Radiolab - Gonads: Sex Ed

Episode Date: July 27, 2018

In this episode, an edited down version of a Radiolab Presents: Gonads Live show, host Molly Webster brings together a cast of storytellers, educators, artists, and comedians to grapple with sex ed in unexpected and thoughtful ways.  "Sex Ed" is an edited recording of a live event hosted by Radiolab at the Skirball Center in New York City on May 16, 2018. Radiolab Team Gonads is Molly Webster, Pat Walters, and Rachael Cusick, with Jad Abumrad. Live music, including the sex ed questions, and the Gonads theme song, were written, performed, and produced by Majel Connery and Alex Overington.  Radiolab is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Before we get started, just a note, this episode contains some strong language, as well as content that may not be suitable or at least ready for younger ears. It is an episode about sex ed. Okay, thanks. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right.

You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See? Yeah. Hey, I'm Molly Webster. This is GONADS episode six, and it's our last episode.

I'm going to go cry after this is done. But first, I want to share with you this really fun thing that Team GONADS did in May, and that is we did a live event on Sex Ed. You know, if you've been listening to this series, we have been looking at the biology of biological, sex and sex determination. And one of the things we kept thinking was like, man, now that we know how complicated it is, like, how do we teach this stuff? And how do we teach this stuff in a climate where people are really polarized and divided? In thinking about all this, sex ed, it just felt like

more than a radio story. You know, if you bring up sex ed with anybody, they have stories, they get excited, they get animated, and it really felt like something that would live quite beautifully in a live space, in a live event, you know, almost like recreate the sex ed classes we all may or may not have gone through. So today we'll be bringing you clips of that show, and it starts with Chad Abramrod. Hello, hello, how are you guys doing? All right. So, so, so excited you were here. So I guess I should just say, welcome to Radio Lab's sex ed. That is a sentence I never thought I would say In the 15 years I've been doing the show

I never anticipated this moment where I'd be on stage saying that to a live group of humans But you know here we are And I grew up in Tennessee so I actually didn't have sex ed So I am looking forward to learning something tonight Please welcome to the stage Radio Labs Molly Webster

This kind of feels like my sex ed class which was like nerve-wracking and you're not sure how it's going to go. So to start the night, we are going to go down south. Mississippi, 2011, the state passes a law that places some restrictions on sex ed, notably when it comes to talking about condoms. The law specifically says no instruction or demonstration on the application of the condom. So that's Sanford Johnson. He is a sex educator in Mississippi.

And so on the one hand, you might think, no big deal, right? It's just a piece of plastic. Kids can figure out how to use it. We don't have to show them everything. But Sanford says it's not really that easy. I will tell you a story when I was a high school teacher here in the Mississippi Delta. The school brought in a guest certified sex educator to talk to the kids about sex. He said this quote that it is stuck with me for 15 years now.

But he said when you make a condom, in the time it takes you to drive it from the factory to the store, it loses half of its effectiveness. And then he said that in the time it takes you to drive it from the store to your house, it loses another half of its effectiveness. And in the time it takes you to take it out of the wrapper and actually put it on, it loses another half of its effectiveness. And I was thinking, that's not how bath works. So Sanford and all of his teacher friends were like, well, if this is what kids are being told, maybe we really do need to do those condom demonstrations. But the question is how?

So for Sanford, this all came to a head at a teacher training that he was at. So the teacher training was to train teachers in how to teach sex ed. And as part of the training, one of the teachers was like up in front of the group and she was supposed to explain how to you, use a condom because this is the caveat in the law. You can talk about a condom, but you can't explain

or like show how to use one. And so this teacher... She was a hand talker. So as she talked, she panned a lot. And as she was reading the steps, like she couldn't help but actually panama on a condom. And somebody from the State Department said, I don't think you should do that. I really don't think you should do that. Like that's a condom demonstration. Talking with her hands was now a And it got to the point where as she's saying the steps, she actually hands our hands behind her back. And, like, that's how she's giving it. Like, that's how she's going through the steps. So we thought it was the most hilarious thing in the world.

