Human Reproduction: Stories about how we learn about sex

In this week’s episode, we share two stories about adventures in sex education.

Part 1: Kate Willet is frustrated by the gaps of information in her abstinence-based sex ed class.

Kate Willett is a comedian, actress, and writer whose raunchy feminist storytelling is both smart and relatable. Her 15 minute special premiered on Netflix’s “Comedy Lineup” in August 2018. She was recently a correspondent for the JIM JEFFERIES SHOW at Politicon 2017. She’s been featured on Viceland’s FLOPHOUSE and her appearance on Comedy Central’s THIS IS NOT HAPPENING was on Splitsider’s list of “2016’s Best Late Night Standup Sets.” In the past, she toured with Margaret Cho nationally and internationally and has featured with comedians like Kyle Kinane, Jen Kirkman, Ali Wong, Dana Gould, and Greg Behrendt. She has appeared in the Just for Laughs Montreal Comedy Festival, Limestone Comedy Festival, High Plains, Big Sky Festival, Bridgetown Comedy Festival, San Francisco Sketchfest (5 years in a row), and most recently Laughing Skull. Earlier this year she was a “Comic to Watch” at the LA RIOT festival.

Part 2: Sex ed instructor Charlie Blake fields an unexpected question from a student.

Dr. Charlie Blake is an interdisciplinary scientist currently teaching at Webster University and Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville. Their research has focused on a variety of topics from the behavioral ecology of fish, to environmental justice and community-based research through citizen science. They are also an artist, a singer and banjolele player, and founder of a nonprofit working on transgender housing instability. Charlie is also a producer of Story Collider St. Louis.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Kate Willet

So I grew up in a very conservative area north of Los Angeles, kind of a suburban town where we had abstinence education. So pretty regularly, like for every year of high school they would explain to us that abstinence was the only way to prevent pregnancy. As a young bisexual person, I knew for sure that that wasn't true.

This was a big theme. The separation between church and state at my high school was absolutely non-existent. We would regularly have speakers come to the auditorium and they'd bring in every grade. I remember this one speaker that we had was a 60-year-old woman who was waiting for marriage. She had not been married yet and she was still waiting. This was like part of God's plan for her.

I don't know why they thought that this would be inspiring to a group of high school kids. I think that they probably could have sold us on the idea of waiting maybe one more year, but not another 42.

She was super religious, like straight up talked about Jesus. The mantra that we were supposed to remember when we were holding out for marriage is ‘No ringy, no dinghy.’

Kate Willet shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in May 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.

It was an equal opportunity thing. We also had male speakers come and talk to us about abstinence. For the guys it was, ‘If there's wood, it's no good.’ That was kind of the abstinence guideline.

In addition to these religious speakers, we they would straight up allow the church, the local youth group to recruit outside of our school. There was this organization called Young Life that would have a pastor stand outside the school. The strategy that they used was that they would target the most popular kids so that the lesser-popular, the kids who were not popular they would follow suit, and I was in the category of less-popular kids so I never was targeted.

But I just don't know what kind of thought process this got approved by, you know? Like there's some middle-aged man standing outside the high school being like, “Hi, I'd like to talk to the most athletic guys and the hottest girls.” And the principal's like, “Yeah, that sounds like a great plan.”

I didn't think I was ever going to get real sex education in high school. The way that I got it was by listening to a radio show called Loveline. This was a while ago so it was Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew. No one should ever have to learn about sex from Adam Carolla and I think that some of Dr. Drew's advice kind of still mess me up to this day. Because no matter what a woman was calling in with, he had the same answer always.

It would be like, “Oh, yeah. I'm not getting along with my boyfriend.” And he would be like, “Oh, you were abused by your father.” Or be like, “I'm allergic to my boyfriend's cat.” And he'd be like, “Oh, it sounds like you were abused by all of your male relatives.”

