According to Planned Parenthood, 43% of female teens and 57% of teen males in the United States do not receive information about birth control before they have sex for the first time.
arketing wisdom tells us that “sex sells,” so why is it that so many school systems lack a comprehensive, inclusive sex education? The consequence is having tens of millions of young adults interested in sex, yet misinformed and misguided about it. University of Miami professor and passionate sex educator Dr. Andrew Porter has stepped up to help fill this void by starting “The Sex Wrap,” a no-holds-barred podcast that is just as entertaining as it is informative. “We’re in a world where everything is sexualized, and then the one thing that we’re not supposed to talk about is sex,” said Dr. Porter, assistant professor of public health in the School of Nursing and Health Studies. In the United States, sexual health education is often not accessible or incomplete due to funding cuts, abstinence-based education and heteronormativity, leaving many students with misconceptions and misunderstandings. “The Sex Wrap,” which Dr. Porter runs with co-host Dr. Spring Cooper, an associate professor from the Department of Community Health and Social Sciences at City University of New York, serves to inform college students—and whoever else wants to listen—about anything and everything that has to do with S-E-X. “Seventy to 90% of our students here are engaging in sexual behavior,” Dr. Porter said, “so abstinence-only education obviously didn’t work.” This begs the question: Where are students getting their sexual health information from? According to Dr. Porter, the answer is often porn. Seeing the scarcity of sexual health education and lack of LGBTQ+ inclusiveness within programs that did exist, Dr. Porter and Dr. Cooper created “The Sex Wrap.” Listeners—most of which are in their 20s—submit questions for Dr. Spring and Dr. Porter to answer, and the co-hosts “don’t pull any punches,” in doing so, ensuring that all
the information they’re disseminating is as “evidence-based as possible.” From butt plugs to blue balls, there is nothing they won’t talk about. But sometimes, Dr. Porter and Spring reframe questions so that they’re appropriate for high school and college students. The majority of the questions submitted by listeners, Porter said, are focused on insecurities like, “Am I big enough? Am I good enough? Is this right? Do I look right? Does it hang right? Are they big enough?” With “The Sex Wrap,” Dr. Spring and Dr. Porter hope to relieve any anxieties people may have concerning sex and address important social justice issues along the way. The mission, said Dr. Porter, is sex positive communication. “If you want to have sex,” he said, “I want you to have that sex, but I want it to be happy, healthy and consent-driven sex.” Some of their favorite topics to highlight are problems like racism in porn, which they have a must-listen-to mini-series on. Dr. Spring says she specifically enjoys serious questions, and hopes people will listen to them. For example, the pair recently put out their first episode on abortion, a topic Dr. Spring was surprised the team hadn’t covered until now. Sitting on the “cutting edge of public health,” the podcast engages with young people by letting them come to the experts, shared Dr. Porter. The crew emphasizes that their show is never supposed to feel like a classroom.
Summer 2021 DISTRACTION 51