It's hilarious, yes. But it's also, like, we need to tell these kids about condoms, and we don't really know how to do it. And so thinking about this, the next day, Sanford came up with something that I think might be one of my most favorite things on the internet. Hi, my name is Sanford Johnson. I'm here in sex-ed training right now. It's kind of just like grainy in the shadows iPhone video in which Sanford Johnson is standing there with one foot barefoot while he's holding a white tube sock and a sneaker. And remember, according to Mississippi law, he's not allowed to perform an actual condom demonstration with a condom. So what he does is he holds up this tube sock to the camera and he says, to teach kids how to put on a sock. If you're going to be engaged in a sock activity,

whether you're wearing an athletic shoe or whether you're using a dress shoe, that matter to me as long as your foot is protected. I want to make sure that you have my sock. So if I'm putting it on a sock, when I do, as I start with a sock and I want to pinch out the air out of the chemical sock because I want to make sure that there's room for my toes when I'm engaging in the shoe activity. Then I take the sock and I put it on top of my foot. and all I do is just roll it down. Just roll it down. Now, some people stop right here

and just only put that sock on halfway. That's not how you do it. You want to take your sock and you want to roll it all the way down your foot. You want to roll it all the way down your foot and then you can put it aside your shoe. And then you're ready to a day as your shoe activity. Now, when I'm done...

This video lives on our website and you should absolutely go watch it when you're done with this episode. This video is delightful, but it served a larger purpose for us, which is that it reminded us that there are a lot of different ways to have conversations about sex and the body. And we thought, okay, what if for our live show we try to reframe the conversations happening around sex ed? What if we use metaphor and euphemism and comedy, maybe even a little meditation as a way to navigate all the stuff swirling. around sex ed, whether that's a law in Mississippi or just the general awkwardness that comes with this topic. So to do this, one thing Sanford and sex educators from all across the country told us

was that a key part of a sex ed classroom was a question box where students could drop in anonymous questions and then the teachers would pull them out and answer them to try and facilitate discussion. So we thought, what if we make our own question box and try and answer the questions with this reframing. So we gathered questions from listeners, Reddit, Sanford, fifth graders. It's in no way comprehensive, but we gave it a try.

To kick us off, here's Major Connery singing the first question. This is just her, a mic, and a vocoder. What are periods? What are periods? Oh, what are periods? It's a period Oh what

Period It's really an unbelievable pain. It feels like someone's shoving a knife up inside me and then turning it slowly But with no rhythm that I can track So I can never quite get my head on top of it

of predicting it It feels like I'm like in hell and I can't move. That's Sinda Agha. She's 24, a filmmaker, and she's talking about what she goes through every month when she gets her period. Now, periods. Sort of a weird topic, still a little taboo, hush, hush. I say paternalism, maybe.

Like, it is a little hard, though. Roughly half the planet doesn't get them. And even if you do, Every period is so different. They're kind of hard to talk about. But Cinda has seemingly found a new language for discussing her period, and it's with kind of an unexpected companion. Some background. So I have endometriosis, which is a reproductive illness that one in ten American women have, where your anemetrium, which is usually the lining of your uterus that gets shed during your period. starts growing in all these places it's not supposed to. So on your organs and your intestines. Wait, it actually starts growing outside of your uterus.

That's what that angiosis is. So each month, and I had no idea about this, I feel embarrassed as a 35-year-old woman to have gotten to this point and not known this, but each month your body tries to push out all that extra tissue that's in places, and it can't. It can't get rid of it. And so it's very painful. And you can take birth control to help a little.

eliminate the pain, which Cinda did for many years, but then she started getting depressions and all these complications, and so she had to stop. And as soon as she did, the pain came rushing back. I got my first period off of fourth control. I was maybe 22 years old. And it hit me when I was at the airport in Casablanca and Morocco alone. It was traveling back from Liberia. She'd been making a documentary for the BBC and was about to fly home. And I got my period. And I had like 30 minutes until I was supposed to board my flight to JFK to get back to the United States. And all of us, and I couldn't move. She said she just sort of froze in place in front of the food court.