So I was just really hungering for some accurate information. I tried looking up sex in the encyclopedia. My parents didn't really talk to me about it at all, so I was really stoked when senior year, peak senioritis, I got to take honors anatomy class. This was going to be an opportunity to get medically accurate sex education.

Our teacher was Mrs. Bay and she was like— that bae was like before that was the thing. She had these long floral dresses and she was probably 32, but she definitely looked like she was 60. We had a section of the course that was devoted to human reproduction, which is what it was called.

The first section of that course was birth control. For birth control, pregnancy prevention, she started out with condoms. Condoms were something that you could use to prevent sperm from entering a woman's body, which actually you can use condoms to prevent sperm from entering anything even a trash can, really. It's just kind of a little baggy.

So she would tell us that she was really committed to us not feeling like condoms were any kind of good solution. She would say that, actually, the sperm could swim through the holes in the condoms and still get you pregnant.

This immediately brought to mind a few questions. One, what holes in condoms? Also, what did Mrs. Bay think the condoms look like? Was she confusing them with cheesecloth? I don't know.

Then we talked about hormonal birth control. The message about hormonal birth control is that it is effective. It's almost 99% effective, but a key thing to keep in mind is that it can kill you. There have been at least two instances of this and we learned about both of them. This is sad, but there have been at least two women that have died of blood clots related to hormonal birth control. The ones that were projected on the screen in our honors anatomy class, they were both very white and very blonde in this way that like if they didn't die of birth control, they for sure would have died of something peanut related.

So it was like don't use condoms. Don't use birth control. The only thing to do is to be abstinent. You must be abstinent.

This is probably a good moment for me to tell you that Mrs. Bay was extremely pregnant with her third child. So learning about abstinence from Mrs. Bay was a little bit like going to the gym and having a personal trainer who chain smoked or something. I know that you're not actually practicing this. I don't know. Who knows? Maybe she was using the condoms with holes in them.

Then we had STD Day. On STD Day, she showed us photos of all of these different STDs in action. Just full-on pictures of genital warts. It was like one of those like old school projectors where you put the little clear plastic on the screen and showed pictures of genital warts.

There was a lot of scaremongering here. It was like there's 20 million cases of STDs and she made us feel like it was possible to get all 20 million yourself. Also, that 50% of these 20 million cases are young people, between like 15 and 24, which is probably true.

But you know what other demographic people gets a ton of STDs is old people. There's a lot of senior citizens in centers going at it with each other, not using condoms or, possibly, using condoms with holes in them. Mrs. Bay did not present this information to us, which is a real bummer because, man, that would have been so funny to laugh about with my high school classmates.

Okay. Don't awe me. Senior citizens getting chlamydia from fucking too much is a little funny. Like that's so— I hope that that's my life when I'm a senior citizen. I mean, if anything, it makes me feel like maybe there was hope for that 60-year-old virgin lady after all.

Mrs. Bay, she didn't make any pretenses of hiding her religious beliefs. There was a bible on the table and when it came to other people's beliefs, like there was a vegan girl that did not want to dissect a cat because she didn't believe in anything that harmed animals in any way. Mrs. Bay was like, “There's no place for your beliefs in science class.”

I honestly couldn't wait to get out of my hometown. I was really stoked to go to college. I just applied to the most liberal places that I could possibly think of. I got into UC Berkeley, which I was really stoked about because I heard there that they liked lesbians and labor unions, which I was a really big fan of.

I went and my first semester I signed up for a course called Female Sexuality. I was expecting to get just finally the information that I had been waiting for. I definitely got some information. Our first day of the class, we went around in a circle of maybe 20 women and there was one woman there, bright pink hair. She's like, “I came out as queer when I was 14 and I came out as kinky when I was 17.”

I was like, “Damn! Holy shit! I'm in college. Also, who are your parents? Do they really need to know that you're kinky?” I don't know. In honors anatomy with Mrs. Bay, I remember that there was a giant debate once that broke out about if the clitoris was real. I was on the side of that it was real. And my friend John, who subsequently went on to the military was adamant that it wasn't.

