Diana Peragine

I would say that's definitely a part of it.

I mean, but I think a common misconception as well is that pleasure is missing from the curriculum entirely.

It's actually something that is included in even the most conservative curricula, but only for a privileged few.

Right.

I mean, you know, lessons on puberty, those touch on wet dreams, erections, ejaculations for boys.

But for girls, they center on menstruation.

Likewise, lessons on procreation.

Those necessarily include the role of the male sexual pleasure organ in orgasm, but instead of the female one, they spotlight the birth canal, right?

So it shouldn't really be all that surprising that young people, you know, prioritize vaginas versus vulvas during sex when sex educators do the same during lessons, right?

Right.

How my young people ask about pleasure, you know, maybe learn a question, its absence, if they, you know, never learn about its importance for female people or that, you know, its lack precludes healthy sex.

Right.

I think so, definitely.

I mean, we have to consider, too, when it comes to education about sex, you know, certainly there's formal education, but there's also sort of the lived sexual experiences that young people are having, which teach them a lot about whether sex is going to be enjoyable, whether it's going to be equitable, and whether it's worth desiring, right?

In addition to this kind of missing curriculum of sexual pleasure in the classroom for girls, for young women, there's also this sort of hidden curriculum of

in their real lives of sort of sexual frustration, of disappointing sex, when it doesn't devolve into being something that's downright painful or scary, that might guide them away or sort of train them away from sexual desire at a very early age when these lessons are maybe likely to last.

Right.

I think that's a great question.

And I think that to kind of get at the answer to that, we kind of maybe have to break down how different sex is

for young people relative across genders and across sort of life stages, relatively speaking, right?