Both/And: A Sexual Violence Prevention Podcast
Both/And: A Sexual Violence Prevention Podcast
The Liberatory Power of Sex Ed with Jacyln Friedman
“We don’t have a problem with support for sex ed in this country, we have a problem with prioritizing it, and making it an issue that they want to stick their neck out on. We have an action problem”
In this episode, I had the absolute joy of speaking with Jaclyn Friedman, author, organizer, and Executive Director of EducateUS, a movement working to bring about a complete transformation of K-12 public sex education in the United States, in order to foster a new generation of Americans who are secure in their own bodily sovereignty, recognize and respect that sovereignty in everyone else regardless of race, place, creed, class or gender, know all the essential facts about how bodies work, and are fully prepared to build loving relationships with themselves and others.
Jaclyn and I took a deep dive into comprehensive sex ed as a liberatory and anti-authoritarian tool that creates change far beyond the high school classroom.
EducateUS is led by Founder and Executive Director Jaclyn Friedman, a lifelong activist, advocate and organizer. Friedman’s work has globally popularized the affirmative consent standard of sexual consent. Her first book, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, was one of Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 100 Books of 2009, and has inspired new laws in five U.S. states, as well as policies on countless campuses across the country and the world. She also spearheaded the legendary #FBrape campaign, which forced Facebook to address and exclude content that promotes or trivializes violence against women under their hate speech policy, and is founder and former executive director of Women, Action & the Media (WAM!).
LINKS:
Drinking and rape lets wise up about it
Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Power and a World Without Rape
Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All
What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl's Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety
Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World
Both/And is a project of the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs. www.nmcsap.org
Need support? Call, text, or chat the NM Sexual Assault Helpline at 1-844-NMSAHLP | 1-844-667-2457 | www.nmsahelp.org
Intro music: "Can't Get Enough Sunlight" written and recorded by Michelle Chamuel http://michellechamuel.com/
Logo: Alex Ross-Reed
Produced by: Jess Clark
Edited By: Dacia Clay at Pillow Fort Studios
https://www.pillowfortpodcasts.com
So,
SPEAKER_00:Welcome to Both And, a sexual violence prevention podcast. I'm Jess Clark, Director of Prevention for the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs and your host. In this episode, I had the absolute joy of speaking with Jacqueline Friedman, author, organizer, and executive director of Educate Us, a movement working to bring about a complete transformation of K-12 public sex education in the United States in order to foster a new generation of Americans who are secure in their own bodily sovereignty, recognize and respect that sovereignty in everyone else regardless of race, place, creed, class, or gender and know all the essential facts about how bodies work and are fully prepared to build loving relationships with themselves and others. Jacqueline and I took a deep dive into comprehensive sex ed as a liberatory and even anti-authoritarian tool that creates change far beyond the high school classroom. To find out more about Educate Us and Jacqueline's other fantastic work, check out the show notes. They There are some real gems in there. I hope you enjoy. Jacqueline Friedman, thank you so much for coming on Both And. I have been a fan of yours for a long time. I read Yes Means Yes in my early 20s, mid 20s, something like that. And it was... A big moment for me because I had interned at my local rape crisis center when I was in high school doing a homophobia and transphobia program in schools and hadn't been in touch with what was then called Santa Fe Rape Crisis, now called Solace, for many years. And I read that and it was one of those books that was passed around my community where one person bought it and then it was handed to everyone as if this needs to be a part of our collective conversation. This needs to be something that we are all regularly talking about. And even if we already had been put it into a context that gave us some shared language. And it was a moment where I said, gosh, I really want to get back into that work. And not even a year later, I got a call from Sala saying, hey, Jess, do you want to come be a prevention educator? And I said, yes, I do. Absolutely. And that was over a decade ago. And here I am many years later, still doing this work. So I will credit that book with getting me back into the movement and gender-based violence and really my love for prevention as a whole. So stoked to have you here. Thank you. Oh,
SPEAKER_02:well, what an honor and really, really proud to have played whatever small role in your path. That's what a wonderful story. I
SPEAKER_00:love in queer community, we all go around to each other's houses and you see the same 10 to 15 books on everyone's shelves. And that is definitely one of them.
SPEAKER_02:Ah, I love that. That's one of the prides of my life.
SPEAKER_00:Well, on that front, can you tell me a little bit about how you came to this work? What is your origin story?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, what is my origin story? Well, I was born... No, I'm kidding. I told you I was a talker. I started doing anti-sexual violence work in college. I went to Wesleyan University in the late 80s, early 90s, which for those who know, it was sort of like the absolute height of student protest at Wesleyan. Wesleyan
SPEAKER_00:and
SPEAKER_02:Antioch, right? Yes, and Oberlin. And I was already, I already came from a sort of organizing activist template. I had been a youth organizer with my state Jewish youth organization. Shout out to the Jersey Federation of Temple Youth. You know, was really, it was one of the reasons I decided to go to Wesleyan. Getting involved in anti-sexual violence work just made sense to me. And then in the spring of junior year, I was sexually assaulted on campus. And it was one of those things, you know, I'm not going to tell the story. I've told the story many places, people can go Google it. And also, it's not that it's not that different than everybody else's story. Unfortunately, it's one of those things, though, where I thought that because I was an educator, and I was already doing anti sexual violence work, that I was too smart for it to happen to me. And I didn't realize I thought that until it happened. And that was a real wake up call for me. And then what really sort of radicalized me and galvanized me was in the aftermath, the school tried to shut me up. I was a good, like I was a part of student government and I had relationships with the deans. And after I was assaulted and started speaking up about it, I started hearing more stories of how the school had mishandled sexual violence cases. And I went to the dean of students and I was like, oh, dean of students, did you know we have a problem? We should solve this. And she
SPEAKER_00:was like- Yes,
SPEAKER_02:I know. And had the political savvy to decide to drop our report and our demands in time to coincide to be on the front page of the student newspaper for the spring trustees weekend. taste of organizing with survivors organizing for survivor justice organizing to push back on sexual violence and I really haven't stopped since that's my list dot moment really your
SPEAKER_00:list dot
SPEAKER_02:moment and I've done a million things since then so in my in my 20s I became an impact self-defense instructor which is you know the the instructors in the full suit padding like it's incredible that changed my life life.
SPEAKER_00:I've taken the basics course three times. Yes, it was life changing. We have our local chapter is called resolve.
