Almost two years ago, when my daughter was in the seventh grade, I took her to see the movie adaptation of Judy Blume’s classic novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”
In one scene, Margaret sits in the auditorium of her New Jersey school while the girls in her class watch a filmstrip called “What Every Girl Should Know.” Over a warbly guitar track, a woman with a singsongy voice describes menstruation. “Once a month, a velvety lining of blood and tissue forms in her uterus to make a warm, nutritious place for a baby to grow,” she says. “If a baby is not conceived, the lining is not needed, and so the blood is released.” Margaret and her classmates are grossed out, and in the theater, grown women laughed out loud. “Oh, how far we’ve come since the ’70s!” I thought. But my daughter did not laugh. Instead, she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “This is so much more than we’ve gotten!”
As it turns out, my daughter hadn’t just received less sex ed in 2023 than the fictional Margaret had in 1970; she had gotten none. At the beginning of my daughter’s eighth grade year at her own New Jersey school, I went to the vice principal to ask why they hadn’t been teaching sex ed. The answer he came back with: Health classes at the school are taught by P.E. teachers. And gym teachers are not exactly known for being comfortable discussing sex with middle schoolers.
This discomfort, in part, comes from lack of training. Many gym teachers do not receive the professional development needed to confidently and accurately teach sex ed. And many of them would rather be teaching gym.
Gym teachers aren’t supposed to be who decides whether students learn sex ed, at least not in New Jersey. Sex education here is a state mandate. So while parents can opt their kids out of sex ed, schools are not supposed to be able to opt out of teaching it.
On the list of supposedly mandatory topics is consent. I was in my 40s before I fully grasped the concept of consent. The sex ed I got growing up in Connecticut was fairly comprehensive, but I had only one word for nonconsensual acts: rape. I thought of rape as a very specific type of attack: visibly violent, with a victim audibly saying no.
As for a lot of people, the #MeToo movement was eye-opening for me. It broadened my vocabulary and led me to redefine some key experiences from my youth. I realized that a relationship that started when I was a teenager was not merely “messy” but emotionally abusive. An encounter shortly after I graduated from college wasn’t a “mistake”; it was sexual assault. These revelations were upsetting but validating. I suddenly understood why I had spent a lot of time hiding in my room the summer after graduation. I understood that emotional abuse can be tricky to spot because it can appear to be passion or love, especially to vulnerable teenagers who are new to dating.
I wonder, though, if I had gotten better consent education when I was young, would I have spotted the red flags earlier? Would I, perhaps, have broken up with my boyfriend on one of our first dates, when he threw dog feces at me? Would I have understood that when he got aggressively jealous of other guys, he was being controlling, not romantic? What if my friends had gotten better consent ed? Would one of them have taken me aside and asked whether I felt safe?
Sometimes I also wonder whether the guys who harmed me might have behaved differently if they had gotten better consent ed.
My daughter’s generation has come of age after #MeToo. They have heard terms like “sexual harassment,” “sexual assault” and “emotional abuse.” They have watched predators face consequences for their actions. But Gen Z has also watched some perpetrators of sexual violence rise to power, holding some of the most influential jobs in the world.
Meanwhile, when teenage boys think about consent, many of them no doubt are primarily concerned with protecting themselves — with not being “canceled.” Most perpetrators in this age group are not intentional offenders, but without a definitive understanding of what consent looks like, they don’t necessarily know how to avoid doing something that would get them canceled.
Across the country, there is no clear guidance for young people on how to have healthy relationships and hookups, no collective understanding of what consent means. They need this desperately, especially now, with a president who was found liable for sexually abusing one woman and who has bragged about assaulting others.
This essential education cannot come just from squeamish gym teachers. One idea would be to put more of this work into the hands of teenagers themselves. This is not without precedent. In 1973 a group called the Student Committee for Rational Sex Education conducted workshops in a dozen New York City public schools. Peer educators ran learning centers that they called “rap rooms,” where students could stop by during free periods. Unlike their adult counterparts, the teenage educators made sex ed fun and playful, motivating their peers to voluntarily seek answers to their questions or to watch a demonstration of a contraceptive device.
After about two years, that experiment ended because of bureaucratic hurdles. A similar program with a focus on consent is currently active in middle schools and high schools around the country through an organization called SafeBAE, which stands for Safe Before Anyone Else. According to SafeBAE’s research, teenagers are far more receptive to consent messaging that comes from other teenagers than from adults, whose language and approach tend to feel outdated.
For student-led programs to thrive, kids will obviously need the support of caring adults. They need teachers and administrators who are receptive to student advocacy and are well versed in Title IX, a federal law that requires public schools to have policies and procedures in place to handle complaints of sexual violence and harassment. SafeBAE encourages schools to not silo sex ed to heath class but to incorporate it into literature and history discussions — say, when studying a book like “The Scarlet Letter” or global conflicts in which rape is used as a weapon of war. This concept sounds promising but only if teachers receive professional development around sex ed and consent ed, perhaps getting the education that barely any of us had when we were teenagers.
My daughter is a freshman in high school now. And she eventually did get a little sex ed. In the eighth grade, after I spoke to the vice principal, the health teacher talked to the class about basic reproductive systems and a guidance counselor gave a presentation on consent. This year, her teacher spent a period covering consent laws. All of this is better than nothing.
Still, the system feels inadequate for giving kids the skills they need to build healthy relationships. Educators are not teaching them in a meaningful way how to spot abusive behavior or how to approach intimate interactions consensually.
My daughter’s last year in high school will be Donald Trump’s final year in office. I hope by then, if we rewatch “Are You There God?,” she’ll be able to lean over during the sex ed scene and say, “Thank goodness we got more than that!”
Hillary Frank is a writer and podcaster. She just relaunched “The Longest Shortest Time” and is the author the forthcoming audiobook “Wedlocked.”
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