SEX (w/Dr. Nadine Thornhill & Julia Feldman)

In this episode I chat with Dr. Nadine Thornhill, a Toronto-based sex and sexuality educator, about reasons sex can be so hard for us to talk about, the difference between sex and sexuality, and how we can talk to our kids about sex without talking about sex.

We also welcome back Julia Feldman to chat about masturbation, the dangers of heteronormative sex education, why most sex educators are women, and how to set our kids up for the sex lives they truly deserve.

You can find "The Talk" on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and If you'd like to contribute to the conversation by sharing your story about one of our episode topics, you can do so by sending a voice memo or an email to thetalk@thetalkthepodcast.com. 

Transcript

Ellen Condon Macy: As far as talking to the girls, I'm not really too concerned, let's say, when it comes to masturbation because that, to me, is very cut and dry. It's just sort of like "it's normal, it's fun, please do it in private." The end. But when it comes to actual sex, my concern is: Where do I draw the line in terms of letting them know that it's normal and it's natural, but also making sure that they stay safe and they make smart choices in terms of partners. And that's not something that I think adolescents are particularly good at.

You're listening to "The Talk": a podcast where we explore the possibility of creating a radical new communication environment between parents and children. An environment that's open, honest, and candid, and where nothing is off-limits.

Tom Macy: Even from a young age, I liked girls throughout grade school and it wasn't like—not to be too explicit—but it wasn't like I had any idea of what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted a girlfriend and all that stuff. When they explained the physical act of intercourse, the penis goes in the vagina, I was just like, "What?" And it blew my mind.

Hi, everybody, it's Jeremy. I'm really excited to bring this episode to all of you because when I think about the phrase "The Talk", this is the one that comes to mind for me, the sex talk. It seems like nearly everybody has a recollection of some iteration of the sex talk that they were given by the adults who raised them and it's almost never a pleasant recollection. However, sometimes in retrospect, it can be amusing how little information we were given, or how awkward our parents seemed to feel about giving it, or how intensely we wish we could curl up into a speck and disappear into another dimension when we realized we were about to get "The Talk". If you've been listening regularly to this podcast, you know that my aspiration is to eliminate the need for "The Talk" to exist. To explore the idea of making it obsolete, a relic of a time when parents and children didn't communicate openly and honestly about stuff, a time when family conversations about sex, drugs, race, death, bodies, and all those other challenging topics were completely taboo. Obviously, this podcast alone isn't going to achieve that goal. But I think the fact that this podcast has been allowed to exist and that so many of you have supported it and expressed how valuable you find these conversations to be is an indication that "The Talk" is improving; that bit by bit, generation by generation, we are headed toward a place where parents are seeing their children differently, understanding that they, too, are capable of understanding, allowing them to make and learn from their own choices. And where many parents are learning to listen better to their children, honoring their voices, and thereby honoring the voices of the children within themselves. Today, we're going to be talking to two sex and sexuality educators who are going to give us some great insight and advice about navigating the conversation around sex with our kids. In the second half of the episode, we'll hear from Julia Feldman about masturbation, the dangers of heteronormative sex education, and the ethics of ethical pornography. But first…

Dr. Nadine Thornhill: I am Dr. Nadine Thornhill.

For over 15 years, Dr. Thornhill has been working with families and teachers to provide the tools for them to communicate confidently and openly about sex with the kids and teenagers in their lives. We started off by asking her what we should make of this cultural idea that there's a "right time" to start talking with kids about sex.

N.T.: I think there are sort of two ideas at play, and one of them is this very old idea that sex, and more broadly sexuality, is something that is dangerous and risky and should never be left unchecked. And so I think throughout history, particularly in Western Christian patriarchal societies, there's been this attempt to put sex and sexuality in these containers and the idea being that it will keep it safe. You know, first of all, it's only about partnered sex, partnered sex for procreation within the context of marriage, all of these ideas that, "OK, if it just sort of happens over here and it's safe and we sort of silo sex and, by extension, sexuality, and keep it contained, then maybe we can sort of contain its danger." But I think something else that's at play is that as parents and caregivers, we get a lot of messages about how it's really critical to parent correctly and there's a lot of pressure around parenting in this ideal way. And again, being the ideal parent, I think, is something that's been very commodified. It's very generalized. And so, even when you look at a lot of parenting books or resources around parenting, we'll talk about a lot about "This needs to happen at this age. This needs to happen at this age or it needs to happen at this age." And so, again, there's this idea of, OK, there's a "right time" to talk about sex. And again, it's usually puberty.