SPEAKER_02:I love impact will love impact till the day I die. That also was incredibly healing for me for my own assault. As you know, there are these scenarios, it's not the only thing you learn impact, but in the basics course, you you get to these scenarios called reversals, which are the sexual assault scenarios. And they're so called because you reverse the expected power dynamics. And I found that I loved the like standing fighting stuff so much I loved the hitting and the yelling and like feeling powerful I loved it as somebody who's been called too much my whole life and like always being told to rein it in being told to go harder and bigger and louder chef's kiss but when we got to the reversals I found that I was not fully emotionally committed and really had to grapple with the fact that it felt like if I learned now what I could have done then that I would have to And somehow invalidate the pain and trauma of that. And I had to really work through that. And I actually, for years afterwards, would have dreams where I would be assaulted in some way, not always sexual assault, and I wouldn't fully fight back, I'd sort of have hardly like push, and I couldn't use what I knew I had been trained to use. And then like, it literally took me five years of processing it to have a dream where like I kicked ass. And then I never had those dreams ever again. So impact was an important part of it. And learning how to teach it was so important in terms of reclaiming my power and part of my work to end sexual violence, right, to be able to pass it on to other people. Also, one of the male instructors once told me I have a knee to the groin like a pile driver, which is one of my all time favorite compliments I've learned in my life. So impact, I wouldn't I couldn't we could just have an entire podcast. I love finding a fellow grad in the wild. And then I was working at New York. And so I started basically writing a book about it. running events for this nonprofit that had the same mission as New Words, you know, it was called New Words Live. And we launched a conference called Women Action in the Media, because post 9-11, we had seen a real erasure of women as experts in the news media, and had just really started to see that backlash vibe shift. So we in 2004, we had the first WAM conference, Women Action in the Media. And I invited Jessica Valenti, who was one of the The feminist blog. on a story on happy hours and sexual violence in New York, in which they didn't talk about perpetrators at all. They just talked about like women getting lured into drinking with like cheap or free drinks and like then getting assaulted, right? As though there were no perpetrators to talk about. And, you know, it was a very old trope, but there's a lot of outrage because it was an ostensibly feminist outlet that ran it. And I At the time, I was managing the listserv from this conference because between conferences, we would all stay in touch on this very contentious feminist listserv that I moderated. And there was this whole outrage. It was largely, although not exclusively, generational. And I stayed out of it because as the moderator, I never wanted people to feel like I was– I wanted people to feel like I was, you know, making fair calls. And so I didn't tend to participate in brouhahas on the listserv. And the editor of Women's E! News called me up. to basically rant and sort of assume that i was on her side the late rita henley johnson and i said like rita i'm sorry i really disagree with you and here's why and we had a difficult conversation but at the end of it she asked me to write basically a rebuttal for her and i did and it was called uh drinking and rape let's wise up about it and it was basically about how we can talk about drinking and sexual violence without blaming victims and it went the 2007 version of It might still be on the internet somewhere. I have no idea. Incidentally, that was the very first time I told my own sexual assault story online. It was like the first paragraph of the piece, just as a framing device fundamentally. And I also learned what it was to be a survivor online and had people say terrible things to and about me and make up things out of whole cloth. And I had been telling my story for years. I started telling my story shortly after I was assaulted and so it hadn't occurred to me that it would be different on the internet and that was a real lesson for me but that was a month or two before that year's conference Women in Action the media conference and Jessica and I got to talking and she like it was like how the men do it was like at a after party and you know we were drinking and sitting around in somebody's hotel room and we called her editor over and from Seal Press Brooke Warner and said we want to do a new anthology on you know affirmative consent and sexual violence you know it's been 10 years since transforming a rape culture which had been the last sort of big anti-sexual violence anthology feminist anthology which was truly transformative for me and really honestly introduced me the idea that we could have a world without rape right like that that could be something that we work toward like in a real big it introduced that kind of big blue sky thinking to me and we pitched it to her literally oh Yes means yes. The rest is truly amazing history. We thought that was going to be a small but influential feminist anthology, and instead it was on Publishers Weekly's best 100 books of the year list in 2009, which still flabbergasts me. Right over there, I have a framed cover and listing from that to remind me of it. And then how did you
SPEAKER_00:move from that work into working in sex ed?
SPEAKER_02:The shortest answer to that, and then I will talk long, is that sex ed is primarily prevention for sexual violence. And I just fundamentally got tired of pulling the babies out of the river and wanted to stop the babies from going into the river. That's the very shortest answer to that. The long answer is, after Yes Means Yes hit in ways we never expected, I spent several years speaking on many, many college campuses, giving healthy sexuality, anti-sexual violence, consent-related talks. And it was incredible. I loved doing that and I met student organizers and survivors and all kinds of students and I heard over and over again this is incredible like I wish I had this eight years ago I wish I had this six years ago and at first I just heard the like this is so powerful you changed my life part right I was like I'm doing a great job here I am doing a great job flying around the country changing lives but then over time I started to hear the second part of that much louder her well why don't you and then there would be this constant sort of drumbeat of like oh you should come to my high school they should have you at my high school and there were several like over time like several times a year someone would try and get me into their high school and I just learned it was impossible I was too frank about things like for example I talk about how sex should be pleasurable to everyone who's participating how dare you I know and it turns out that like talk talking about pleasure and sexuality is actually like a bridge too far for most high schools. A couple years after Yes Means Yes came out, it's sort of in the middle of all of this, there was a profile of the incredible sex educator Al Vernacchio. And he teaches sex ed at the time, maybe still at a Quaker high school, I think in Pennsylvania. And it was wonderful. And it was going all around amongst my friends who were like, this is incredible. everyone should get sex ed like this but of course we can't do that in America right like you know because he's teaching it at a private school and I thought well why not and I started to realize that there was an enormous amount of agreement about what constitutes good sex education and what the impacts are of good sex education which are far reaching and far beyond what most people think of them and I'm sure we'll get into that and as As much agreement as there was, almost no public schools in the country were teaching what everyone agrees was like quality sex education. And that just seemed like a problem with a solution. Right. That just seemed that appealed to me as like somebody who likes puzzles and like who's temperamentally an organizer. I just was like, OK, well, why and how do we get from where we are to where we need to be? Like, why is nobody solving for this? You know, over time, that took a number of shapes. So a few years after that, I got involved in sex ed advocacy here in Massachusetts and I learned how hard it is to pass a sex ed bill. That's all the bill says. That's what many bills say across the
SPEAKER_00:country that were really hard to pass.