And a janitor ended up coming up to me and being like, are you okay in Arabic? And I was like, I kind of speak French and don't speak Arabic. And he was like, are you okay in French? And I responded. I was like, oh, I don't have to say period in French. He was very helpful, but the pain was so bad. she was just like, I have to call somebody. And I still had Wi-Fi so I called my dad.

Which I was kind of surprised about. Like, I'm pretty close to my dad, but he's not the period guy. Maybe we're old-fashioned. I don't know. So we called them both into the studio to talk about it. All right. Okay, so I'm a good idea. I'm a professor and I'm her dad.

I asked him, what was it like to get that phone call? You know, it was harder for me. because I couldn't do anything. It's sort of helpless, and all you can do is sit there and feel the emotions, but not be able to, you know. I feel really bad for you, you know. Gould said that on that call, while Cinda was in the Casablanca airport, and he was all the way in Illinois, he just started trying to do everything.

Close your eyes, take deep breath, what are you feeling? Meanwhile, Cinda is literally... I sound like I'm having a baby. In bed, yeah, it's like being in a labor room. She was crying and moaning and ghoul's trying to make her feel better. He's like tossing out all these ideas, but the pain's still really bad. And then my dad said, think about a color. Like, think about the color red.

And then shift it to a different color in your brain. In that moment, Cinda became 11 years old again. It was her first period and the pain was terrible. I was laying in bed. My mom couldn't be there. And she was, you know, almost always there, but she had to be at work. I was having really bad cramps. So it was my dad and my uncle leaning over me trying to help me,

and I was just, like, mortified, but I was in too much pain to, like, really worry about it. And so, yeah, my dad turned on Gregorian chants, and he burned some incense and started waving it over my head, and he was saying, like, just track the smoke with your eyes and just follow it, follow it, okay, imagine you are the smoke and you're just floating, and I was really committing to us. I was like, okay, I'm the smoke. And then he was like, okay, close your eyes, imagine a color, what color are you seeing?

I was like, red, obviously, because that's on my period. Cinder realized in that moment she could actually see the pain. it was a thing that had a shape to it that she could identify. And then he's like, okay, and now try to change it into a different color with your brain. I was like, like as blue. Sinda found herself thinking back to that moment and once again talking to her dad and trying to transform the color of the pain. I remember standing then on the little staircase that leads up to the plane,

and I was like gripping onto the bar trying not to fall over and like gritting my teeth just like clenching my jaw and I was just like okay the color red okay I see it yeah I see it all right okay come on turn into something else pink maybe okay all right

and she says standing there about to board the seven hour flight it actually helped I mean I was still in really bad pain but mentally I can stay here. Sit inside of it. It's like it's not a very non-judgmental. Yeah.

It's like, okay, I'm feeling pain. Let's really feel it. It's very Sufi because in Sufi tradition and Cindy culture... And so Sinda and her dad are from southern Pakistan. You don't like try to avoid suffering. Instead you just try to express it. Like when someone dies, there's literally professional. whalers that you hire to come wail and cry with you, right?

Or maybe you don't pay them, but you were telling me about this. Yeah, that is common, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, every time somebody comes visiting, the whole story is repeated, and then the professional whalers start. Crying. It's their job to, like, stress suffering. And it's to get you to cry again.

It's not to be the crier if you can't cry. It's actually to get you to keep going through it. To keep crying, to keep pushing through the feeling. Right. So sit with the pain. That's point number one. And point number two is pain to me seems pretty dark. I don't know about you, but I don't know if I would actually think about a color.