Jeremy: And in a lot of cases, not only is that the first time this topic is broached but there's also no continued mentoring or follow-up after the conversation. And it's just like this barrage of information.

N.T.: "Don't get pregnant, don't get anyone else pregnant, don't get sick. OK, we're done." And it doesn't need to be that way. And I think that puts tremendous pressure on us as parents. It's both giving our children too much and not enough information because, you know, you sit down and you think, "OK, I'm just going to throw kind of anatomy, development, periods, erections, feelings, relationships, contraception, safer sex at them in an hour." That's way too much information for you to take in all at once. But also, as you said there, no follow up and there's no preamble. So it's sort of like, "Wait, what? What just happened?" Our kids live in the world. They're seeing things in their relationships, in their friendships at school, on TV, on social media. They're having all of these internal experiences. And if we've just had that one talk, again, there's no context. There's very little understanding. And if we haven't taken the time to make it clear that those channels of communication are open, it may not occur to them to come to us with those questions, with their curiosity, with their confusion, because it's just not available to them. Something that I've realized is that a lot of parents, it's not that they don't want to be open with their children, it's not that they're sitting there thinking, "Never come to me with a question, never come to me if you need me." They want their kids to come to them. If they have questions, they want their kids to come to them, but they just simply don't have the skills and the experience of having these particular conversations. A lot of us didn't grow up having those conversations with our own parents. It's like anything else. If you've never done it, you may not know how and you may not be amazing at it. And again, what I always want to encourage with parents is to take that pressure off yourself. You don't have to feel super comfortable. It's OK if you feel awkward, particularly if you're not used to saying these words out loud, if you're not sure "Is the information I'm giving them accurate? Is it appropriate? Do they need to know this? What do they need to know?" So something that I will say to parents is if you haven't had a conversation with your kid until they're 10 or 11 or 12, it's OK to say, "Look, you know what, I know we've never talked about this before and I'm not sure how this is going to go. And to be perfectly honest, I'm feeling kind of weird and awkward about this. But I think it's important for us to start talking about this, so. I'm not going to be perfect at this, but I'm going to do my best, so let's go."

Jeremy: Yeah, well, there is a pressure and a desire from parents to be an authority figure in their children's lives. So if you feel like you're not an authority on this subject, I can see how it's very difficult to be vulnerable with your kids in that way and say, "Look, I don't know everything about this. We're going to explore this together." We can go on that process with them if we need to, right?

N.T.: A hundred percent. A lot of us as parents feel that we didn't have sufficient sex education, whether it was insufficient in school or it was insufficient in our homes. And oftentimes we want to try and broach these conversations with our kids because we want to give them better sex-ed than we ourselves had. And what I was talking about was the fact that if you as a parent and you as an adult feel like, "Yeah, there's a lot of stuff I don't know or I wasn't taught as a young person," it's not too late for you either. And that idea that you can learn together is so powerful and it's going to be so healing and informative not only for your child, but for you as well. And it can help you unlearn, maybe, some of the lessons that were harmful or didn't serve you or no longer serve you. And it's going to help. It's going to give you an opportunity to discover all sorts of new information and new ideas that can really just expand your perspective on your own sexuality and your own sexual experiences because you're still alive, you're still a human, you still have life to live and we're sexual people our entire lives. It manifests in different ways for different people at different times, but your journey is not over either. And something else I say to parents is it's so not about doing it perfectly. It's not about doing it seamlessly. I do this for my job. And I can tell you that I struggle having conversations with my own kid. I get nervous, I get uncomfortable, I get awkward. Sometimes I don't know what to say, but I really think it's the attempt and it's the willingness that is so powerful for your child. Every time you show up, even if you totally mess it up, it's the fact that your child sees, like, "Hey, I was willing to put myself out there and talk about this with you because this is important and this matters and you matter."

Jeremy: And that's a huge way of building trust with them. If they can see you fail or if they can see you falter and they can see that you're a human, it feels like that's a great way of strengthening a bond that will allow them to feel like they can come to you because there's not this wall of parent authority over the child. And I was thinking, too, that there are ways of practicing that model of listening and exploring things together when our kids are really young, like, "Hey, dad, when was T rex alive?" And I can say to them, "I don't know, let's check it out, let's look it up together." And that's a great way of practicing that way of learning together.

N.T.: Absolutely. And those are all things you can say during conversations about sexuality. "I don't know, let's find out together." And sometimes when you're looking, you may want to go off on your own at first. You may be like, "I'm going to go see what can I find."

Jeremy: Before you're like, "Let's Google that together."

