Sex Education with Heather Corinna from Scarleteen

Hi everyone.

Welcome to Teach youh Kids. We're a podcast about homeschooling, whole child development and the future of education. And today we are talking about sex education with Heather Carina from Scarlatine. Many people homeschool because they're interested in their kids learning about topics that are not taught in school or not taught the way they'd like them to be. And for the most part, our community is interested in evidence based, secular, sex positive, inclusive, queer friendly, not abstinence only curriculum that includes talking about consent and gender identity. However, if that is not you, I want you to know that you are welcome here. You're loved, you're seen, and we want to have this vitally important conversation with you. So this podcast is an opportunity to get that conversation started. Heather is the founder, director, designer and editor of Scarlet Teen, the first truly comprehensive sex, sexuality and relationships education site and resource for young people of its kind. Scarleteen has provided millions of young people accurate and inclusive information and support for over 20 years. I have been reading it myself recently for advice and it's just an amazing resource which I wish I had discovered many decades ago. So Heather, to get started, I would love to hear the story behind Scarlet Teen. What inspired you to get started?

Sure. Well, as of Friday, we're 25 years amazing. So that's just right. It's like both amazing and kind of mind boggling.

That's mind boggling.

And you know, not, not longer than about 25 years ago, I was running another website that was a sexuality site that was meant for adults, particularly adult women and trans and gender diverse people. And you know, it was 1998, like there wasn't a lot on the Internet. There really wasn't even that much porn on the Internet. I mean, porn was still pretty much a video porn store situation then. So, you know, finding things on the Internet was both a little harder in that we didn't have search engines yet either, but also a little easier in that no one who could get there was, was combing through, you know, millions upon millions of web properties. Right. Just weren't very many. So, you know, if somebody came online and they were looking for anything to do with sex and sexuality at all, the likelihood of them winding up at Scarlet Letters, which was the name of the site that I was running, even if they weren't looking for particularly queer, particularly feminist sex information, they would have been likely to land there. And so I, I started getting emails from young people, just ask, just asking sex questions because they would see me answering advice questions for adults. And you know, had go get her spirit, God bless them. And so, you know, the questions that I would get at the time, you know, I was in my late 20s, this would have been, you know, 28 when this was happening, were not for me as a 28 year old person who'd done a lot of, let's just call it sexual field work and leave it there. They weren't complicated questions, you know, they were things like, you know, how you decide on a birth control method or how you use a particular birth control method or, you know, just kind of standard issue managing and negotiating sexual relationship stuff and sexual decision making. And you know, before that time, I had been teaching early childhood edition already for almost about 10 years from right out of high school. So I already was teaching. I'd grown up in and out of hospitals and public health because of, that's what my mother did. I'd grown up writing because that's what I do and with an activist parent as my father. So, like all the pieces were kind of there for me to just answer those questions and there wasn't anywhere else to send them, you know, because of course, just in the spirit of, I don't know if I should I be doing this? I don't know. Right. Like, it's not what I intended to do. I looked and there just wasn't anything yet. Not that far. After we debuted, a couple things like kind of quickly happened. Parenthood got a website. They, for a while, they don't have it anymore. We're running a teen site maybe like a year after that. But, um, I'd answered a bunch of these questions and answers. And then I quite naively thought, well, I'll just publish a handful of them and then everyone will have what they need. Right? What could possibly go wrong? But also, it's ridiculous that I would have. I mean, where, where did I think that everyone was getting this sex education, that they could merely supplement it with 10 pages of questions and answers, Right? Like, and, and the fact of the matter is I didn't think about it, you know, the way that I came up, the way a lot of us came up, you had, you know, the classes on periods and puberty in middle school and that was the end of it. You know, I went to an arts high school. I was our sex educator at high school. I don't think I should have been. I'm not so sure that the advice and information that I was giving everyone when I was 16 with no training was probably fantastic. In fact, I'm sure that a lot of it was just absolutely wrong. But the minute that I put something out there, of course, you know, it kind of snowballed. There would be more questions and answers. And then I had to choose between my existing teaching job and this because I was staying up all night answering things and also hand coding web pages because we didn't have even like really a WYSIWYG then, let alone what we have now, which is that you could you know, just kind of drop in this whole website and you have this nice back end built for you. Your content is all managed. Yeah, I had to close the other site within really a handful of years. I mean, it just. It kind of ate my life. It's not. It's not the worst thing there. There are worse ways for my life to be eaten than this. But, you know, within a year, I would say of just debuting the site and putting it out there already, there was. There were thousands of people every day. And now when we. We just did account again for 25th, it's 90 million people that have used Scarlettine. Right? It's bonkers. It's bananas. And there's like thousands and thousands of pages. There are not 10 pages anymore. There are thousands of thousands of pages. There's three kinds of direct services. Like, it's. No one is naive here anymore about what is there isn't needed, I can.