But Cinda said for her family, it's not that surprising because her dad's like a little obsessed with color. You know, you would always wear like post-it note, hot pink, bright orange, like purple. You're in purple right now. Is that culture or is that just you not caring? Well, no, there are many people in the culture. And then we're pink. Pink would be unusual. Red is more common.

And Cinda's laughing here, but if she was being honest, she would say that when she was a kid, this color palette... Well, this used to really embarrass me. Now I'm proud of it. Sorry. In the end, color was a place that she and her dad were able to meet. And then just keep meeting. Because the month after Morocco,

another period, more pain, she called her dad. The next month, another period more pain. She called her dad. And then the next month? Yeah. What are you saying and doing in those moments? So the first thing I'm trying to do is just to get her to be in the color rather than sort of trying to switch it right away.

Can you really feel it? Yeah, I'll close my eyes and I'll focus in on where the pain is. and what it feels like. And I let it just kind of shoot up into my brain. And it feels like if you watched like a watercolor, kind of like wash across a page, you know, and everything's red all of a sudden. And the first thing I think is, aha, yeah, that's it.

Like, I've identified it. I try to be one with it in a way, see what do you see what do you feel and then I try to just kind of shift the color it will start like you changing the tint a little bit into orange and it's still like mixing with the red and then pushing it all the way to something different like it's like a wash and it gets like thicker and thicker and then all of a sudden the wave is coming in. At this point in the live show, we put onto the screen these amazing images. They're hyper-saturated, poppy, surreal, and they're made by Cinda.

If you want to see them, you can go to radio lab.org slash gonads and check them out. Cindy's inspiration for these photographs is what she sees in her mind's eye when she's in incredible pain, and she's able to capture the images and write them down as her dad is coaching her through these color meditations. Think of the sea, think of the clouds, think of blue, and just consider the lastness of the ocean. Yeah, that's a classic one. goes on and on, and babes come and babes go. My dad, he thinks a lot about the scale of the universe and the scale of all time. And nothing stays, nothing is permanent.

And our smallness and how insignificant our unhappiness and our suffering is when you think about all of that. Heaves come and babes go. And he just makes me feel, it sounds weird because he's very loving, but he, like, makes me feel how little I, matter and it calms me down. Think of waves. The vastness of the ocean goes on and on. waves come and waves go

and waves go and nothing stays nothing is permanent. It all just seems very real and yet it's gone and it continues and it's gone and waves come and waves go and it's a sea of blue

and then imagine you're one of those bubbles just fronds your veins one of those bubbles it will increase and then it'll just pop and be gone

and then more days will come that's cool that was good that was actually realistic you still call him I always call him and how do you like

schedule that. For you, I would almost be like, oh crap, is today the day she's going to call? And like, how do I book my afternoon? It is in your calendar. It was, yeah, it's my calendar. What is the day? My favorite is in my dad's calendar.

He's crushing. That was filmmaker, Sinda Agha, and her father, Gould Aga. We'll be back with Radio Lab Live, sex ed, the final episode in the GONAD series. Here on GOND's, we've been talking about the biology of sex and sex determination, and I can't help but think that the one place this all plays out is dating. Anna, do you remember our summer of single?

Oh my God, I do. Mine was very short. Yeah, yours lasted like a week. Mine is still going. This is why we're excited that our good friends over at Death, Sex, and Money, led by Anna Sale, are taking us. the topic of dating. They're following a group of listeners for the entire summer. They're a variety of ages. Some are straight. Some are gay. Some are online dating. Some aren't.

