed why it is very important to moving forward integrate sexual pleasure into those models of sex education, inclusive and pleasure-centric sex education, and why that's important. And we um came up with a conceptual model that really outlined how we see sexual pleasure fitting into all of these components of sexual health. Like teaching people about sexual pleasure is crucial for understanding things like um sexual consent and agency, and understanding that the pursuit of pleasure is different than the pursuit of power, right? We see with sexual assault, power is at play. It's a power play. It's not about pleasure in that context. And so understanding that distinction and being um able to differentiate that is something that should be taught in the context of sex ed, especially um when we see how high sexual assault rates are and how there's such a misunderstanding of sexual consent uh across the board. I mean, we really have a lot of work to do in that area. Um, or with things like, you know, the reason that people engage in sex is because of pleasure, overwhelmingly. Um, Mestin and Bus published that very uh sort of noteworthy study of like identifying over 250 reasons that humans have sex. And procreation, baby making was not even in the top 50 reasons. So we are not seeing that people aren't having sex for the purposes of pregnancy and procreation, despite the fact that many sex education programs really focus on that being the only thing that's at play, which is just so off. I mean, it doesn't include people who have sex where procreation is actually not an option, where there's not like a sperm and egg at play, but also doesn't include any of the sort of pursuits of pleasure that really do drive sexual experiences, especially in young adults and adolescents. Um, and it's all throughout life. I mean, there's yeah, there's there's a lot of pleasure going on with all of that. So I think a lot of my work has looked at what are the implications for pleasure on relationships. And I've looked, I've done a lot of work in sexual satisfaction specifically, and looking at how we can maintain satisfaction and sexual desire over the course of longer-term relationships and all of the variety of factors that are at play with that, of which there are many.
SPEAKER_00Wow, well, that could be a whole other podcast. I I wish I wish we could get into that. Um I I'm just thinking back to you talking about the museum in the Netherlands. And I'm just I I I'm just thinking about this this piece of education before puberty happens, or you know, education before uh, you know, uh children uh go through whatever they're gonna go through, the developmental stage they're gonna be in, before they decide to engage in sexual activity or or what have you. I I think that that's some of what's really missing here in the United States is is to educate at the point or after the fact. It doesn't serve the purpose of you know preparing and making good choices and giving consent and all of the all of those good things.
SPEAKER_01Right. I mean, even just the fact that we still see grade five being the time when people get the puberty talk. I mean, the average age of first menstruation is now 10 years old. That is before grade five. Right. So, you know, what is the point in teaching that at that age? It's just so it's it's just it's not developmentally appropriate. And um, kids have questions and they deserve answers. They deserve to be able to make their own decisions about this kind of stuff, and they deserve to have developmentally relevant information so that they can make decisions that are best for their own health. And I think that's another thing that the Netherlands does that and and many other places in the world as well, um, not many other, I would say a few other um places in the world as well. Sweden is good at this, for instance, um, is really seeing sexual health as part of overall health. And we just don't value it in that way here. Um, we really sort of teach, especially in the education system, teach to the test, right? So the first thing to go is health education. Um, the first thing to go out of health education is sex education. Yet, really, that's like a very important life skill. It's sort of like the fact that I was never taught how to do my taxes in the context of school, but I was taught complex algebra and geometry that I've never drawn upon again. And so these are sort of the, in my eyes, this is where education should be headed, is like this more pragmatic approach to why we need to know these things. Um, and I think that we are doing a disservice to the development of our youth by not teaching them about these things.
SPEAKER_00And I'm thinking that guy, I want to go back to your pleasure and desire and long-term relationships too, but I don't know, there's so many sexual scripts that are so uh wrong and that so many people believe. We had an episode earlier uh in season one about with Eva Drury in Ireland, and I just it's just so impactful the kinds of things we take in because we don't have education to line them up for ourselves. I even even ideas around you know women not wanting to have sex or that it's not pleasurable for women, or that men to be ready at a drop of a hat and always want sex. I mean, these kinds of scripts we could change that narrative if we did have more comprehensive sex education, yes?