N.T.: Or something with your three or six-year-old. But you can say that. You can say, "You know what? I don't know. That's a really great question. I'm going to go see what I can find out and we're going to talk about this again." And then there it is. There is your ongoing conversation. So in a lot of my workshops, one of the topics that we will go over is sex versus sexuality. And so I will talk about how when we talk about sex, generally speaking, we are talking about acts that are intended to arouse us, give us pleasure in a certain way, and they may be partnered and sometimes they may be solo acts. And then I'm like, sexuality is about our identity. It's about our feelings. It's about our families. It's about our bodies. It's about how we relate to all of those things. It's the words we use to describe those things. It's so many aspects of our- sexuality is basically being a human. It's a bunch of things about being human plus sex and all of those things that are not the sex may be things that might inform sex that we do or don't want to have. And so what I will say to parents is, so things that are related to sexuality that you are probably already having some sort of conversation or teaching around with your kids are things like emotions, your feelings, even something as basic as like, when your kid is in a mood. Whatever mood that is, if you can help them name "Oh, you seem really happy. You seem really excited. Oh, you seem angry. You seem frustrated." Giving them that language is a foundational skill that they can build on so that later in their lives, if they're in sexual or romantic relationships, they're able to say, "Hey, this feels good for me. This doesn't feel good for me. This is what I need. This is what I don't need. Here are my feelings. Here are the feelings I have about you. Here are the feelings that you may be having about me." That's something you can do from the time your kids are- you can do that before they start talking, honestly.

Jeremy: And if you're modeling that kind of gentle probing and helping them to, like you said, name their emotions and name what they're feeling, then they're going to be able to translate that out toward other people, too, when they need to, right?

N.T.: Absolutely. Something like consent, which we also often talk about in the context of sexual relationships, is something that we navigate and negotiate in so many aspects of so many different relationships. So, again, when you have a young child and if you teach your child that they need to ask before they play with somebody toy, that's consent. When your child is interacting with you, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, teaching them that they're allowed to decide whether or not they want a hug or a kiss because hugs and kisses are supposed to feel good and are supposed to convey love and affection. Again, that's a foundational lesson about consent. There's nothing to do directly with sex, but again, can be built on as they grow older. And it's something that they can bring into sexual relationships if that's something that they choose to pursue when they get older. And there are so many things like that, even just how we talk about their bodies. When we give babies and toddlers baths, oftentimes we talk about the body parts that we're washing. Just include their penis and their vulva and their testicles. You're not sexualizing anything, but you're just teaching that this is also a part of your body to be acknowledged as every other part of your body is.

Jeremy: And this is a difficult thing for a lot of us to do, especially if we did grow up in more conservative or religious communities where we were explicitly or implicitly taught that our bodies are a base sinful part of us. I mean, it's a very pervasive white intellectual idea, to be honest. But the point is, it's like this world where the best way to deal with bodies and body parts is to not acknowledge their existence.

N.T.: So often we assume that if we don't acknowledge it, then it doesn't exist for them. And our children exist in the same world that we do. And so when we talk to them about these aspects of their bodies, of relationships, and just explain the things that are happening around them, it's not that we're suddenly presenting it to them and they're like, "My God, I had no idea." Like I'll say, if your child has a penis, they know they have a penis. They can see it there. It's part of their body. Their vulva is part of their body, they can feel it. So when you don't acknowledge it, you are still teaching them something. And so by talking to them, what you're doing is you're just helping them understand it and sort of giving them a lens through which to view it. And when you don't do that, it's not that they don't see these things. What they will start to do is they will start to come up with their own little explanations in their heads and sometimes they'll be right and sometimes they'll be inaccurate. And so when you do something like, "I'm not going to name my child's genitals," what they realize is, "OK, something's weird about my genitals because I have them, I can see them, I know they're there. But how come every other part of my body has a name and this doesn't? What's up with that?"

Jeremy: This is something I see constantly in parenting Facebook groups and stuff where somebody will ask about how to initiate the sex talk with their kids and a whole bunch of people will be like, "Just wait till they ask about it and answer whatever questions they have then." And personally, that response always kind of grates against my instincts. But I'm curious what you think about that idea of just waiting to initiate essentially until your kids are the ones who start the conversation.

