Sex & Politics
About “Sh!t Our Parents Never Told Us”
HI, QUEERS. And welcome. Strap yourselves in.
(Yes that pun was intended. If you didn’t get it, we have our work cut out for us.)
I’m just going to say it: sex isn’t just for procreation. We fuck for fun and for revenge. We have sex to build bonds and because we’re in love. We screw because we’re bored and because we crave pleasure. We do it when we’re sad, alone, or happy. Contrary to what 7th grade health class taught my Texas town, sex isn’t just about penetration, and sex education isn’t just about sex. Sex education is about all of the things leading up to, shaping, surrounding, and including our sex lives.
In the united states, racial capitalism (the legacy of an economy built on the free and cheap labor of Black enslaved people) shapes and surrounds our relationships. It maintains an unfair legal and social culture that underscores how we interact with one another, shaped by long-enduring means of control in the form of racial and gender hierarchies. Sex and drug education in the settler-colonial united states of america must be political because sex and drugs are political. They are political because the way we interact with sex and with drugs is inextricably tied to our access to power and self-governance. Both race and gender inform your “worth” (and your humanity) in a deregulated capitalist economy: Within racial capitalism, power comes from being hegemonically white and male.
Queerness is political: to be “queer” is to deviate from the norm. But who gets to decide what’s truly “normal?” In the u.s., what’s normal is dictated by White Supremacy Culture: “The two genders” we’ve been confined within as the price to (unwillingly) participate in american society were borne from the creation of a racial hierarchy with cis-het white men situated on top. Our sexual relationships are regulated by bureaucracy; the few meager illusions of power and self-determination that exist are regulated by The State. From the politics of desire to sexual liberation, we must decolonize our existence and detach our worth from our cash-value.
This project is an ode to all of you, who taught yourselves about desire using those porno anime drawing books; to all of you who could only get off to gay porn until a certain age; to all you who learned to masturbate with a vibrating toothbrush; to all of you who put a tampon in the wrong hole the first time; to all of you who found youthful solace on Grindr; for all of you who accidentally played lesbian porn through your parents’ Bluetooth speaker; for all of you whose worst childhood moments and mistakes are online forever; and to all of the parents who tried to shelter us from our true selves.
Sh!t Our Parents Never Told Us was founded on the idea that the internet raised us in a post-modern world where information (wrong, right, or both) constantly floods our feeds and our minds. In a society where sexual liberation is inexorably tied to performance that’s palatable to the cishet white male gaze, where true freedom is acknowledging that we don’t exist in a vacuum, where we’re doing what we can despite these omnipresent influences and inescapable systems of oppression — this is what my parents never told me. This is for the queers who never got what we needed.
Here’s to better sex [ed].