SPEAKER_02:And it's incredibly popular in Massachusetts in every county. Rural, suburban, urban, everyone wants it. And we've never been able to get the Speaker of the House to get it to the floor for a vote. It was in the middle of one of those fights in 2018 that I went with my partner and some friends of ours to the town hall in our town because the three of them, not me, wanted to be delegates to the Democratic, the state Democratic convention from our town. And there were more people in my little liberal Um, that wanted to go be delegates to the state democratic convention, then there were seats from our town. And so everyone, everyone on this like Saturday, late morning, early afternoon at the town hall, like had to get up and give a little speech about why it should be them. Right. And then we voted and the bill, the sex ed bill that we've been fighting for for years at that point was like hanging by a thread. We were still trying to get it through the house, but it's hanging by a thread and not a single person. And I thought, I bet if you polled this room, you would have 100% support for that bill. You would have 100% unflinching support for that bill. But it's nobody's priority. It's nobody's baby. Right? Like, nobody in here, sex ed is their issue. Like, we don't have a support problem on sex education. Not in Massachusetts. It's not in this country. Planned Parenthood studied this in 2023 and found that like 90 some odd percent of parents support sex ed in public schools and high school and 80 some odd percent support it in middle school. Like we don't have a problem with support for sex ed in this country. We have a problem with prioritizing it, with people acting like they support it, right? And making it an issue that they want to stick their neck out on. We have an action problem. We don't have, by and large, a persuasion problem. We have a saliency problem. And a little penny dropped and I was like, well, who's working on that? And I looked around and I thought, well, we have a few great sort of C3 organizations, sort of traditional nonprofits doing traditional policy work and advocacy work on the national level. We have, you know, CECAS, we have Advocates for Youth, Planned Parenthood does some, but there isn't anybody who's doing politics about it, actually trying to change the political reality. Like, oh, we have a political road block how do we politically move around it and there isn't anybody who's doing like grassroots movement building and that is how and i was like oh i should probably do that i wonder if somebody else is doing that maybe i really hope somebody else is doing that because after women action the media i promised myself i wouldn't found another organization famous last word i was like surely someone else will do that or is probably already working on it and i left it for a while and then i worked with jessica valente we reunited to do believe me our second anthology together Which is about the subhead of that is How Trusting Women Can Change the World. Fantastic book. So that was like 2018. I just sort of let it sit there. And then I was touring for Believe Me in the very beginning of 2020. I got back
SPEAKER_00:from
SPEAKER_02:six weeks of book tour on like March 6th. No, it was actually was a great time to be in a book tour because it was like a last hurrah. I just didn't know it. I spent like the last six weeks before the world shut down like flying. Flying across the country, eating in restaurants and being in crowded rooms with strangers was all I did. So I had a binge before, but I had been thinking while I was on book tour, I was like, I think I'm ready. I think I'm going to start this organization. When I get back, I'm going to start this organization. And then I was like, no, this is not the moment. So I took 2020, got my feet back under me and I started in the beginning of 2021, started like putting the pieces together and we launched in the fall of 2021. What's
SPEAKER_00:been the most powerful piece about starting that organization, about your work with Educate Us?
SPEAKER_02:I have to say one of the things I love most about it is seeing the passion that young people have for this issue. So we launched a youth advisory board two years ago and it's just incredible working with like 10, 16 to 22 year olds from And whenever we have. internships available or seats on the Youth Advisory Board. We have hundreds of impressive, qualified young people applying for these positions. Like, we literally just closed this week when we're recording our applications for our summer and next academic year internships. And we have four internships available, two summer internships, one organizing, one communications, and two academic year internships. For four spots, we got over 400
SPEAKER_00:Wow.
SPEAKER_02:sometimes I want to look at them and say like, we failed you. You should not have this. We should have fixed this. But they just want to like dig in.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. There's a young person who I worked with who was in the Youth Advisory Council of Girls Inc. of Santa Fe. And she worked so hard with us for all of her years. She started her sophomore year of high school working with us on an affirmative consent bill. And she was committed a hearing. She was on the floor. She was organizing other young people and she did not get to see that bill pass before she graduated high school. And now she's showing up for a comprehensive sex ed bill and she's zooming in from college for public comment and saying, I have been working on this since I was a sophomore in high school. I'm now a sophomore in college and you have failed me. You have failed me and I'm going to continue to show up so that we are not collectively failing the young people coming behind me and every time she speaks in committee you can see the impact that it's having on committee members and in the audience and going yes we have failed you and you are taking that failure and now taking it on yourself as your responsibility to change things because you're seeing things that we didn't 10 years ago Young people, I had the pleasure of working with the youth advisory group and Girls Link of Santa Fe. They had their big advocacy day a couple of weeks ago. I got to show up at the Roundhouse, which is our state capital. It is actually round. It's pretty lovely. It has one of the best art collections I think ever. It's gorgeous. Those young people, they got to come up with their own priorities and their number one priority was comprehensive sexual health education. The number one priority. And they spoke to it. so well. And so we had legislators come in the room and hear from them about why it was important to them. And they said, this is not just us understanding ourselves and our bodies. This is us understanding how to navigate relationships moving forward. And it tells us and it tells our schools and the rest of our community that our safety is important, that having the skills to move through the world with spirit information is important. And the idea that we would be denied access to this information in this more formal setting is infuriating to us because and you know we're going to go and get that information somewhere else and sometimes it's not going to be as accurate sometimes it's going to be harmful
SPEAKER_02:so yeah sometimes it's going to be active misinformation
SPEAKER_00:yes
SPEAKER_02:yeah absolutely you know you you leave a kid to look it up on google they might get to scarleteen which is an incredible resource but they also might get to porn hub right you know what i mean like and you know i'm not anti-porn but it's not good sex education no right it's like teaching somebody to drive by asking them to watch fast and the furious right like i didn't make that up but it's a great metaphor that's
SPEAKER_00:really perfect