N.T.: Some children are very curious and waiting until they have questions might work if you have one of those children who's- they're always asking me questions about everything, I never have a chance to actually volunteer information because it's like, "What's this? What's this? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?" That having been said, a lot of children, again, particularly around sexuality, it's not going to occur to them to ask. They may not have the language to ask the questions. They may not know how to frame the question, particularly if you haven't been having those conversations their entire life or sometimes, like my child, because you've been having this conversation their entire life, they're like, "You know what? I'm done. I don't want to ask you nothing." So what you can do in that case is take it upon yourself to be proactive and volunteer information. Again, when we're talking about young kids, I think a great way of getting into the conversations or giving them the information is to look for books. There are so many fantastic books that are written for children about sexuality, about bodies, about relationships, even about identity, things like gender or orientation. And so if you want to look at some of those books, and what I often suggest to parents is I'm like, "You can even read the book yourself," because what that will do is help you capture some child-appropriate language to talk about these issues. That's often a big barrier for parents. They're like, "I just I don't know how to say this to like a four-year-old or a five-year-old because no one said it to me when I was four or five. I learned it when I was twenty-seven. And I can't say it in the twenty-seven-year-old way." So I'm like, "You can read those books and you can borrow those phrases or ideas." Or you can sit down with your kid. If your kid likes reading with you, sit down and that can be one of the bedtime stories or one of the story-time stories. And that may lead to questions or it may not. But again, you're just sort of familiarizing them with these ideas and whatnot, and then you can let them know, "Hey, if you have any questions about stuff like this, ask me any time." But then go back every once in a while, maybe every month or two with a new book, or if they really liked that book, go back and read it again. Just so they're accustomed to just hearing those words, getting into those concepts and those ideas so it just feels safe and comfortable for them.

Thanks so much to Dr. Nadine Thornhill for joining me for this conversation. You can follow Nadine on Instagram at @NadineThornhill and you can find out more about her work at NadineThornhill.com, where you can find an ebook for parents called "Let's Talk About Sexuality." In it, she breaks down different topics that you might want to discuss with your kids at different stages of their lives.

N.T.: I tend to not use the framework of age-appropriate because I think that age alone, when you're talking about individual kids, is not necessarily the best gauge of what they're ready for. So it's broken down into conversations you can have with preschoolers, children, tweens, and teenagers.

The book talks about what might be going on at different stages of sexual development and includes conversation prompts that you can use to kick off that dialog with your kids. There are even additional resources for parents to explore.

N.T.: So if you're like "Ahh but I don't know what to say," I'm like, "Here's where you can kind of bone up on your own sex education so you're ready to have these conversations."

And if you'd like to dig even deeper, you can check out Nadine's web series entitled "Every Body Curious," which has fun, sexuality-related lessons targeted toward nine to 12-year-olds. You can watch it with your kids and use the information as a springboard toward normalizing and continuing to have these important conversations as they develop into young adult humans. Find “Every Body Curious” on YouTube or by visiting NadineThornhill.com.

Coming up, Julia Feldman is back with us to talk about the purpose of sex education, pornography, and setting your kids up for the sex life they truly deserve. Julia Feldman joined us last fall for a Fast and Furious Q&A as part of our Bodies episode. Julia is a sex educator and consultant who's dedicated to providing a scientifically accurate, empowering, joyful perspective on sex and sexuality to parents, teachers, and to her throng of Instagram followers.

Jeremy: I really want to talk with you about what sex education is like in our country, what it could be like, and I have this feeling, not coming out of any real expertize, but this feeling that that good quality, honest, open sex education could solve a lot of problems. One to two generations down the road, if this kind of thing could be embraced and implemented, there's so many things that it could improve about everyone's quality of life. And so I'm really interested in exploring that with you a little bit. And my first question is, it feels like a lot of, if not most, sex educators are women. Does that feel like that to you? I mean, at least looking out at the people who are doing this kind of thing visibly on social media and who have these really great platforms, it seems like they're mostly women. Do you have any reflections on that?

Julia Feldman: Yeah, I think there's a bunch of things at play. My first initial response would be that sex-ed in and of itself necessitates a certain amount of tax and care and willingness to talk about vulnerable topics. And again, that's something that people who identify as women are just socialized to do better. I also think that coming from the perspective of a person who has a partner, who has worked in elementary education, and middle, and high school now, who identifies as a man, that the way that people who identify as men are perceived talking about sex to kids in our society is often considered very predatory. So I think that there are often people who identify as men that would pursue that work if they were encouraged to do it and supported in doing it. And I think that it would revolutionize the way that our society views sex-ed and that students experience it if there was more gender diversity among teachers. But I think honestly, I think most men would be scared to enter the world of sex-ed, because if you're standing in front of a room full of kids talking about sex, I mean, I've had experiences where people have misconstrued what I've said, and I feel like it would be taken even more seriously or people would be more confrontational if it was a person identified as a man.