And they're all over the country. Through these stories, they'll be thinking about all sorts of things that come up in dating. Who are you attracted to and why? Like when it becomes intimate, like what kind of intimacy feels right? And all of these things feel like right now, they're like very much up for grabs and also something a lot of us are talking about. abstractly. To listen, you can check out hot dates because it's dating in the summertime on the death, sex and money podcast feed. Go get it. Hi, this is Emily in Louisville, Kentucky. Radio Lab presents. GoNads is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. Additional support for radio lab is provided by

the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This is Go Nads episode six. This is our live show about sexet. So far, we've talked about condom demos without any condoms, periods. We even went on to talk about the deeply important topic of what happens to all the bananas after condom banana demos. But we ultimately went on to discuss a question that is one of the primary reasons I wanted to do this show. Anything, anything, anything, anything, is there anything of limits? What you'll find is you can get together a room full of people who you think have the same

opinion on what should be taught in sex ed in schools, but once you boil it down to the nitty gritty and the fine details, you realize everybody draws a line somewhere. And to wrestle with that line drawing, we got together a panel of really smart people who think about this, and we presented them with real-world scenarios we ran into while reporting this issue, and we tried to have them do something where they, like, waved flags for when they thought a line was crossed, or for when they supported the line that was being drawn. I'm not sure if the flag thing worked, but you may hear reference to it. And so I would like to welcome to the stage. I'm going to move. Maybe I shouldn't. I'm going to stand here and then they'll come and then I'll go.

Yay. Education historian and author of the sex ed book Too Hot to Handle John Zimmerman, Muslim youth activist Dahlia, and sex educator Erica Hart. Okay, so the first one, Descent. 1st, 1994, Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, condone the idea of teaching school children to masturbate as a way of avoiding the spread of AIDS. She was asked by Dr. Rob Clark, a psychologist at a U.N. AIDS conference about the prospects of a more explicit discussion and promotion of masturbation as a means to limit the spread of the virus, and she began her reply by saying she was a very strong advocate of sex ed in schools at an early

age and quote as per your specific request in regard to masturbation i think that is something that is part of human sexuality and is something that should be taught um i think masturbation is really really important and i think that people should learn about it and i feel like it should be taught like taught um as part of like a sex ed curriculum but for this reason absolutely not um i think like she really like politicized that reason and it was used not for her own sexual benefits but as like a way to downplay AIDS and be like, this is terrible. I don't want anyone to know about this or deal with this. So like I don't.

This seems like a red flag to me. Interesting. John? This episode was completely miscast and misunderstood. It was an invented media non-event. It was cast. It was reported as Joyce and elders saying that he thought that in schools, teachers should teach students how to masturbate.

That is not. not what she was saying. What she was saying was masturbation is a part of human sexuality, and people should be informed about that. That's very different than saying we're going to teach them how to masturbate. Which I would then pose to the panel. Would you go as far as doing a how-to in a sex ed class, how-to masturbate, or do you just introduce it as an idea?

We're talking about now in K-12 schools? Well, we can talk about what. If there's a yes in there, I'd want to know what age. If there's a no, I'm curious if that's age-related. You can't necessarily teach how to, and I think also speaking to what you said about Jocelyn Elders, this is another example of how race and sexuality gets conflated, or not necessarily conflated, but definitely comes to the table of that Jocelyn Elders was like literally, essentially lost their career talking about this, which just shows the anti-black origins of ever talking about sex

and how our bodies are used and on the lines, but when we start talking about ways that we can actually own them, it's now a problem. And the other part of that, is that you can't necessarily teach someone how to have, how to masturbate, hashtag Cosmo. You can't really do that. Because everybody has a different body, right? And everybody's bodies function differently. Like, for example, me, I'm a Bryce Cancer survivor. I don't have nipples.

So to be like, oh, you can stimulate your nipples, that would be triggering for me because I don't have that body part. But if you could just say, touch your body in the ways that feel good for you, like I told my fifth graders yesterday. And they were like, what? Like, what does that mean? I'm like, any part of your body you could touch, and that is called masturbation, right? So now they know what it means, and there's not this weird thing around this, am I doing it right, miss? Which I get questions about all the time. Like, am I doing it right?

I'm like, does it feel good to you? Then, yes. This has been a hugely contested question across American history. And, you know, masturbation specifically? Yes, specifically. And if you don't want to read about masturbation, don't study sex education because you find it's the most contested subject. And the reason is it's explicitly and only about pleasure, right? It's not about procreation.