SPEAKER_02:so working with young people has been it's just been very moving and i think also because i started as a like a young organizer and it's like getting me back in touch with that my younger self as well and it's just so helpful to remember how passionate and smart and capable i was then also right i think Yeah, I agree. there growing up under this new regime and it's a lot I don't in any way think like oh it's the same as when I was a kid but also I was like a hundred percent put me in coach and if there hadn't been people there who would at least get out of my way and in the best case like support me and mentor me I wouldn't have been the organizer and advocate that I am today
SPEAKER_00:yeah and that so much of the the antidote to so much of Yes! One of the things I
SPEAKER_02:love about the work we do is that we started off focused on state and local organizing, and that's all we do. I feel very lucky to say in 2025, we've never been focused on federal organizing, because that's not where most of the decisions about sex ed get made. Like, look, do federal dollars sometimes get allocated to abstinence propaganda in schools? Yes, and we should advocate for that, and we should have. federal dollars for to support grade sex ed being taught in schools but in reality from where we're starting I just also thought as a new small organization like the most bang for our buck that we're going to get is going to be to get involved in local and state level fights the bigger you get the more expensive it is to make an impact so my theory of change is also what's the best impact we can make with what we have and now yeah there's still actually so much winning available if you look at the local level there's so much available And people are fired up and looking for something they can win. I think the other thing that came to mind immediately when you asked me what's the most surprising thing is We work with candidates for school board who are pro-sex ed and we help them win. And getting to meet these candidates from around the country in wildly different contexts who are running for wildly different reasons. You know, the wonderful thing about school board candidates, most of them are first-time candidates. All of them are running in their own community in like talking to people they know and their neighbors, right? The beauty of school board context is it's human scale and And everyone can imagine, you know, if you show up and to vote for your school board, like that your vote will make an impact. Right. And it doesn't feel abstract. And I'm a big believer. Decided by very few votes. Oh, my God. We lost a heartbreaker a couple of years ago. We backed a really incredible, talented candidate who was running against a woman who had helped charter buses to the insurrection. And we lost that race by 98 votes. Wow. I'll never forget it and I'll never let it go. 98 votes is small enough that you think, what if we had done this other one thing? I feel like I could have moved 98 more votes and it haunts me forever, although it certainly keeps me on point in all our other races. I bet it does. What 98 votes are we leaving on the ground right now and how can we go get them? But for everyone listening to think, you can imagine being part of 98 people who are going to either manage to show up for the school board election or to know enough to vote on that line, you know, to have done your research when it comes down versus leaving it blank. It matters so much. It doesn't just shape individual kids' lives. It shapes the community.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I was lucky enough. I spent about a decade doing the sexual violence portion of a larger comprehensive sex ed program in the local school district. And it was a wonderful program. It still exists. It came Because just speaking about the very hyperlocal nature of things, where the school district said, hey, we need to do comprehensive sex ed, nurses go do this. And the nurses said, well, we don't want to do this. This is, we're busy. We're really busy doing other things. We're not trained in teaching. We're trained in nursing. These are different things. And so they started bringing it in outside. Can I just say
SPEAKER_02:something about that? This is one of the things that drives me absolutely around the bend when people are like, parents should teach this at home a if you ask parents most parents are like i don't want to do that but also like nobody says parents should teach calculus at home or biology or even english literature because everyone recognizes that those are real fields with like real pedagogy and it takes real skill both to understand the material and also know how to teach it effectively we recognize that as a professional field and one of my hobby horses is that sex ed is not different than that parents are not prepared or equipped to teach it because it actually takes a high level of education and skill to do sorry it's one of my
SPEAKER_00:right 100 right percent 100 right there with you and that so often subjects like sexual violence prevention are treated as these cast offs that oh just have the gym teacher just have the just have whoever go and teach it and they read out of a book and we know that it is often the singer not the song and that having a highly trained, qualified, relatable, skilled educators can be the difference between a curriculum working or not.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. So the school district recognized that. And so they started bringing in outside programs. And so at the time, I think it was Planned Parenthood and the Attorney General's office, because they had some trafficking money and the RIP Crisis Center. And we were all going in throughout the year it was all willy-nilly and then by virtue of folks knowing each other at these different organizations and liking each other we started working together and saying hey maybe we should coordinate a little more maybe we should make this actually one curriculum and then the curriculum ended up being monday was the school nurse they did anatomy they did the body great and then from tuesday to friday it went from the rape crisis center where she's not talking about sexual harassment and consent and communication healthy relationships la la and then Planned Parenthood and at that time two days of Planned Parenthood and at that time Planned Parenthood had switched their model from here let me show you terrible pictures of STIs and the pregnancy belly all things that did not work to actually let's talk about consent and communication and how this all ties in with STIs and pregnancy and general sexual wellness and embodied consent and all of those pieces and then it ended the last day with Resolve, the vocal chapter of Impact, where students were putting the knowledge that they had learned into actual skills and practicing saying no, practicing being told no and responding. And
SPEAKER_02:receiving no,
SPEAKER_00:yes. And receiving it, practicing intervening when someone says something harmful or is causing harm in some other way. And it was great because it also followed bystander intervention theory, where through the week, we're starting with understanding that it's a problem, that it has something to do with me. And then at the end, having a plan and having confidence in that plan. That was done five days in seventh grade, five days in eighth grade. It is evaluated as the entire week. So not just one per session. And it's coordinated highly with the school district. So it's planned in the spring for the following school year with all the school nurses. They meet every year to talk about what went well, what didn't go well, how we can change curriculum, how we can, or now they how they can shift things to have more repetition where it's needed and less where it isn't and meet those students needs and it is provided in Spanish simultaneously in separate classes that is
SPEAKER_02:phenomenal just phenomenal