Tell, you know, and I've been reading through the questions, and they're just so tender and sweet, and I love how you address them. And I wish that I'd had this resource as a teen and, you know, even now as an adult, I'm learning things, reading your blog, and I'm just wondering, like, you know, how your. Your team is obviously incredibly well trained, informed, and delicate and how you talk about these issues and, you know, you're addressing teens who are not fully developed, you know, either physically or cognitively. So when you are training people and answering these questions, how would you describe, if you can, your core values and the framework you use to talk about sex education with adolescents?

I love that question. I especially kind of love this question coming from, like a homeschooling, unschooling situation. Because Montessori and unschooling is what I come to this with. That's my background. I'm like a big John Holt person. Maria Montessori is like my personal hero. And so, you know, one of the things that I noticed when I got those initial letters and I engaged with those initial letters is that what. While by all means, people writing in were seeking information wanting information and were glad to get the information. The more central value of the interaction to them more seemed to be that there was a place that they could ask a question, that someone heard and saw them, and that someone responded to them with care, you know, with kindness, with respect, and in a way that, you know, Even in my 20s, it wasn't peer to peer. It's not peer to peer to be 28 talking to somebody who's 15. But even with a tinier age gap than now, it's still coming to them in a way that you're not their peer, but you respect who they are right in their space, in their life, and you're not being patronizing with them. So, you know, a big piece of what we do in training is kind of talk about those initial interactions, right? And how even when, even when we might have a time where, you know, let's say we have a new volunteer and they don't actually know, they can't just give someone right off the top of the head the information that they're asking for, what they can do with that person is still answer them, say, hi, we're glad you're here. You know, we do this a lot. We're really happy that we found us. We're really happy that you trusted us to ask this question. And that person can even say, you know, I don't actually know the answer to this question, but I can offer you a few things and maybe they're going to show them how to research what it is, or maybe they're going to say, I can't give you the informational piece, but I hear that you're having some feelings around this that are upsetting you. I can witness your feelings. We can talk about your feelings, you know, so even then, when somebody doesn't necessarily, you know, not everyone there is me, who's been doing this for such a long time, who does have a dizzying storage of facts in their head about all of this. But this thing where people feel seen, they know that they've come somewhere safe. And I think a lot of the times when young people come to anybody with these kinds of questions, you can tell them as much as you want that it's okay for them to ask you and it's safe for them to ask you, but they still are, like, ready to be ridiculed or shamed or, you know, like it's, it's just in there because this is, this is the world that we live in. So even just, just unloading that thing where they get to be like, oh, God, right. All of these, all these things that I was afraid were going to happen, none of them happen here. So that's a really big piece of it. Right. You know, the other thing is that we want the information that we're giving to someone to be something that is right for them. So even though you might have somebody who's, you know, let's say 25 and living in Connecticut asking a question that is the same question it's somebody who is 15 and is living in Iran is asking, even if the factual answer may be the same, we're not necessarily going to give the same answer because they're, you know, the place in which they're centered and they're experiencing it. Right. Is so radically different. So that's another thing is we always, you know, much like when you'd, you know, when, if you're in a healthcare setting and you're taking care of someone and they have a chart, you're going to look at the chart and you're going to take. So we'll say, let's look at the pieces of information we have about somebody. How old are they, where are they, how do they identify themselves? You know, what are the pronouns that they use, what are the words that they use for their sexuality and what are they telling us in the piece? Because another big thing there is that a lot of the time the information that someone actually turns out to need is not necessarily the thing that they thought that they were coming to do, right. In the context of a conversation, we'll often have young people kind of come in with a question. Let's say they're having a pregnancy scare, right? And so they think what the issue is, is finding out if they're pregnant or not right now. But when you get through the whole conversation and you're really asking lots of questions and you're really engaging and you're really paying attention to not just the question they're asking, but what are the details around it. It can turn out to be that what they actually needed to have a conversation about was how actually consensual their sexual interactions are or how much they really are coming to them because that's something they for themselves want to be doing at that time versus that they feel like a partner wants them to be doing it, or that it, it's the time for them to be doing something, so they must. Or that, you know, someone with low self esteem may think that the first person that likes them and is interested in them in that way may be the only person Ever interested in that way. So you talk about that. So there's a lot of training, too, and kind of teasing out conversations, doing what we can to kind of really keeping them running until we feel like the other person has been like, okay. And sometimes that can take a long time. Sometimes that can be over weeks or months even. And I think another big piece of that, especially when you're talking about parent educators, right, Is that so many people, whether it's parents or it's just. Or it's young people or it's just any of us out in the world, get the idea that there's like that sex talks are these. There are these things. They're in these tiny little boxes, right? Like, even if you think, oh, okay, there's more than one, which is in and of itself still pretty unusual, right? Like, you might think, okay, here's the puberty talk. It's in this little box. And here's the talk about if we're have sex with other people, and here's the, like, safer sex talk. But really, this is. These are lifelong conversations, right? And they have so many levels and so many layers that if we come into the conversation with someone and we kind of give them the impression that, yeah, it's real quick, back and forth, question and answer stuff, they'll usually go with that, but they're not going to get the same thing out of it as when we're like, they've come in at the start of what may be. They could be here talking to us on and off for years or reading things for years. So, right. The start of a conversation that we want to. Instead of trying to be like, okay, we have had it. We can now close the door. Like, as much as we can have the door open on our end, we want to keep it open.