And even though I expect that many people in this audience think that sex is for pleasure, it's important to understand that there are some 330 million Americans, and not all of them agree with that premise. Right? Some of them think that it's only reserved for heterosexual marriage and it's only reserved for procreation. And that's why the objective discussion is masturbation, because masturbation, by definition, doesn't fit that framework. I was going to say, what's the role that, like, religion has in this? Because masturbation is so tightly tied to, you know, I was raised Catholic, definite no, no, right? It's so tightly tied to that. I wonder, how do you respect sort of, like, religious space when you want to introduce a topic like masturbation?

Yeah, I'm like... I mean, a lot of my students will say things like, well, for example, God is a man. And I don't necessarily agree with that, but I have to kind of hold space for that. That's their understanding of it. So same thing with masturbation, where it's like, I can't masturbate because I'm Christian or I'm Catholic. I'm like, okay, so you will not masturbate then. But I still have to talk about masturbation as you are in my sex ed class. And that's a topic that I'm going to talk about and not necessarily not talk about

because there's some students who are religious. It's like you don't have to opt in to everything that I'm saying. It's just knowledge for you so you don't go around shaming yourself or someone else for engaging in such behavior. John? It's really difficult, you know? I mean, there's shockingly little sex ed in this country, and there are a lot of reasons for that. But one reason is that we differ so fundamentally about sex and sexuality. You know, I mean, we're here in Lower Manhattan.

This is not a representative audience. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And sex is tied to use a loaded word, our most intimate ideas of ourselves as human beings. And many of those are faith-inflicted. You know, and so if you look at Western democracies, what you find is people that object to sex education now, they often cluster among two groups, white evangelical Christians, and also recent immigrants, especially immigrants from the Muslim in the Hindu world. you know, and these are often groups that agree about nothing else. But in the UK and Sweden and Canada and the United States,

every account of their shared objections, every newspaper account must use the headline, Strange Bedfellows. I've never seen a single journalistic account because it works perfectly, right? I mean, these are people that basically agree about nothing, including immigration, right? But this is hard, and it should be hard for people like myself on the left, because we say we value diversity, but we also want this thing. called comprehensive sex education. How do you square that circle?

Dahlia, you're nodding. Do you have any thoughts? Yeah, so I was raised Muslim, and I think it's not a, don't teach your kids about sex. It's more of it's an unspoken, heterosexual, we use it to procreate type way. And I hate, like, feeding into this, like,

American narrative of, like, Muslims are, like, all straight cis heterosexuals, but I'm like, fuck. But I'm like, we're not. But also, that's how a lot of us were raised, unfortunately, and, like, with new generations, coming in, we're like all queer and whatnot. But it's hard to navigate sex in general, let alone masturbation, because there is a stigma

that's tied not just within the religion, but within our own communities, depending on where we're coming from. Okay, so this one happened at charter school, Rockland, California. So kindergarten class, a student can bring in a book, and the book can be read during story time. And so for one of the weeks, a transgender student brought in a book called I Am Jazz, which is a book about a transgender kid. The teacher read the book in class. And then there was a really interesting reaction from the parents. Like, holy crap, we were not prepared for this.

Our kids came home with very confused and tons of questions. And I thought that this was an interesting one because a lot of what we've been talking about is sort of formalized sex ed? And this is informal sex ed? I don't necessarily think that it's informal per se. I mean, it's just about a person's experience. And what cis normativity does, which is cis meaning like the world is very cisgender dominant, is like, this is weird. Now we're going to, maybe we should have had a letter about this. You didn't need a letter about talking about George Washington or the Civil War or the Vietnam War or World War II. So why is it that when you're talking about a trans person that now you need to be warned that you're going to talk about this?

