When Carlie McPhee visits schools across the province as a sexual health educator, she focuses on empowering youth through education and giving them tools to navigate sexuality, gender roles and boundaries. McPhee is the founder of sexual health company the Whole SHEbang, and a former sexual health project coordinator of the UBC Centre for Gender & Sexual Health.
Though McPhee prides herself on creating safe spaces for students of all backgrounds, this is not necessarily the norm for sex education. According to McPhee, there is only one consistent theme when comparing sexual health education across Canada — and that’s inconsistency. Some sexual health curricula can make people who do not conform to traditional Western norms of sexuality and gender feel erased, unseen and unsure of themselves.
According to the Director of the UBC Sexual Health Laboratory and Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaechology Dr. Lori Brotto, this lack of “comprehensive, universal, gender inclusive, age-appropriate sex education” is a key barrier to exploring sexuality. That lack sets many of us on a path to sexual reclamation — luckily, learning about sex and sexuality is always relevant, regardless of age, experience or background.
“We’ve seen that kind of flip-flopping back and forth around how much sex that is taught and it differs district by district and province by province,” Brotto said. “The reclamation part is, ‘How do I reclaim my right to have this information?”
“Even if you’re in your 20s or 30s or 50s, it’s never too late to learn how to get consent, what are the parts of the body, how do you masturbate, what does an orgasm feel like? All those sorts of things [are] part of the reclamation.”
The learning
For UBC students, this learning journey can begin at home, in classrooms and in research labs alike.
Dylan Nemes, a first-year medical student who wrote his undergraduate honours thesis on pornography, mental health and social attitudes, has always been interested in relationships. His upper level sexual psychology courses at UBC Okanagan “snowballed” his interest in understanding sexuality.
“Everything that I’ve learned has made me interested in learning more,” he said. Now, Nemes said that his background in sex research has made him more comfortable supporting patients in a clinical setting with their sexual health needs.
Brotto similarly commented on the “beautiful evolution” that she sees in her graduate students as they become more open and articulate in conversations about sexuality, both in the research lab and in their personal lives.
Brotto said the theme of reclamation for this year’s Ubyssey Sex Issue is fitting, as sexual self discovery is also inherently “proactive.” It’s about taking your pleasure into your own hands, learning new things and finding what works best for you.
“[Reclamation] is about very intentionally contemplating … and experimenting with what fits and what doesn’t for who you are,” she said.
The unlearning
Patriarchal and heteronormative norms can have a strong influence on how we approach sexuality. For McPhee, navigating her role as a sexual health educator involved a lot of internal labour to unpack those norms.
“I first started teaching while I was still unlearning a lot of my own heteronormativity that I grew up with,” she said. Since then, she’s come into her own Queerness — reclaiming her own sexuality as she teaches students how to do the same.
In her sexual health education workshops, McPhee said the content is inclusive, age-dependent and sex-positive. Younger kids learn the parts of the body and puberty, while teens move on to learn about crafting healthy experiences, boundary-setting and “understanding the water we swim in in terms of gender roles.”
She said she places a special emphasis on centring inclusive, gender-diverse education in a space where all students can feel safe and seen.
“I don’t want anyone feeling like they have to reclaim or do work to dig out of a hole that they were put in by circumstances of not getting enough education or getting education that didn’t … include them, which I know is just many people’s realities,” she said.
According to Brotto and McPhee, patriarchy presents a unique set of challenges for women and non-gender conforming people.
For those who are struggling with shame or other negative feelings about sex, Brotto recommended mindfulness as a way to work on “compassionate, attention training.” By slowing down and observing what’s going through our mind, we can compassionately confront self-judgements and see them “not as … a statement of who we are, but rather a byproduct of centuries of misogyny and patriarchy.”
“Doing this kind of reclamation work is hard, it’s stressful, it’s anxiety promoting,” she said. “And mindfulness is a beautiful tool for managing distress and uncertainty and fear and all of those sorts of things.”
Claiming what is rightfully yours
Although mindfulness practices can be helpful, they’re not a blanket solution. According to McPhee and Brotto, true sexual health starts with funding comprehensive education throughout the nation.
Brotto called on students to vote for government representatives who “see sexual health education as a basic human right” and advocate for more standardized sexual education that isn’t left to individual school districts.
McPhee stressed that the need for people to reclaim and reevaluate their understandings of sexual health acts as a sign that sexual health education has a long way to go — but she is ready to support students in that journey.
“I think as long as there’s people reclaiming their identities — which I hope they do and that looks different for everyone — there’s more work to be done,” said McPhee.
“[The goal is] to maintain a healthy thriving sexual health throughout life. That’s when we don’t need to reclaim anymore, because you can claim it to begin with.”
This article is from Reclamation, The Ubyssey's 2023 sex and relationships issue. Read more personal essays and student stories from Reclamation here, and sexual health and education articles here.