It's safe to say that if you attended high school in Australia, you probably received a limited sex education, if you received one at all. For those who did, they usually resembled this; brief and awkward lectures, almost always separated by a gender binary, where teachers sung the benefits of abstinence and you left the classroom feeling a mixture of shame, embarrassment and confusion.
Sexologist, Chantelle Otten, works to remedy these gaps of knowledge in her new book The Sex Ed You Never Had. In a post on Otten's Instagram yesterday, she announced the book, an "inclusive and shame-free guide to all things sex, bodies and relationships," she explained.
For many of us, the current public discourse revisiting our sex education has been a long time coming, so Otten's book is a welcome resource. Whether you're in school or said goodbye to that place long ago, we have no doubt The Sex Ed You Never Had will be incredibly useful. The holes in our sex education are alarming. Whether it's the complete omission of queer sex and sexuality or the silence around female pleasure, power and consent. As young people, we are not being adequately prepped for the experiences we will inevitably meet. What's more, this lack of information when we're young, takes years to unlearn and re-educated ourselves on as adults.
As a pyscho-sexologist, Otten has dedicated herself to honest, empathetic and science-based research of human sexuality. From her practice in Melbourne, she works with patients as a kind of "detective into their sex lives" to help them achieve a healthy, fulfilling and shame free sex life. Basically, she's doing the lords work. Luckily for us, we can now read about it.
View this post on Instagram
You can pre-oder The Sex Ed You Never Had here or through your favourite book store. It will be officially available on September 28.
Images: @chantelle_otten_sexologist