Dahlia, what about you? I know when we were talking backstage, you said you could go either way on this one. Yeah, because my only thing, my only qualm is like cis people don't know how to facilitate discussions about gender with their kids, obviously, especially if you're a kindergarten and you're asking, like, my boy, my girl, like these questions that you said at this yard, asked. So I wish that the parents knew about it just so they'd be able to facilitate a conversation. So it would have been like a productive experience for the kindergarten themselves, themselves. A letter, like if a letter would have been okay, like I'm kind of like a letter would have been better because so that way they would have been able to know about this beforehand.

So like the kid wouldn't come in at like 4 p.m. and be like, I don't know what's happening. This is what happened at school today. So if they knew about it beforehand, I feel like it could have been a more productive conversation. John, any thoughts? Look, it's really hard. I share the sentiments that we just heard. about cis normativity and I'm deeply supportive of trans rights. But I'm also supportive of public schools and I understand that they are under threat. All right? And I think that there's a really delicate balance here. If you want people to support your public schools, you can't at the same

time transmit the message that somehow they just didn't get this thing, this sex thing right, and we, the school, have to intervene. There is a fear. I mean, I think in what you were saying, there's a centering of institutions in this country. It's like up, the institution needs to be upheld, like, oh, don't mess up the school. The school is going to fall apart. And if the school falls apart, then we have nothing, rather than centering the most marginalized. And I think to think that a school is going to fall apart, but not trans folks and non-binary people and genderqueer people, and to not think about their experience is a mind fuck, for lack of better words.

So I think what is missing in sex education is talking about intersectionality, which is not just this celebration of various identities, but talking about the ways in which people are impacted by systems of oppression. So actually talking about that, when you talk about masturbation, is this really something that someone has access to? If you're talking about putting on a condom, why is it that Mississippi, the poorest country in this country, has no, cannot talk about condoms?

Like that is really a function of race and class, right? And really being mindful of that and really bringing that into your classrooms and people don't necessarily do that. They're like, oh, let's just talk about sex and let's just have this conversation and not be mindful of the things in which people are also bringing to the table. Yeah, John. I agree with all that. I just think that a true and honest intersectional approach would also acknowledge

that a lot of recent immigrants to this country find a lot of these themes, anathema. Don't think they belong in a public school. believe that they're familial and religious matters and not school matters. I'm not saying I agree with them. I am saying, though, that an honest intersectional approach would have to acknowledge that, would have to take account of the fact that we are a diverse society, and many of our recent immigrants, not all, but many, find these themes inappropriate for a public school.

But that's the opposite of what I said. I said it matters that you actually talk about where people are from. and that you actually get interested. And if someone is dealing with being documented, they probably don't want to talk about masturbation. As the conversation went on, I wouldn't say that we ever actually came to a consensus on any single scenario.

And you can feel it gets thorny. But what was brought into the room were all of the different things that go into thinking about how lines are drawn in sex ed. So race, immigration, class, maturity, body type, age. We went on to discuss, Other scenarios, some of my favorites are introducing bondage to ninth graders

or live BDSM demonstrations. Attendees were warned. Because yes, that has actually happened on a college campus somewhere. We aren't able to play all those for you here on this podcast, but what we are going to do is play you the final segment of the night, which is a batch of questions from what is sort of the quintessential sex ed target population.

Oh, lightning round. Okay, so I'll just do a little thing. So last week we heard about this sex educator who made an amazing discovery. this educator was teaching a workshop at a middle school in southern Maine, and they were talking to the school nurse, and as they talked, they saw that on the nurse's desk there was this, like, overflowing envelope. She asked what it was, and it turns out, the nurse said,

oh, those are my fifth-grader's sex-ed questions. And so we obviously were like, we want those. Thank you very much for telling us this story. and they're pretty great. And so we're coming to the end of the night. And like all sex ed classes, we've only gotten through about five questions. And so one of the things Sanford tells me that they do

is we'll do a lightning round. Would they just try and whip out answers? So to help us out, from the Tonight Show and Comedy Central, please welcome our very own self-proclaimed sex ed expert Joe Firestone. Do you want to stand far apart or closer together? I think we should stand here.