SPEAKER_01And this is where my research all ties together, right? So this is exact that is exactly the point is we need to change these um sex education practices if we want to see couples have healthy, long, satisfying sex lives into long-term relationships. I mean, that is the foundation that we draw from. In my therapy work, I see patients who or clients who come to me who have um, you know, followed all the rules that they were told in their abstinence-only sex education program. They have um they signed that pledge of purity. They kept their virginity for, and I'm putting all of this in air quotes for anyone who um is listening, you know, uh these air quotes of of virginity or purity or these constructs that are really just um have no meaning. And that piece of like them saving this for some special time, now they're married, and there's not some magical flip of a switch that happens. Now they're married and they they can't engage in happy, healthy, satisfying sex with their partner because they've got all of these mental blocks that have been placed up against them by waiting all of that time. Now that's not to say that some people should wait until they're married to have sex. That's a wonderful choice that one can make. But for it to be pushed upon you and to be something that is covered in shame and guilt and resentment, that's where it becomes a problem. Um, and it just isn't the right choice for everyone. What I'm seeing in the abstinence project that I'm loving is the fact that this has wide sort of implications for all sorts of people. Like it impacts your sexual messages, yes. It impacts your satisfaction in your long-term relationships, yes. It also impacts people who were molested as kids and the sort of what that meant to them and how that was kept a secret because of it. It impacts them. It impacts people who are transgender and don't come through to their own gender identity or are much slower to come to that because of these messages that they received about binary sex and binary gender. And it impacts so many different groups of people. And that's what I think is so important about it is that it's just so far-reaching.
SPEAKER_00You know, the many years I've worked with women mostly, I've just seen this played out over and over and over and time and time again. And um I'd be curious. Well, just give us a couple tidbits from your long-term relationship, your research on that. I'm sure you've investigated the desire, desire styles, uh, all the misunderstandings people have about that. Can you speak to that a little bit? Because I know your research on that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um, yeah, a lot of my research is in like desire discrepancy in particular. So when one person has higher or lower desire relative to their partner. And um, I think something that that is really that you mentioned earlier about men's desire and how it's just always ready and always willing. And, you know, men just can have sex at any time and should always want to, that can become a real disservice to men and to women and to everyone. Because then once they end up experiencing low desire, it's like they're this, you know, person who they're they're outside of the norm. They're not able to seek that help. And so that can end up being a really problematic um piece of that puzzle. One of the main studies that I think um I like to draw upon when thinking about maintaining desire in long-term relationships is we reviewed, we did a systematic review of all of the literature in how to maintain desire in long-term relationships, and found that they could be classified into three sort of levels of impact on your relationship. So one is these individual levels. So this is things like how stressed out you are, whether you are experiencing satisfaction outside of your relationship, like, are you feeling, you know, are you feeling good in your friendships, in your work environment, all of those things. That's like those individual things. And then there's the interpersonal, which is like, how compatible do you feel with your partner? Do you feel like the two of you are communicating about your wants and needs? Are you getting your sexual needs met from your partner? And if you're not, are you talking about it? And things like your relationship satisfaction. Um, do you like your partner? Because if you don't, like it can be kind of hard to want to have sex with them. And that's completely normal. Um, and then there's the things that are more societal that are these like um, like the sex education and the cultural norms that we have, and how egalitarian your relationship is, and the extent to which you feel like an equal to your partner, and how we socialize men and women differently when it comes to sex. Women need to be the gatekeepers, and men need to be the pursuers and the knocker-downs of that gate. And that is super problematic dynamic that we have grown up learning. And so, how is that impacting it? So there's all of these factors, and you can imagine, right? Like two people come to the table or more if you're in an open relationship. You come to the table with all of this sort of in a backpack that you're carrying, that you have, and all of those things then need to be considered together. So inevitably, you're going to experience some issues with desire, you're going to experience some issues with desire discrepancy. That is just part of it. It's how you navigate that. And couples who navigate it together, so who don't turn away from each other and be like, okay, I know that this is my problem and I'm gonna try and solve it by doing this, this, and this on my own. That's one way to approach it, but it is not nearly as effective as sitting down with your partner and coming up with a dyadic solution where the two of you work together to find ways to address the scenario. And you can imagine why that works, right? Like that's forcing you to sit down and actually talk about it. It's forcing you to address the issue. You're learning about each other's needs and wants in a way that you wouldn't have been otherwise. So it makes sense that that would be the thing. But so often we see people pursue fixing this on an individual level, and that's just not nearly as effective. And so we we really um encourage couples to approach this together and not sort of pathologize one person for having the low desire in the relationship. There's a lot of different reasons why you might have low desire, and a lot of that response is completely normal.
SPEAKER_00Because I do think that's that's a lot of why the first question from so many people is Am I normal? Because they have no framework for what is normal or what they've seen either in media or however they've seen it depicted, you know, it's not normal. So this is the coming back to the comprehensive sex education pieces that provides a lot of framework for normal. So many think that, you know, something's wrong with them or they're broken or they're not normal. And it's a rare, it's a rare person I meet with that I'm like, yeah, we have a real problem here. It's usually you're really okay.
