The Blog
Let's talk about sex, sexuality, and everything we were never taught to question. From documentaries and pop culture to pleasure, relationships, and sex education, this blog explores how we learn what we know about sexuality, who gets to shape those conversations, and whose voices are left out.
Expect honest reflections, critical conversations, and a little myth-busting as we challenge stigma, unpack shame, and imagine a more inclusive, pleasure-centered world.
Before there was social media, Pornhub or ChatGPT, television and film took the lead in teaching us what sex education looked like. Think about the visual language of the sex ed scene. The anatomical diagram at the front of the classroom. The teacher who would rather be anywhere else. The banana and condom demonstration. The students hiding their laughter behind their hands. The horrified faces. The abstinence lecture. The awkward question that nobody wants to answer. We recognize these images almost instantly.
That familiarity raises an interesting question: Did television teach us what sex ed was supposed to look like, or did television simply hold up a mirror to what was already happening in classrooms? Honestly, it’s probably a little of both.
Popular culture does more than entertain us. The images we encounter establish what we see as normal, embarrassing, desirable, dangerous, or worthy of being taken seriously. Sex education has developed its own visual vocabulary in popular culture, and much of it revolves around discomfort. The classroom becomes a place where sex is whispered about, laughed at, moralized, medicalized, or reduced to diagrams of reproductive organs and warnings about pregnancy and disease.
That matters because the media doesn't simply show us sex education; it can also shape what we imagine sex education is. When the same awkward classroom scene appears again and again, inadequate sex education can begin to feel less like a failure and more like an inevitable rite of passage: Of course sex ed is awkward. Of course the teacher is uncomfortable. Of course nobody talks about pleasure. Of course students aren't going to get all their questions answered here.
This creates a strange feedback loop. Real experiences of inadequate sex education give writers material for television and film. Those representations become familiar cultural images. New generations encounter those images before, during, and after their own sex education experiences. Eventually, it becomes difficult to tell where the stereotype ends and the lived experience begins.
Maybe the more interesting question isn't whether life is imitating television or television is imitating life. Maybe it's what happens when both keep reinforcing the same story about what sex education is allowed to look like.
So what happens when school sex ed has become so futile that it’s practically a long-running joke? Every generation seems to share some version of the same experience: inadequate sex education at school, an awkward and confusing conversation with a parent, or a mountain of misinformation passed along by a friend. So, where do young people actually get their information?
Increasingly, they look elsewhere. A 2024 study found that teens were more than seven times as likely to name social media as their main source of information about sexuality as they were to name school. Pornography has become another source of informal education, with research showing that 1 in 4 young people 18-24 consider porn helpful for learning how to have sex.
Not talking to young people about sexuality doesn’t remove the conversation from the table. It just moves it to another table, one where the information may be inaccurate, misleading, or created for purposes other than education. Young people are still going to have questions about sex, bodies, relationships, pleasure, and health. When trusted adults and educators don’t answer them, they are left to navigate those questions elsewhere.
And now there’s a new seat at the table: artificial intelligence.
In 2026, 44% of surveyed teens reported using AI tools such as chatbots for health information or advice within just the previous three months. Unlike the uncomfortable gym teacher, the embarrassed parent, or even a Google search, AI is available 24/7, answers almost any question without appearing to judge, and never gets embarrassed. Whether or not we intended it to happen, AI is quickly becoming another place young people can turn when they have questions they don’t feel comfortable asking anywhere else.
So what happens when media, pornography, and AI become some of young people’s most trusted resources for learning about sex?
The problem is that these platforms were never designed to replace comprehensive sexuality education. Pornography, for example, is entertainment, not education. It can present sexual scripts that young people may interpret as models for what sex is supposed to look like, while leaving out important conversations about communication, consent, contraception, relationships, and the realities of different bodies. A 2023 systematic review of 19 studies found an association between adolescent pornography exposure and having sex before age 16.
Artificial intelligence presents a different set of concerns. In a nationally representative 2026 study of 3,466 U.S. teens ages 13–17, 17.1% reported receiving false information from conversational AI, 23.1% said they had felt manipulated or pressured, 32.3% had been asked for uncomfortable personal information, and 15.2% reported being prompted toward risky behaviors.