SPEAKER_00:and it's not just a parallel curriculum it is provided in a particular cultural context and there it includes parent nights and it includes in Spanish additional sessions with parents to help them navigate the issues that might be really specific to them Do
SPEAKER_02:you know that's so important also because I definitely hear from parents who they're one of their hang ups about improving sex ed in school for their kids is that they're afraid that their kids are going to come home with questions that they don't know the answers to. Yeah, because parents didn't get good sex ed either. Right. Like I'm I'm a parent age, even though I don't have children. Right. And I had very little sex education. And honestly, I got my sex education in the 80s in New Jersey. i probably did much better than folks who grew up in the 90s and perhaps lived elsewhere in the country like in the 80s was before there was a lot of abstinence propaganda in the school so it was literally just very inadequate just like not enough and there was very harmful propaganda so if we don't pay attention to the parent piece of the puzzle we don't bring parents along as to why they need to support this for their kids because they think of sex ed as that thing they had when they were which was not either non-existent or not good. And then it leaves them very open to propaganda. We worked with the community. We don't only work with candidates, just for people to be clear. We also work with organizers who just want to improve or defend sex ed in their communities. And we worked in a community that had just passed a great new curriculum. They implemented the three R's, which is Advocates for Youth Curriculum, after like a five-year fight. It was a medium-sized city here in New England. And the opposition was doing this incredible misinformation campaign to get people to opt their kids out of it because they had lost the fight at the school board level so now they were just trying to get more and more parents to just opt their kids out and they were spreading just lies just lies about what was being taught organizers in the community held a parent night to explain about what was in the curriculum answer questions let people look at it and heard from somebody at the end of the night who said like this is wonderful I'm glad my kid is getting this I opted them out of that other thing but I'm really excited about this. which is funny, but terrible and illustrative of what we're up against, right? Like when parents know what is going on, they tend to really support sex ed. They have hangups about sexual orientation and gender identity being taught. That's often the sticking point. And we can talk about what to do about that if you want to. But by and large, they're really excited about most of the curriculum. They want their kids to learn most of the curriculum. And sometimes a lot of, in a lot of cases, all of the curriculum. But because they don't have a conception of what we mean when we say sex education because they had either something terrible or nothing in most cases they're very vulnerable to mis and disinformation and they also are just vulnerable to thinking it's not important right like why should I be passionate about sex education if it's so dumb or like incomplete or was not helpful to me you know a lot of people think it's just like how do you put a condom on a banana
SPEAKER_00:in my years teaching as part of a sex ed program I would sometimes encounter educators who were really hesitant to have us in their classrooms. They didn't know what it was going to be. They didn't want it in their classroom. They were even sometimes resentful that we were taking up time in their science class to teach this thing. And we would have conversations with them ahead of time to get prepared. And if anything, if we knew there was going to be a lot of resistance, try to find a different classroom or say, hey, can you help us with classroom management? But nothing else. Please do not editorialize throughout. And then I can't remember one time where at the end of that, they did not come up to me and say, thank you so much. I wish I would have had this growing up. I wish I would have known that I could say no. I wish I would have been able to help my friends when they were experiencing harm. I wish I would have understood that my body was worthy of love and respect and care. And at the end of the day, that's what success is, is this idea that your body is deserving of love and respect and care and the ability to experience what you want to experience that you have agency and the same thing with parents after we would have those parent nights they would come up to us and say god I'm so glad my child is getting this I wish I would have had this yes
SPEAKER_02:Almost universal.
SPEAKER_00:Almost universal. Once they knew what we were talking about. Right. And you could see the parents who would come in with a fight face on and ready to go at it with us. And then at the end would go, oh, this is great. It's hard to argue with. Yes. Hey, I'm teaching your kid how to have healthy relationships in the world and feel like they have a sense of agency.
SPEAKER_02:It's only hard to argue with if you think that we are all co-equal human beings.
SPEAKER_00:Well, there's that. Yes, there's that.
SPEAKER_02:Because fundamentally, sex ed teaches that we are all co-equal human beings and that every right that you have for yourself and your own body and your own dignity and your own autonomy, the people around you also have. And you have to respect those rights as well. And that has actually quite far-reaching implications and not everyone wants the world to be structured in that way.
SPEAKER_00:About those far-reaching implications, why is the pushback so intense and what seems like increasingly so?
SPEAKER_02:there's a number of reasons about why it's increasing right now some of them have to do with just a sort of cascading thing that happened during and after the covid lockdowns and online school sort of period which is sort of two things happened one is that parents started overhearing what their kids were learning parents actually paid much closer attention even whether they wanted to or not to what their kids were learning and then that they hadn't really thought about before and they heard things out of context and they you know and that sort of stuff and they also became very frustrated some of them because look we all felt out of control so and some of us handled that in some ways and some folks handle that by trying to exert their rights over everybody else's rights fundamentally
SPEAKER_00:some of us took up knitting and baking sourdough some of us took up trying started yelling at school board meetings about masks yes yeah
SPEAKER_02:exactly yeah i've taught myself how to crochet yeah great So it started with fights over masks in schools and school shutdowns. But then that same set of parents that really believe that what they want for their individual kids should be what gets imposed on the whole school, which is this deeply individualistic. It's really about individualism versus like community or society, right? And the folks who are passionate about individualism and also the sort of nuclear family unit as the unit of the country as opposed to like communities. let alone societies, really, once they started getting into those school board meetings, like didn't stop. And so it was masks. And then it was quote unquote, critical race theory, right? It was about teaching about racism in school. And then it was about LGBTQ kids and sex ed. And you know, it has sort of expanded, because they just decided school boards were like the new frontier. So that's part of what's happened. But it's happened at the same time as obviously, The country has been sliding toward authoritarianism, or at least parts of the country. Look, the authoritarian impulse is actually deeply unpopular when you pull on the policies of it. But also, here we are, where we are. I'm trying to not talk about politics. It's
SPEAKER_00:hard. It's real hard.