So I was like, okay, this will be like a good hippie situation. I'll definitely learn about it here. But it wasn't so much that. It was kind of artsy crafty. We had to make paintings of our labia and stuff. I had to sit in front of the mirror of my dorm room painting my stuff and I got a really weird reputation on my dorm floor. I think one woman in the class made the painting with menstrual blood.

We also learned a lot in that class about the etiquette of things, like being part of a throuple. It was pretty wild. Anyway, I'm not trying to both-sides it, but I still feel like I just— it was very difficult, even in college to get the pure information. At this time I'm just still trying to figure out if the clitoris is real, so that I know whether or not to paint it.

When I was kind of thinking through this story, I went on Mrs. Bay's website and she still has all this information up. She's still teaching the same stuff many years later. And she says that if you're a former student looking at the website, that you should email her to reach out and tell her how your life is going.

I thought about it, but I realized it would be super weird to email your high school anatomy teacher from many years ago and be like, “Hey. I don't know if you remember me, but I've had sex now and it went fine.”

All right. Thank you so much.

Part 2: Charlie Blake

I teach sex ed to middle schoolers at my church. In every class, we put out this anonymous question box. Every year, the first few weeks of the session, there's always some kid who thinks they're being smart whose mom is making them come to this class and why do they even need it anyway because they have the internet?

So this kid thinks they're being clever. They'll put a card into the box that they think is going to make me uncomfortable, such as, “Explain ‘bukkake’?”

Bukkake is a sexual activity performed in groups in which multiple people ejaculate onto another participant, often onto their face. The participants can be of any gender and it's really important to remember that if you're practicing this activity responsibly, everyone has enthusiastically consented ahead of time.

You can't get pregnant or get anybody pregnant from bukkake and the risk of STI transmission is actually lower as compared to vaginal or anal intercourse. It can be made even safer for the recipient partner if they wear glasses and avoid getting any ejaculate in their eyes or mouth.

Also, bukkake is the name of a Japanese noodle dish in which broth is poured liberally over udon noodles.

Charlie Blake shares their story with the Story Collider audience at the Public Media Commons in St. Louis, MO in October 2021. Photo by Joe Martinez.

This type of explanation, it generally stuns the 13-year-olds into silence and sets the stage for the type of honest, informative, accurate and shame-free discussions that we aim to have in the class.

But what I notice is that, after the first few weeks, after we build up some trust with each other, the cards the kids start putting into the box become pretty personal. Actually, a lot of them aren't even written as questions.

One day, I pull this card out of the box and it simply says, “All my friends have boyfriends or girlfriends but I've never even been on a date.”

See? Not a question. But I try to respond as best I can during class, offering some general platitudes about how the right time will come along, but the kid's not satisfied. They come up to me in the hallway after class. They want to talk more about it one-on-one.

They reiterate, “I am 13-and-a-half years old and I have never even been kissed.” Still, not a question.

So as I'm standing there in the hallway, puzzling over how to try to help this tender young person, I can't help but be transported back to my very first boyfriend. Now, I seduced my first boyfriend in a really sexy and romantic setting, the Science Olympiad team. This is an after-school program in which high schools compete against each other for the title of nerdiest nerds. This particular year, our task was to build a trebuchet. This is a projectile machine that flings objects really far using a counterweight, not to be confused with a catapult that also flings objects really far but uses a spring or elastic band.

A trebuchet it's a very nuanced machine, many working parts. Plenty of time for me to gaze seductively at my crush across the workbench over the next few weeks as we discuss options for lubricating the axle. I also practice using a tape measure with finesse so that I can check the distances traveled by our tennis balls as sexily as possible.

Once our machine is complete, there are also long bus rides to the competition venues on which I pretend to forget my headphones so that I can scoot closer to him and share one of his earbuds.