Young people are going to have questions about sex. Avoiding those questions does not make them disappear; it simply changes where young people go looking for answers. That is exactly why comprehensive sex education is more important now than ever, especially at a moment when federal sex education programs are undergoing major changes.
In 2026, the Trump administration terminated 53 of 67 existing grants under the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPP), a program created to support evidence-based approaches to preventing teen pregnancy and improving adolescent sexual health. Cuts and changes like these threaten the ability of programs across the country to provide young people with accessible, medically accurate, and trusted information at a time when they need it most.
But young people aren't going to stop asking questions just because the funding disappears.
That is why The School of Sexuality Project is expanding how we make comprehensive sex education available. We want to create online content that is accessible, medically accurate, honest, relevant, and, because sex education doesn't have to be awkward or boring, actually fun.
This is our first step in that direction.
Welcome to The Blog, our new online home for comprehensive sex education conversations. A place to ask questions, challenge misinformation, talk honestly about sexuality, and get the information we all deserved to have in the first place. We can’t wait to have a chat with you!
Sexplanation: Let's Talk About Masturbation Shame
What happens when something completely normal becomes something we're taught to feel ashamed of?
I recently watched the documentary Sexplanation, and I really enjoyed the incredibly sweet, vulnerable journey director Alex Liu takes us on. Alex, a queer Asian American filmmaker, sets out to grapple with the shame our society attaches to sex and how that shame shapes our relationships with ourselves, our bodies, and the people we care about most.
What makes this film especially powerful is that Alex isn't just documenting sexual shame—he's confronting his own.
Rather than remaining behind the camera, Alex becomes an active participant in the documentary. His personal experiences become part of a much bigger conversation about how we learn to feel about our bodies and sexuality. From conversations with religious leaders to deeply personal exchanges with his parents, Alex takes us along on his journey to unpack the shame he has carried for much of his life.
And one of the biggest sources of that shame? Masturbation.
The Masturbation Shame We Never Talk About
Masturbation has to be one of the most unnecessarily stigmatized parts of human sexuality.
For generations, we've been told that touching our own bodies is dirty, sinful, dangerous, or something we should never admit to doing. Remember the old warnings? You'll grow hair on your palms. You'll go blind. Something terrible will happen if you touch yourself.
Of course, none of those things are true. But the shame behind those warnings? That's very real.
Like so many young people, Alex found himself living in what I like to call the masturbation shame closet: a place where something completely normal becomes a secret you feel you have to hide.
And when nobody talks about masturbation openly, that silence can start to feel like confirmation that there's something wrong with you.
But there isn't.
Masturbation is a common, normal part of human sexuality. It can be a way to explore your body, discover what feels good, relieve stress, or simply experience pleasure. Some people masturbate, some don't, and both are perfectly okay.
The problem isn't masturbation. It's the shame we've attached to it.
When Shame Becomes Bigger Than Sex
One of the most heartbreaking parts of Sexplanation is Alex's willingness to talk about how deeply sexual shame affected his mental health.
He shares the depression he experienced while carrying that shame, including a period when he struggled with suicidal thoughts.
That's a difficult thing to share, especially publicly. And it's an important reminder that sexual shame doesn't always stay neatly contained in the part of our lives we label sex.
It can shape how we see ourselves. How comfortable we feel in our bodies. Whether we believe we're worthy of love, intimacy, and connection. And whether we feel safe enough to talk honestly with the people closest to us.
When young people repeatedly hear that their bodies, curiosity, or desires are something to be ashamed of, those messages can become part of how they understand themselves.
Sexual shame isn't necessarily the sole cause of depression or suicidal thoughts. Mental health is complex. But Alex's story shows why we need to take the emotional weight of shame seriously rather than dismissing it as embarrassment or an awkward phase.
What If Sex Ed Didn't Teach Us Shame?
This is exactly why young people deserve shame-free, pleasure-centered sexuality education.
Not just lessons about anatomy, pregnancy, and sexually transmitted infections. Not just a list of things to avoid.
Young people deserve information that helps them understand their bodies without fear. They deserve to know that masturbation is normal and not medically harmful. They deserve to understand privacy, boundaries, consent, and bodily autonomy. And they deserve to learn that experiencing pleasure doesn't make them dirty, immoral, or less worthy of respect.