Okay. So Joe? Yes. What made you our sex expert? Well, you asked and I just said it. And I don't, I actually

probably have had sex less than everybody here. But you felt ready to answer these questions. I mean, I figure at that level, I think I could handle it. And I just want to say I'm nervous about the speed. Okay. Okay. It is a lightning round.

I understand. All right. It's raining outside. Oh, okay. I'm ready. Okay. There's no ticking. Unless you want there.

No, I do not want ticking. Ready? Yeah. Does breast milk taste like carton milk? No. I take long hot tubs. Does that mean I won't make a lot of sperm? What?

This isn't mine. Right, of course. No, you have so much sperm. Yeah. Yeah, don't worry about it. Lots of sperm. How long do you have sex for? Two to 20.

The time of this lightning. round. Yes. Yeah. I heard my friend lives off donuts and McDonald's. What do I do? Oh, passion and love. How big can a penis get? Huge.

Why do we do this anyway? Because it's we don't want to do math. My mom buys me books. It answers my questions. I still want to ask her my questions, but I don't want her to get mad. What should I do? Oh, definitely take her out to lunch.

Other girls have developed, but I haven't. Can I use a cream? I think it's any cream you can think of. I mean, I think creams are always good, especially in winter. I would say, go for it. A little coconut butter? Yeah, it's going to happen eventually. Just keep, you know, moisturize it.

Ready? Get it ready. What happens when two sperm reach an egg at the same time? Twins. Can people have sex with objects? Yeah. She's shoes a woman. Start to.

like each other in fifth grade. It's exposure, it's just exposure. You surround them long enough, you just start. It's a horrible psychological, homeschool them. A penis fit in a vagina. It's really hard, but there's a lot of maneuvering, and I would say use each other. When girls are still young, does milk come out of their breasts

when they squash them? I guess it depends how hard you squash them. Why do girls have the baby and feed it and help make it and the boys don't have to do anything, but help make it? It's so fucked up. It's so fucked up. Yeah. I don't understand. I wonder that.

Can I keep that one? Yeah. This is a rain-related one. Yes. Can a penis shrink or grow because of the weather? Yeah. Anyone? Yes.

I have a crush on someone. How do I tell her? Oh. obviously hidden messages definitely don't be direct I would say gifts I had the white clear oily substance on my underwear what should I do

oh laundry why when a boy sees a girl he likes his penis hardens and sticks up it's the eternal question and I guess the answer is the penis is guiding you towards what you should be doing, which is your homework. And that's a show.

Radio Lab Team GoNads is Rachel Cusick, Pat Walters, me, Molly Webster, and Chad Abramrod. Live music, along with the GoNads theme, was written, performed, and produced by Major Connery and Alex Overington. With live event production help from Melissa LeCase and Alicia Allen, and engineering by Ed Haber and George Wellington. Special thanks to Upright Citizens Brigade featuring Lugan. Zanzalis, Molly Thomas, and Alexandra Dixon, and to our panelists, Delia Makub, John Zimmerman, and Erica Hart. Before we go, two corrections. Jocelyn Elders quote read, as per your specific question in regard to masturbation, I think that is something that is part of human sexuality and it's a part of something that perhaps should be taught. Plus, Sinda Aga is actually 25 years old.

We said 24. Go to our website to see Cinda's Images, Sanford's video, and check out our listener-created sex ed bookshelf. It's awesome and it's for all ages. Thanks so much for listening to GONADS the series. See you soon. This is Jen Frolick calling from Berkeley, California. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abimrod and is produced by Sorn Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Maria Matasar Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Maggie Bartolomeo, Becca Bresler, Rachel Cusick, David Gabel, Bethel Huppty, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielte, Robert Kroewan, Annie McEwan, Latif Nassar, Melissa O'Donnell, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Oliai, Carter Hodge, and Lisa Yeager. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.