Jeremy: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I get the idea that women and female-identifying people have maybe more investment in quality sex education existing. Do you feel like that's true?

J.F.: You know, I mean, we can get to why sex-ed exists and historically, the role that it's performed in our country and in society as a whole, but if you think about one of the major functions of sex education, in terms of teaching people how to prevent unwanted pregnancies, then you could say that people who have wombs are a lot more deeply invested in preventing unplanned pregnancies because they are the ones who are likely going to have to navigate that. So, yeah, I think that there's a more personal connection also in terms of talking about consent and communication. People who identify as women tend to find themselves in situations where their voice and their consent isn't honored as much. So, yeah, I think there's a lot of different factors at play. But again, I think it's really unfortunate. I think that the more voices that are present in the conversation and the more diversity in adults that young people see, the more they can realize that this information connects to them. We talk all about the importance of having women scientists and women in STEM and having that representation and I think that we need to talk about having gender diversity in sex-ed because it goes both ways. You need to see yourself represented to view it as relevant.

Jeremy: And speaking of that, it seems pretty clear that sex education in its current state is really pretty heteronormative and centers around heterosexual conversations and issues. And I think that not only are there a lot of things that the hetero community can learn from the queer community about navigating healthy sex and relationships but it just kind of blows my mind that still now, in 2021, that the focus of sex-ed is so narrow in that way.

J.F.: Yeah. I mean, I think that, again, if you go back to historically the role that sex education has kind of been designed to perform, especially in school-based settings, it's historically been moralistic or it's in light of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. That's when a lot of legislation came through, especially in the United States, around mandating sex-ed. And it was specifically around preventing the spread of HIV and in a lot of places that still all that's mandated in terms of sex education. So I think that if you're looking at sex-ed as a tool to stop the spread of infection, it's a very different type of role than if you're looking at sex-ed as something that can empower people to have a better,  more healthy relationship with our body, to encourage body literacy and self-knowledge, to encourage the development of healthy, consensual relationships. There's so many other things that sex-ed can do other than just teaching people to put a condom on a penis so that hopefully the spread of HIV is prevented. So I think that if we're looking to the LGBTQIA community and the queer community to add to our understanding of sex-ed, it really first necessitates a huge departure in terms of what we expect sex-ed to be able to do for us and what we want it to perform. But in terms of the types of messages, yeah. I think talking about communication and consent, understanding that there are lots of different types of sexual activities and what's most important is that you're doing it in a safe, consensual place that's aligned with your values. You know, there's a lot of different messages that focus on pleasure, that focus on empowerment, that focus on making sure that content is relevant to people. I mean, I've spoken to so many teachers who say, "Oh, yeah, our sex-ed is totally inclusive of queer people. We talk about gay people all the time." And I have to push back and say, "Yeah, you talk about gay people spreading HIV and that's at being the highest risk population." That doesn't count as inclusive sex-ed if you're targeting a population and scapegoating them. So, again, it's understanding what it means to be inclusive, but also how are we including people, and are we helping lift them up, or are we using them as a scapegoat?

Jeremy: I want to talk a little more about this idea because the baggage that so many people of our generation who are now parents have is very real and can be really hard to even recognize, let alone doing the inner work of wading through and deconstructing it. The only thing that we were taught, whether it was in church or school or wherever was sex, will hurt you in X, Y, Z ways and X, Y, Z, bad things. 

J.F.: A whole host of bad things, right? Pick your bad thing.

Jeremy: So I'm just curious if you have ideas about how we can get from that space to where we are talking openly with our kids about sexual pleasure and fulfillment and actually setting them up for a healthy relationship to sex and healthy relationships with other people.

J.F.: I think that most of that work really involves a lot of inner work as parents assessing our own values, and I think that a lot of times parents have a lot of resistance to things internally because it's just what they were told. So I taught a class of sixth graders last week and almost all of their anonymous questions that they put in the box were about waiting until marriage. And it was fascinating to me because this is a really progressive school. These parents are not religious. But I think that because so many parents, this is what was told to them, this is what they parent to their kids, even if it's not aligned with their values or current norms. There's still this internalized notion that when a kid asks me when can they have sex, I was told to wait until marriage, so that's what I'm going to tell them, even though we know that most parents didn't wait until marriage to be sexual. So I think that the first thing is just kind of checking in with yourself about how you feel about these things and realizing if, oh, the waiting until marriage or graduation or whatever arbitrary milestone was given to you doesn't resonate with you, you got to do something else. And I think that as parents, if we haven't had good sex ed modeled for us, it's really hard to figure out how to break free from the narrative that was presented to you and come up with something new. But the first step is really just figuring out what are my values, what do I actually feel and what do I want to share with my kids? And a lot of people never embark on that inner journey.