Pleasure shouldn't be treated as a reward for meeting society's expectations of what makes someone good, respectable, or acceptable.
Our bodies are not something we should have to earn permission to feel comfortable in.
And pleasure-centered sex education isn't about telling everyone to masturbate. It's about making sure no one grows up believing they're broken because they do—or because they don't.
The Sex Ed Lesson Alex Didn't Know He Was Teaching
What I loved most about Sexplanation is that Alex doesn't pretend to have all the answers.
He asks questions. He gets uncomfortable. He talks to people who see the world differently. And he lets us witness the messy, emotional process of confronting beliefs that have followed him for years.
In that way, Alex becomes both the filmmaker and the student.
And maybe that's what makes the documentary such an effective piece of sex education. It reminds us that learning about sexuality isn't just about gathering facts. Sometimes it's about unlearning the shame we've carried for so long that we forgot it was ever taught to us.
Sexplanation is a thoughtful, funny, vulnerable, and deeply human documentary. Alex does a wonderful job telling his story while inviting the rest of us to question our own.
Highly recommended viewing.
And if you've ever felt ashamed of your own curiosity, your body, or the simple act of experiencing pleasure, here's your permission slip: You don't have to carry that shame forever.
Common Threads: Whose Truth Gets Told?
When a society refuses to hear certain stories, telling them becomes an act of resistance.
In honor of World AIDS Day on December 1, our team watched Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. This powerful documentary brings together the stories of people lost to the AIDS crisis, stitching their lives together much like the panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt itself. Through personal memories, photographs, and the voices of loved ones, the film reminds us that behind every statistic was a person with a life, relationships, and a story worth telling.
The documentary follows people whose experiences with HIV/AIDS reflect different paths of transmission, including sexual contact, blood transfusions, and shared needles. Their stories reveal how the epidemic affected people across different communities, while also exposing how stigma, homophobia, and social inequality shaped whose lives were treated as worthy of protection and whose suffering was pushed to the margins.
Woven between these intimate stories is news footage and media coverage from the 1980s, revealing the fear, misinformation, moral judgment, and political neglect that surrounded the epidemic. The film was released in 1989, just eight years after the CDC first reported the unusual illnesses that would later be recognized as AIDS. President Ronald Reagan did not publicly address AIDS until September 1985, more than four years after those first reports, and did not deliver a major public speech focused on the epidemic until 1987.
By the end of the 1980s, tens of thousands of people in the United States had died from AIDS-related illnesses. Yet for much of that decade, queer communities and others affected by the epidemic were met not only with a devastating public health crisis but also with silence, discrimination, and the suggestion that their suffering was somehow deserved.
And that is what makes Common Threads so powerful. At a time when people living with HIV/AIDS were being stigmatized, ignored, and pushed out of public view, this documentary brought their stories into the open. It refused to let the people lost to the epidemic be remembered only through headlines, statistics, or the moral judgments of those in power.
We often think of documentaries as windows into the truth. But whose truth are we actually seeing? In Crafting Truth, Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro remind us that “All representation is transformation” (2011, p. 11). In other words, documentaries don't simply show us history. They shape how we understand it.
And that's exactly what makes Common Threads so powerful. At a time when politicians and news outlets helped shape a public narrative of fear and stigma surrounding AIDS, this documentary offered another way of understanding the crisis. Through the voices of loved ones and the stories preserved in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, we encounter people whose lives were too often reduced to statistics, diagnoses, and moral judgments.
So this World AIDS Day, take some time to listen to the voices that were historically silenced. Honor the lives lost, the stories that deserve to be told, and the communities that refused to disappear quietly. Let this day be more than remembrance. Let it be an opportunity to challenge and transform the narratives that have shaped whose lives are valued and whose voices are heard. Because the silence, stigma, and fear that fueled the AIDS crisis haven't disappeared. We still see them being used today to deny people pushed to the margins of society their autonomy, humanity, and right to live with dignity.
Remembering is important. But whose stories we choose to tell, and whose truths we choose to hear, can be an act of resistance.
To honor World AIDS Day, we've put together a list of documentaries that challenge the silence, celebrate the lives and stories of those affected by HIV/AIDS, and remind us why these histories still matter. Watch with us!