SPEAKER_02:But we have to describe the world that we're living in, because it's part of the answer. Right. Because fundamentally, an authoritarian mindset requires a the nuclear family to be the sort of social unit and nothing bigger than that, because it requires a lot of isolation. And it requires a lot of black and white thinking. So it requires there to be men and women and no confusion in between and no variety, you know, and to be clear, it's a man who's a woman, it just requires like black and white thinking. which doesn't exist in nature, right? Like, it doesn't exist, but it wants to impose that. And then it also wants to impose, like, top-down rule, right? That's authoritarianism, right? That the people at the top are in control, and they get to say what the people who aren't at the top do with their entire lives. Those are a lot of, like, key components to authoritarianism. And I think it probably becomes clear how sex ed runs antithetical to all of that, just in describing it, that sex ed teaches we are all co-equal humans and And we have the right to determine what happens with our own bodies and we have the right to pleasure and we have a responsibility to each other, even for people who are not in our nuclear families. It's the foundation, I think, of a beautiful democratic community. But there are forces in this country who don't want democracy anymore, maybe never did. And they correctly understand sex education as a threat to them. Isn't just, you know, a lot of times when in sort of old school arguments for sex education, You know, you'll keep your kids safe from getting diseases or getting pregnant. And like, realistically, that doesn't work. It doesn't work. Because parents don't think their kids are going to do stuff that will get them diseases or pregnant like that. Like not my Nigel, right? And it doesn't work. Because if we're not parents, then we think, well, then therefore, I don't care about this at all. Right. But in reality, what we're doing is creating communities with shared families. Right. What sex ed does is create fundamental shared values, really basic humanitarian values, not like right or left values, bodily autonomy. Right. Anti-violence. You know, we stick up for each other bystander intervention and we see it. You know, there was a 30 year meta analysis done of sex education programs that came out five years ago now that found incredible outcomes for sex education in schools, including increased bystander intervention. Like if kids saw that Somebody else is being targeted for bullying that they would speak up. Less perpetration of bullying and violence and harassment, less being victimized by bullying, violence and harassment. Increased academic performance, not surprisingly, because when you're in a school that feels safe and has these values that make you feel safer, you can concentrate on your schoolwork and less belief in sort of the patriarchal hierarchical mindset that is an essential component of authoritarian thinking. There's a reason that they're targeting it. They're not But we're the many and they are the few. And that's what I want to say. that are vulnerable to targeting and manipulation when we build strong communities which sex ed is a huge part of that actually makes us much stronger the sex ed that most impacted my life is not the sex ed that I didn't or didn't get in the 80s it's the sex ed that the guy who assaulted me in college didn't get not because I think he was confused about whether or not he had my consent he was not and could not have been but he didn't ever get the message that consent mattered or that there would be consequences of any kind of social or otherwise if he violated consent right there he got no education that there was a community value around consent and that changed my life more than anything and that's why i'm so passionate about sex ed in schools in particular because like he did not have parents who were going to go find a community sex ed program if he didn't have it in schools right the only way he was going to get sex ed is if it was in his school and he just had to take it you can't end sexual violence by saying like, oh, well, my kid got sex ed.
SPEAKER_00:No, that is absolutely not how it works. And that's why we're going to the social ecological model. And that's why we can never only work on the individual level. And we have to be in relationship and community societal as well. La, la, la. Many sexual violence prevention educators listen to this podcast and are quite familiar with that concept. And I think one thing that gets left behind in that, though, oftentimes we talk about this a lot is Yes. Yes. fun of it a little bit it's yeah they're always going to joke about it but
SPEAKER_02:it doesn't mean they're not also taking it in yeah
SPEAKER_00:exactly yeah we talked about it that at the beginning of every session was listen y'all are going to laugh and it's because it's what you do when you're uncomfortable and when something is new and we're going to use that we're going to laugh intentionally together quite a bit so that we can because we also when we're laughing together we're creating this shared temporary community and how can we build on that all of that yes that's
SPEAKER_02:funny when I would do my college talks i would always do a little disclaimer at the beginning very early on i learned i had to say like i'm going to make jokes on purpose and you should laugh if you think they're funny like because i found that people were not sure if it was okay to laugh because they were at like a presentation about sexual violence right and they expected it to be very serious and i tried to make lots of jokes because we need that to learn this stuff it's deadly otherwise but if i may not only are you making these beautiful essential anti-violent cultures inside schools when we teach sex ed but also the kids who experience that culture are going on to be doctors they're going on to be police officers they're going on some of them to be elected officials or judges or lawyers people in positions of power who help shape the sexual culture in a lot of ways and the culture around sexual violence and you know what a different world it would be if all of those people right now had like really great the kind of sex education that you described earlier
SPEAKER_00:I like to imagine that world and again going back to young people is their ability to imagine that world and begin to demand it one of the groups I work with is is a middle school a private middle school for girls in fact the director of that middle school is an impact instructor and we are everywhere everywhere every eighth grade student gets the 20-hour basics. It's incredible.
SPEAKER_02:I used to get to teach a few of those in private schools, and I was like, if I had had this as a teenager, I'll start crying about it right now. Just transform
SPEAKER_00:it. It's amazing. Those classes, I've been to a couple of those graduations, and it's just wow. Yeah. And watching the parents sob, and it's all of that. Those young people, they are showing up at the state legislature to talk about why they need sex ed in middle school, and they're so Yeah, absolutely. of what sex ed teaches is yes it is put in the context of sexual health and sexuality and underlying and I think this is what you've been saying all along is underneath all of that is The idea that you get a say in your life and what your world is going to look like. Yes. You get a say in what happens to your body and how you move through the world in your body. That extends to you get a say in what happens in your community. You get a say in what happens in your larger relationships. You get a say in larger policy pieces that those skills, I think, are just so transferable.
SPEAKER_02:You know, it changes the way you approach the world and there for what you're going to do in it. And I think about like two different examples that are wildly different here. The sort of low stakes example of that, if I may toot my own horn is, you know, at Educate Us, I work really hard to make sure that it's a good place to work for the people who work at Educate Us. We're a tiny team, but it's really important to me that to whatever extent it's in my power, we're creating the world internally that we're trying to create externally. And that we're people first and everyone feels like respected. And I sometimes worried especially with the interns they come in and then they leave and I think I've spoiled them and they're gonna go not because I did anything extraordinary and I was like they were like you know I had an intern recently who had like several deaths in the family and we had to do a lot of flexible scheduling and they were like very I think overly grateful that we were flexible with them and I they were expecting to get in trouble and I was like why would you be getting in trouble you're like a person who has family and what I say to them always is you may not encounter a lot of workplaces that operate the way we do, but I want you to know what's possible both so that you'll fight for it more and also because maybe someday you're going to be running a workplace and you'll know more about what's possible. And that's not to say that we're perfect. I'm sure there are lots of ways I could do better, but like that's I think that modeling that even when the world, you know, when you leave school is going to be worse, right? It changes what your expectations are, what you know is possible, what you've experienced somatically as possible. And I think also So for whatever listeners remember the Stanford rape case, there's two cases. There's the Stanford rape case. And then a year or two before that, there was a rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, some high school students. I'm not going to get into the gory details because who needs it. But the difference between how bystanders acted in those cases, I think is really illustrative. In Steubenville, Ohio, one of the kids who watched two of his friends assault a passed out girl at a party, took the stand in the trial and was asked like why didn't you do something and he said I didn't know that's what rape looked like I actually believe him because he got non-existent or terrible sex education in which he expected rape to be like a woman fighting back and a stranger in the bushes overpowering her with a weapon right he did not understand that it could be his buddies and a woman passively being acted upon sexually which is like what the dominant patriarchal model of sex is anyway right like when are the consumed in sex and men are the consumers right he genuinely didn't know that's what rape looked like and therefore he did not do anything and when you look at this the Stanford case there were two men that happened along the and saw the assault and they immediately intervened and I believe firmly the reason they immediately intervened even though they saw a very similar scene in this case it was one assailant and a passed out woman is because they were Swedish they're international students and Sweden has excellent sex education and they know what rape looks like. Even when they go out into the much harsher world, they're going to understand in their bodies when something is wrong and in some cases be able to do something about it. And that changes the world.