So our trebuchet only makes it to the semi-finals but our relationship continues to grow. In the spring, we decide we're going to attend prom together.

The night finally arrives. His close fade is fresh. He smells amazing. Our outfits are color coordinated.

After a long evening of rubbery chicken and me mostly awkwardly declining to dance because I feel too self-conscious, we find ourselves parked in my car in his grandmother's driveway ready for our good night kiss.

At this point, I had invested months into my plan to seduce him with science, honestly worrying a lot more about the distance our hands were resting from each other on the workbench than the distance our tennis balls were traveling.

So we're sitting there in my teal Toyota Corolla with its aftermarket spinner hubcaps that at the time I thought were ironically cool. I sit up straight, because in high school I'm obsessed with my posture and convinced of its impact on my attractiveness. I take a deep breath, but my hands still shake a little as I loosen my grip on the steering wheel.

What my date does not know at the time is this is not just prom night. This is my first date ever. And this is about to be my very first kiss.

As our faces draw nearer, my nervous excitement is at an all-time high. That feeling, in an instant, turns to abject horror, for as our lips meet, a small strand of snot drips slowly, rolls down my lip directly into our kiss. To this day, I do not know whether he refused to acknowledge this salty, unwelcome addition to our smooch because maybe he knew it was simply too mortifying to name or actually maybe he didn't even know what happened. But either way, I knew.

He gets out of the car and I flee the scene as fast as I can, driving to my friend's house in tears where I spend the rest of the evening sobbing under her ping-pong table at the after-party sleepover. I am so utterly inconsolable that my friend's very Christian mother thinks I am definitely on drugs.

No, Mrs. Judy. If you're listening, I wasn't high. I was just struggling under the crushing weight of existential embarrassment like only a teenager can.

Fortunately, I didn't literally die under that ping pong table. My boyfriend and I dated for a year after that, never talked about the first kiss.

Eventually, I made it to Quaker Liberal Arts College. For the first time, I was in an environment where people not only talked about sex, they talked about the politics of sex. In fact, there was a dedicated space called The Wymen's Center. That's women with a Y.

It was at the women-with-the-Y center that I actually realized I wasn't one. I started to put some words to some feelings I'd been having for a while. At the time, I naively thought I had invented the word genderqueer myself before discovering the long and vast history of transgender people around the world.

So, in class, I delve into the history and psychology of gender as a social construction. Outside class, at a weekend retreat on campus, I listened to a guest speaker tell a very captivating story about the kinky aesthetics of kitchen spatulas. On the third floor of the college library with its dingy orange carpet, I pull an anthology of queer fiction from the shelves that, when I open the pages, confirms the existence of an entire world I hadn't even known I was searching for.

By the end of college, I've not just self-actualized. I am organizing a feminist art show featuring a very memorable burlesque dancer who describes the way she worked her way through graduate school as a sex worker. Somewhere between the pasties and the nude Plaster of Paris body casting party I attend, I decide I too want to go to graduate school and eventually I want to get my PhD in ecology.

It's around this time that I also become involved in the Unitarian Universalist Church, all of which leads me to that hallway where this tender, young human stands before me reaching out for validation in a way they can barely articulate.

As I stand here in this tiled hallway watching the unitarians mill about, eating their vegan church donuts, I finally realize what this kid is actually asking. Honestly, what about 90% of the cards in the question box have asked me over the years.

What they really want to know is, “Am I normal? Is this okay? Is it okay to be like me?” That's what they want and need to hear the answer to. It's the question I wish I didn't have to wait until college to figure out.

So I turn to this kid and I say, “Want to know how old I was when I had my first kiss? 17.”

“Really?” The kid says looking astonished and relieved.

“Really. I was 13-and-a-half years old and completely unkissed and I lived,” I tell them. And now, I explain bukkake to 13-year-olds without even a smirk.