Jeremy: Yeah, that's an interesting lie that you mentioned, that most parents, of course, probably didn't wait to have sex until they were married, but that's what they tell their kid. There's just a level of investigation that hasn't been done or hasn't been honestly embarked upon or just is too intimidating to admit that there's that conflict of those values.

J.F.: And I think that most parents don't even take a step back to look through their child's eyes and realize the cognitive dissonance of growing up in a society so steeped in sexuality everywhere, and then being told by your trusted adult who you turn to for guidance that you should wait till marriage. There is such a gulf between the experience that they're observing on TV and in social media and that message. And it necessarily is going to put that child in a situation where they have to decide, "Am I going to reject popular culture and everything my friends are saying and doing, or am I going to reject my parent who I trust and respect but seems really out of touch with what's going on?" And so I think that as a parent, it makes more sense to put yourself in that situation and figure out how am I going to help my child navigate these conflicting messages and maybe not give them such conflicting messages as opposed to saddling your child with that responsibility. I think a lot of parents don't know what to do, so they give their kid that message, not realizing, wow, this now falls on your child's shoulders to navigate and they're probably not really equipped to do that.

Jeremy: Ok, so once we've done this inner work of clarifying our own values around what sex means and we want to pass those values onto our kids, I feel like it is important that we make sure we convey to them that these are conclusions that we've come to as individuals and for ourselves as individuals, and that they know that we expect them as they grow up and develop to question not only what they hear elsewhere, but also whether what we are telling them. We expect them to make these decisions for themselves ultimately.

J.F.: Yeah, I think a lot of parents are scared to empower their child to realize that they can make certain decisions for themselves, not realizing that if you don't prepare them to do that, you're putting them in the world, ill-equipped, to make decisions for themselves. How much better is it to have them navigate that under the safety of your roof with your support as opposed to laying down the law and then, when they leave, suddenly being in a situation where they have to figure that out all on their own? It's better to stumble with the guidance and support of your parents.

Jeremy: Yeah. And it can be hard to see past that point where they are out on their own because keeping that level of control while they're there, it's an easy fix for a lot of things. It's an easy fix for a lot of chaos or a lot of unknown, a lot of messy conversations and messy interactions. And it's hard for us to be OK with that mess, that messiness, and understand how important it actually is.

J.F.: But the thing is, it doesn't have to be that messy.

Jeremy: Tell me about that.

J.F.: You know, there's such a fear. There's such a fear that you're releasing them into the wild and they're going to go crazy with it. But having conversations with your kids about values is something that you can do from a really young age. You know, you're listening to a song and you're asking them, "What do you think about that? How do you feel about that?" Prompting them to make sense of situations when they come to you about a conflict with their friends, letting them explain to you how they would navigate that situation or how they think someone else could handle it better. But talking through and this metacognition around how we navigate situations is a really important step. But I think also there's a different type of frame. The way that I encourage parents to talk about when you're ready to have sex, in my sex-positive approach, is all about framing it around what you deserve. Your kids deserve really fulfilling, really satisfying, really enjoyable sexual interactions. And in order to have an interaction that is fulfilling and satisfying and aligned with your values and all the good stuff that we want for them, you need a lot of different criteria in place. And most people don't have that in place when they're very young. You probably want a partner that you trust and respect who respects you. You probably want to feel confident in your body and secure enough to know what you're comfortable with so you can communicate that to someone else. You want to know that you have measures in place to keep yourself physically safe. You want to know that you have a private environment so people aren't going to barge in on you and so that you can actually relax and feel comfortable. Again, you want to make sure you're acting in accordance with your values. There are so many different factors that a person needs to have the experience that they deserve. But I think that when we explain this to young people, their thinking about it changes. It stops being like, "Oh, I just have to wait until I'm a certain age." And they realize that they are proactive in creating the type of experience they deserve. The more you know about yourself and how to keep yourself safe, the better your experience is going to be. The more you know about your partner and how to communicate with them, the better experience you're going to have. So how can we build up these skills in our kids about communication and about negotiation and about learning about topics that they're interested in so that they can equip themselves with those skills to have that fulfilling experience as opposed to avoiding this because it's going to be bad? If we parent that way, like, "Don't mess up in math class," is not something we say to our kids. We say "I believe in you, you're going to ace that exam. And if you don't, we're going to figure it out together." Not like "Don't get pregnant and mess up," but like, "Oh, I understand you want to be intimate with your boyfriend. Let's figure out ways that you feel equipped to do that in a way that's going to keep you safe." And it's all about having those high expectations. And I think for some reason when it comes to our bodies and sexuality, we've been so much steeped in shame that as parents, our initial response is just to kind of pass that shame along. "Don't do something stupid, don't mess up," is just a really terrible way to approach parenting.