SPEAKER_00:And that's, I mean, that's the crux of bystander intervention theory right there is you need to be able to see something happen, but then you need to be able to interpret that thing as requiring intervention in order to go anywhere with that. Yes, you need to plan all those things, but if you can't interpret that event as requiring intervention, nothing's going to happen. And that's so often the case. as we normalize behavior, we normalize deeply, deeply harmful behavior, of course folks aren't going to intervene. And you've talked about community a couple of times, the antidote to fascism, or the antidote to fascism, or authoritarianism, or both. We get a twofer, is community. The last episode, Julie Sweetland from Frameworks Institute on, and you're talking about framing, how do we frame messages that actually move people into action And she said over and over that any message, any call to action has to be based in community. And that anytime a call to action is based in an individual action, that... It might have that moment where you've done that one thing, but it doesn't move you toward a greater purpose where you're going to do many things or then you're going to involve other people. And I loved that. I had never thought about that before. And... Also, we talked about how in scrolling social media, we think that like reposting a thing once is that is our action. And it fulfills this part of us that feels like we have done something without doing something. So dangerous. Yes, it's so dangerous. And that when we are moving people into action, that when that the most effective thing is to move them towards community. So it's not just call your senator. It's not just show up at your school board meeting. It's get together with with a group of friends and write postcards together, get together with a group of friends and host a homestyle town hall meeting about what's important about this issue and then move in action from that place. What's been your experience with the most effective
SPEAKER_02:ways to move people towards sex ed? That's the fundamental model. So, you know, the call to action is always if we come together and have enough of us do this thing, then something will be better in the future. We're moving towards something and not just against something. So folks can find all of those messages at educateusaction.org if it's okay to plug. Oh, yes, it will be linked in the show notes. want to get someone to do something, you have to make them feel something. So the other component that I would say is, and that comes with community. Community is a great way to generate it is like, it has to be based in emotion and not just facts. There's actually an enormous amount of research on this. There's I can cite a lot of facts about why facts don't persuade people. I
SPEAKER_00:had a conversation about that just a week ago. Can I share all of Yes.
SPEAKER_02:We teach an advocacy workshop called Passion to Power, which is free to take. If anyone wants to take it, you can also find that on our website. And the first hour is on storytelling and why the focus of all of our advocacy work is on honing and shaping your own story for advocacy work. Because if you want people to feel something, to do something, you have to make them feel something. And the component unit of making people feel something is Our brains are so
SPEAKER_00:accustomed to the shape of stories. We relax into them. It's so unbelievably effective.
SPEAKER_02:And what's even more effective is this technique called deep canvassing. Are you familiar with deep canvassing? Yes. So deep canvassing is a technique. Canvassing is sort of shorthand for like door knocking or phone banking for a cause, right? Like you're trying to tell people to vote for something or to show up at a meeting or, you know, whatever, get people to do something. you're calling strangers or you're knocking on doors of strangers. Lots of people have done this for various reasons, for get out the vote or, you know, for a particular candidate or for an issue. Deep canvassing was developed in the fight for marriage equality in California after just a bruising loss that was unexpected on a ballot measure. And LGBTQ organizers in California got together and were like, we need to understand why people we think should be voting with us are not voting with us. And they just started knocking on people's doors and just like, got curious and they just started asking people to talk to them about where they are on the issue and why they're there. And what they found was the most lasting and deep change you can make in terms of persuasion on issues where people are kind of stuck in a place of bias and fear, which is certainly the issue of sex education and sexual violence, is you can get somebody else to tell you a story. You can get that person to tell you a story and you have a story exchange. So, you know, you solicit from them a story about why they feel the way they do why they are afraid of what they're afraid of whatever it is and the more specific and emotionally evocative a story the more they can really emotionally enter the story they're telling you the more effective it's going to be and then the key part for you is you're not listening to correct facts you're not in fact forbidden from correcting facts which is my least favorite part of this technique it's like people say just wrong things and like i've i've broken this a million times and every time i do it doesn't work because people are telling you misinformation because it justifies how they feel. And the important thing is how they feel, not the misinformation, right?
SPEAKER_00:The dissonance is deeply uncomfortable. And yes, anything to work through that. Yes.