SPEAKER_01Right. I know. And so many people do just need that reassurance, but they're not getting that from their partner, perhaps because their partner, because it's with their partner that they're having some difficulty. Learning that there is such a wide variety of normal when it comes to sexual health and sexuality and sexual expression is an important and like pretty powerful discovery, I think, for a lot of people.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Let's wrap up with coming back to your project that you're currently working on, the abstinence project. And you talked about stories, right? I I think I would love to before we wrap up, for you to give an example. Like you talked about the backpack as you know, and that that analogy. I love that. Do you have a story possibly off the top of your off the top of your head that that has worked well with the project or that you did recently that you want you could share?
SPEAKER_01So the way the project works is people go to the website, which is the abstinenceproject.com, and they submit their stories. So people are submitting their own stories of how abstinence-only sex education impacted their sex life or impacted their gender development or impacted their sexual identity development. And so there's all of these stories that are on the site. So you can go to the site and you can actually read all the stories, and or you can go and submit your own story. Some of the stories are super short, they're just a couple sentences about I was taught that uh I was supposed to wait until marriage to have sex. I waited until marriage to have sex, and it didn't work. I couldn't have sex, so I thought I was broken, and that ended my marriage. You know, that is a very simple, very clear short story. So not all of them are these like long stories, and then others build this beautiful narrative of their childhood. You know, a few that were that have been so powerful are ones where like someone was molested when they were young and didn't tell anyone, and these are the reasons why is because they were really taught through abstinence-only sex education that they weren't supposed to talk about that and that that was bad and that that was dirty, and so they just labeled themselves that way. Or I think, you know, one of the stories that actually inspired this years, this project in my mind years ago, was the story of Elizabeth Smart. She talked about how when she was in the Elizabeth Smart, just to remind any of you, was um captured from her bedroom, kidnapped, uh, raped many times, and then she escaped. She eventually did escape. Uh, this is in Utah. And so she talks about how in sex education she was taught that she was like that once you have sex, you're like a chewed-up piece of gum. And nobody wants a chewed-up piece of gum. And so she talks about that and how that really impacted her because when she was raped, she felt, why would I scream out? Why would I say anything? Because I'm that chewed-up piece of gum. And that's how she labeled herself. And when I heard her tell that story, that really clicked with me as a way of bridging that gap between people who think, between that political divide that often happens in the context of the sex education wars, that I wish were not there. And I don't think it should be there. I think that there are a lot of people on every side of the aisle that would agree that it's really important for us to be not teaching about a chewed-up piece of gum, right? For the exact reason of Elizabeth Smart's story. So that's where storytelling to me becomes really important is it allows you to have that connection to a story and have that piece. So anyone can read the variety of those stories that are posted, and those are on the abstinenceproject.com. And I would encourage people to submit their own stories, short or long. Um, and yeah, I think it's just like a really great teaching tool. I think it's a really great way to think about what the sort of far-reaching implications are of sex education. And I'm working on resources as well within that website to be able to direct people to um other sites that can give opportunities for how you can teach inclusive and pleasure-driven and um comprehensive sex education effectively. We have a lot of websites that do exist in that already do that. So I'm planning to just sort of link out to all of those. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Oh, cool. What a great resource. So we'll um we can link to that in the show notes, but and also tell people how they can find you outside of the abstinence project.
SPEAKER_01They can find me at kristinmark.com or at the Institute for Sexual and Gender Health at University of Minnesota Medical School.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Love it. On this podcast, Kristen, we have a pleasure practice of really trying to pause and notice what delights us day to day, what just brings us pleasure. I really feel like learning how to do that in our everyday life can really translate to pleasure, sexual pleasure and sensuality. I wondered if there's something day-to-day that delights you that you might share.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I just this morning, um, I'm in Minnesota and the leaves are changing right now. And I think one of the things that I noticed today is just I was walking my dog around the lake and just looking up at how the sun is just hitting the leaves and that sort of change of season, I think is something that I really appreciate in living here now is seeing that sort of change of season and that renewal. And um, that was really that's something that I delight in is getting to see that happen and um to stop and appreciate it, like you said, take a moment to really to really enjoy that.
SPEAKER_00And soak it in. Yes. Lovely. Oh, thank you so much for being with us, um, Dr. Mark, and and for the work you're doing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and thank you for disseminating it all to the public in your podcast. That's great, very important component here. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Oh, thanks again for being with us. Well, community, I hope that you heard a few things here today that will spur you on to really looking for comprehensive sex education and how to make that part of your life and your family's life. And that will include the pleasure principle, as Kristen talked about. And when we do that, we'll learn to give ourselves more permission for pleasure.