Jeremy: Coming back for a second to my church upbringing because so much comes back to this. Obviously, there's a huge focus in religious, especially Christian evangelical communities, on virginity, on purity, on the evils and the horrors of sex and any sex act is against the will of God until the moment you're married. And then you're expected to have a life of uninhibited, wonderful sex with the one person of the opposite sex who you have committed yourself to for the rest of your life.

J.F.: Can we just pause and realize how fascinating that message is and so misaligned with everything else that we learn about in our entire lives? That's problematic.

Jeremy: And so I've been deconstructing this in myself for a long time and I feel like I'm in a pretty healthy place with that part of my upbringing. And so when my oldest son was five last year, he was talking about two of his friends that he likes and he said, "Dad, can anybody have two wives? Can people have two wives?" I was like, Oh, my God, I am so happy that I have the opportunity to answer this in a way that would have been so different than an answer that I would have gotten when I was a kid." And we had a great conversation about the idea of ethical non-monogamy in terms that he can understand. A lot of people get married to or are partnered with one person, but some people are with two people or more. And as long as everyone who's involved agrees and they talk to each other about it, then sure, this can happen.

J.F.: And I bet your kiddo was like, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense!" And I feel like when you talk about gender, when you talk about relationships or consent, I feel like oftentimes there's pushback from adults like, "Oh, that's too sophisticated or complicated for kids." But when you actually talk with them, it's like, "Oh, it's actually really simple" and it makes perfect sense to them because they're not steeped in those values that are telling them that intimacy is wrong or that it must be exclusive or that sex is connected to gender. When we allow them to have a broader understanding, they actually totally rise to the occasion. It's actually logical that you would love more than one person. That's a logical thing.

Jeremy: So many of us, especially people who grew up with that sort of repressive sexual perspective, don't know what to do with those emotions as adults. When you're in a committed relationship and then you're attracted to someone. You don't know what to do with that. You don't understand it. You don't understand why it's not a horribly wrong thing. And so, I mean, this is one reason that that that seeing you out there, doing your thing and other people like you out there doing your thing is really meaningful. It's really, really meaningful to me because it gives me the hope that my kids' generation and their kids' generation will have the opportunity to have something different. And that feels really good.

J.F.: That's awesome. My message for so many parents is just the importance of breaking things down into really small bite-sized pieces for yourself because I think that, for example, masturbation is something that parents are so uncomfortable with and they don't know how to navigate. But when you actually understand intellectually that our body is covered in sensory nerve endings and sensory nerve endings simply send messages to our brain about how sensations feel and that certain parts of your body have a high density of sensory nerve endings that feel really good when they're stimulated and that it feels good to masturbate because your brain is actually sending these messages to the rest of your body and just telling you that it feels good. It takes the value and the shame out of it. If you understand mechanically, yes, masturbation is pleasurable and there's ultrasound footage of fetuses in wombs stimulating their genitals for pleasure, not because they're thinking sexy or unpure thoughts, but because their brain is rewarding them for stimulating themselves in that way. We can really get down to it or like your child's question about relationships, like, yeah, love is really beautiful and it makes sense that you would feel love for different people and maybe your love for different people feels different or maybe you want to love lots of people. But when we can actually break these down into bite-sized pieces, we realize, "Wow, so many of our feelings are just about shame. And they're not actually about reality and they're not about things we actually believe." And it's really liberating to get to that place to realize, "Oh, it feels good when I touch myself because I have a clitoris. That's rad. I might want to love multiple people because I am a loving person" and just kind of normalizing those experiences.

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah. And it's not because Satan is whispering in your ear.

J.F.: No, it's not. It's just not.

Jeremy: Speaking of things that Satan approves of and Jesus does not, can we talk a little bit about porn? Another place where there's a lot of shame, there's a lot of confusion and there's a lot of discomfort from parents. And the world of porn is a complicated thing. Would you just talk a little bit about healthy ways to start that conversation about porn with kids?