SPEAKER_02:It's so hard to not be like, well, that's actually not true. But it doesn't help. What helps is listening without an intent to persuade, which is a sort of an oxymoron when you're having conversations where your goal is persuasion. But in the moment when you're listening that story, you're listening to understand them, just to genuinely understand them. And not making any assumptions that you already do understand them. In fact, two of the key questions that you ask are, how did that make you feel? And why did you feel that way? And we often skip especially that last question, but I think both of those two questions because we think we know when someone else is telling us a story. But I had to tell you, I've gotten the most magical and fascinating responses asking people those questions when they tell me a story. And then you share your own story about why you are where you're at and why this issue is so important to you and ideally you like connect a value that you hold in common there's always a value you hold in common right we all want kids to grow up safe and happy right like there's there's always some core values you can agree on and what happens if you do this sincerely is the defenses go down understanding each other goes up people feel heard and therefore they relax and sometimes they self-persuaded sometimes they've never ever really been asked or prompted to reflect on why they feel the way they do and they come to their they shift themselves before you even talk to them about it just the act of prompting them to talk you through it they hear themselves and they're like oh and now i see that i've been stuck in this place because xyz and sometimes it's just the human connection the deeper human connection and like like a lot of times this doesn't work on people who are hard opposition on whatever the issue is you're not going to get them this people works on people who are Soft opposed to soft support, moving them toward from soft opposed to soft support or soft support to hard support, right? And so a lot of times those people, they don't know why they feel icky about whatever it is. And they don't want to feel icky about what it is because they know it's not the right answer, quote unquote. And so they've been very afraid to talk about how they really feel because they feel like everyone's going to yell at them. And when they get the experience of just getting to talk it through without being yelled at, There's just so much softening that happens that then you can then make an argument at the end that can get heard, right? But you have to do the work of relationship building first. We always say one of our team agreements that educate us is like relationships are everything because everything moves at the speed of relationships. The entire world moves at the speed of relationships and relationships move at the speed of trust, right? And that you being vulnerable and sharing a story, them being willing to be vulnerable and tell you a story, that exchange of relationships ability builds trust like nothing else so fundamentally like you can do this with people you know also you can do this with friends and family it's harder to not be reactive with your friends and family because the stakes are sort of higher like when you're doing this with a stranger it can okay you can have detachment and be like well i'm never going to see this person again and i can debrief this with my pal afterwards and just be fascinated by whatever this person's saying when it's your mom it's a different feeling but if you can manage it you can do it with them you can also do this with legislators we I love that when working with someone who is involved in any issue who might be on what might be seen as the opposite
SPEAKER_00:side of something. thing is me asking like why did you why do you care about this in the first place why did you get into this line of work what is your origin story because so much in there is there's so much opportunity to identify shared values and another piece is another fact is that it is more effective to insert your message after someone has stated something about themselves that they feel good about is because i care about my community and that can happen in a class room setting and teaching sex ed is a young person says something harmful we say okay well hey let's pause for a second what's something that you love about yourself i'm a really good friend okay well you just said that if someone is drunk or on drugs that they're asking to be assaulted or if a woman is wearing skippy clothing what would that look like if if you saw a friend being assaulted what would you do as a good friend what would that mean for you and they go oh so we go back to what they've already said is important to them um Second, we're in a classroom context, but also in these conversations where we're trying to move people into community together to work towards some sort of shared issue. And one other element of that is that because we humans, we like to believe ourselves to be good people, one. We're so invested in that. Yes. I can do all kinds of cherry picking and the confirmation bias comes in and there's, there's sort of ironic that that's
SPEAKER_02:why the facts don't work because we think we're rational
SPEAKER_00:because we think we are deeply rational beings. And so when we get to that place of curiosity and feeling and connection, it moves past that. We, this isn't about being rational or not. This is about what do you believe? What do you value? And how can we, what do I believe? What do I value? How can we connect in that place and move together from there? I totally
SPEAKER_02:agree with all that. I want to come back on and close the thought on deep canvassing because the really exciting thing I want to share is that we just spent two years with the support of the Packard Foundation and CECAS developing a first of its kind deep canvassing script on sex education that persuades people on sex education and specifically drills down on folks whose hesitation on sex ed in schools is about teaching about gender identity. Because we find that most of the soft opposed people, that's where they're hung up. And it works. It genuinely works. And we're going to be doing trainings on it this year. So if anybody listening wants to learn how to use this technique specifically on sex ed, and especially about talking about trans kids in schools, they should sign up on our email list at educateusaction.org because we're just sort of putting together the details of our first training. It's going to be a virtual training so people can dial in from anywhere in the country. And we're really excited to get people trained on this technique because it it's like nothing else it's it's incredibly effective that's amazing i mean i think that i mostly just want to say to not feel helpless to not get stuck in helplessness right like i think it's really easy right now to feel overwhelmed to feel like everything is very big and difficult and there's so little that we can do but it's not true i don't feel energized and hopeful every day But I've really learned that whether I feel hopeful or not is sort of none of my own business in terms of what I do, right? And I learned that there's a number of folks who've spoken beautifully on this. I personally learned it from Rebecca Solnit's book, Hope in the Dark, which she wrote around the Iraq war. And the idea is fundamentally like, if you behave as though no change is possible, you definitely will not produce any change. If you behave as though there is hope for change, you may in fact be able to produce change. You may not, but you might. And so I feel like our job at Educate Us Every Day is just to get up and figure out how to produce hope for change for sex ed. And there's a whole bunch of tools on our website for people who want to get involved to explore and figure out what your role might be. But just don't choose nothing, is what I would say. You can choose to, like, grab a friend and decide to continually to go to your school board meeting once a month and just make sure you know what's going on there. Or even go to, you know, the SECIS SIE You'll put this in the show notes. They have state report cards so that they'll be able to tell you what you actually you can say much more know what New Mexico needs than than I can. And I know there's there's a film moving right now as we're recording. But your school district, you know, you can find out what you're what's being taught in your school district and advocate for it to be better. There's a million things that you can do and you don't have to do all of them. And in fact, you can't do all of them, but don't do none of them. Just pick one.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. It comes back to it. the end of the day the answer is in community it's being together it is what keeps us from being hopeless but and it is what keeps us moving towards what could be different we heal in community all of that
SPEAKER_02:yes absolutely we cannot do it by ourselves relationships are everything so if something feels too daunting to do by yourself think could i do it if i had a friend or three friends if you don't like calling your representatives what if you had some cheese and wine and some people over and you all called your representatives like and then you spend like five minutes calling your representatives about whatever the issue is and then you've got cheese and wine and friends right community and relationships make literally everything more possible
SPEAKER_00:absolutely and you can make it fun Jacqueline thank you so much for coming on both and it's been an absolute pleasure folks you can find Jacqueline's work at educate us everything will be linked in the show notes educate us action I love that we don't need to say dot calm anymore or done, you can just Google Educate Us Action. You will find it. Yes. And everything else will be linked in the show notes. Jacqueline, thank you so much. Thank you. It was a real pleasure. Thank you for listening to Both And. Both And is a project of the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs, and this episode was made possible by the New Mexico Department of Health. Both And is produced by me, Jess Clark, and edited by the fabulous Daisha Clay at Pillow Ford Studios. Intro music was written by Michelle Chamuel and logo design by Alex Frost-Reed. You can find links to the articles and papers we mentioned in the show notes. And as always, you can reach me with questions, comments, and even disagreements at jessc at nmcsap.org. Thank you. And I'm so looking forward to next time.