J.F.: Pornography is really popular and it's popular for a reason. People are fascinated by sex, and I feel like each generation has had its version and now hardcore porn is just so readily available at people's fingertips. Before that, people would look at the Victoria's Secret catalog or whatever was lying around the house. People are resourceful. And as long as technology has existed, people have always used it to access porn. The first thing we have to normalize is the fact that people are curious and especially if there is a deficiency or a lack of access to information, they're going to access whatever they can. And if porn is the most readily available information, they're going to turn to it. If you want to learn about sex, it makes sense that you would watch people having sex, right? We often think that it's so shameful and how embarrassing that kids are watching porn, but actually, you should applaud your kid. They want to learn about a topic and they found a place where it's happening, where they think they can get information. So as a parent, your role is really to be the guidepost for your kid, to kind of break it down to them, to explain like, "Yeah, it makes sense that you're going to want to check out images and videos of people having sex because you're going to be curious about sex." And we need to talk about what readily available pornography is and is not. If you go online and you type in words related to sex, pictures and videos are going to pop up. And in most of the ones that pop up, the people doing it are not being paid fairly. They're not necessarily being respected in what they're doing. There's a lot of dynamics in the interactions that people are having that are not realistic, that are not exemplary of the sex that you would deserve. People are not necessarily engaging consensually. They're not necessarily using protection. They're not necessarily prioritizing everyone's pleasure. But also the people that are in these films are hired because they are not normal people. They're hired because they're exceptional, because their bodies have exceptionally large appendages, or are exceptionally flexible. The people that are performing and pornography, oftentimes these are professionals that are hired to do this. And so, that analogy of you wouldn't watch the Fast and the Furious to learn how to drive and you shouldn't look to pornography to learn how to have sex. You need to understand the limitations of this. So I think it's really important to normalize curiosity while also contextualizing the fact that what you see when you type a search term into Google and porn pops up is not what normal sex is and it's not the sex that you deserve. And I think that that's kind of really framing it. The sex you deserve is sex that is mutually pleasurable, that is super respectful, that's safe, that's aligned with your values. Go into, again, the criteria of what a person deserves and explain that what you see in porn is going to have likely a lot of really harmful behavior. And if nothing else, it's not showing you how to do this properly because they're not going to talk about navigating condom use. And so when you find yourself in a situation where you want to talk about safer sex practices and you think about the porn that you watched, it's not going to help you do that. So kind of, again, acknowledging that curiosity and desire are normal, but that these behaviors are not normal and you don't want to replicate them. And it's also, I'll be honest, a lot of parents ask me like, "Well, how do I steer my child towards safer, more ethical porn if I want to?" And that's problematic because ethical porn is usually porn that you pay for and minors can't pay for porn legally. So it's this gray area where you want to encourage your child to potentially, if they're curious and they really want to explore, to pursue something that's safer and more ethical when in reality that's just not there. And I got that from my high school students all the time. They're like, "I would rather consume ethical porn. What can I watch?" And even when I ask about vibrators, I can't tell young people to go purchase their own vibrators because technically it's not legal. And so, again, when you think about how we stigmatize sexuality, I think a lot of people would be having a lot less risky underage sexual behaviors if vibrators were readily available to people but in the absence of that, people are exploring with each other in riskier ways. So if we think about how just kind of shame is institutionalized in our society in terms of what we can access to pursue our sexuality in a healthy way, it's really limiting, especially for young people. And as parents, I think that's an important thing to be cognizant of. If you're encouraging them to pursue healthier options, what exactly do they have available to them? I talked to parents who are buying vibrators for their teenagers who ask for them and realizing that I can be an advocate for my child if they can't advocate for themselves. Yeah. And again, that's us figuring out how we can use our position to help.

That's Julia Feldman. If you'd like to know more about Julia's work, you can visit her on the Web at givingthetalk.com or follow her on Instagram at @GivingTheTalk. 

Thanks for listening to this episode of "The Talk." Thanks to my guests for this episode, Dr. Nadine Thornhill and Julia Feldman. If you'd like to know more about Nadine or Julia, you can read our episode notes at Thetalkthepodcast.com. At the beginning of this episode, you heard a clip from Ellen and Tom Macy, who appeared on our episode "Bodies Part Two." If you'd like to support "The Talk," you can do so by visiting Buymeacoffee.com/coffeetalks, or you can purchase one of our beautiful tote bags or stickers by visiting TheTalkThePodcast.com/merch. Dana Gertz designed all of our original artwork. Our post-production assistant is Mackenzie Yaddaw and a final and fervent thanks goes to my wife Jenny and to our kids for being the reason "The Talk" exists at all. Goodbye.