That's wonderful. And I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts on just, you know, for a parent who wants to, you know, for their children to have a good sex education, you know, when is a good time to start talking about sex? Or do you wait until your child starts asking you questions? I mean, how do you navigate that, those conversations?

That's also a great question. I mean, for me, it's lifelong. Right. And some of that also is understanding that when we say sex, it's a lot of things that we're talking about, right? It's not just physical sexual activities that people are engaging in or even so much as, you know, what we've culturally decided are sexual parts of a body. You know, to me, before almost anything Else, the very first conversations that we'll be having with children. Really, really. Again, I'm an early childhood Ed person, right? So really, really little children are actually consent and boundary conversations. I'm glad that the culture has changed enough. I remember that about a decade ago, I did a podcast with Amanda Hess, and I suggested that even when doing something like diapering, that even though the conversation is not going to be two way, especially not for a while, we're saying things as we're touching a kid's body, you know, to be like, I'm going to take your diaper off now, and I'm taking your diaper off so we can do this thing and I'm going to touch your butt now. Right? Like, and again, they're not going to, they're not going to have some qualitative conversation with you when they're six months old. I mean, no one thinks that that's going to happen, but what is going to be happening is that you're already setting this situation for them to know that, yeah, if people are touching each other there, there should be other communication happening besides just touching. And when they start to get to that place and everyone who has a toddler knows what this is. Where, when you get to the yes or no place, the no tends to happen a whole lot more than the yes. Right? Like, and so once you start to have those consent conversations, a lot of it can feel kind of gamey, right. And boundary pushy on their side for them to be like, how. How many things can I say no to? And that's the, you know, that's the stuff of the thing where you're running around your place to try to get the toddler to keep the diaper on or put a shoe on or. And then sometimes you have to have conversations to be like, I hear you that you don't want to put your coat on this morning. However, we have to make the choice to put the coat on because hypothermia is the consequence if not. But I think, you know, for me, so many of these kinds of conversations which, you know, consent is important and more than just sex, right? It's very important in sexual interactions, but it's important in so many ways that there are so many of the kind of what I think of the building blocks of sex ed that really you're not talking about sex at all. You're doing things like having consent conversations and giving people modeling consent. You're, you know, with a toddler when they start to do things like they're curious about their body parts and other people's body parts. You're giving them language for what body parts are. You're helping them know what is and isn't private with people when it is and isn't okay to touch somebody. You know, as kids start to develop their own kind of elective friendships, right. You're giving them sex and relationships information when you're helping them to navigate those, right. And you're staying in conversation about what, what is and isn't okay to do with friends. What is and isn't kind when somebody's hurt their feelings, helping them through. How do you, what do you do when your feelings are hurt or when they've hurt somebody else's feelings? What do we do when we've hurt somebody's feelings? I mean, and all of these things are happening. You're not, you're probably not getting to them, asking any questions about again, you know, what we tend to think about is like capital S, sex until they're seven or eight years old. And by then, if you've been having all of these kinds of other conversations, there's almost not even a lot to talk about. Right. Reproduction can be something that's certainly esoteric, but it's. I think you're always, I think you're talking from minute one, honestly. I mean, while we're talking about this, I'm even just thinking about how many people, you know, in breastfeeding. There's a lot of stuff that happens with having to explain to really young kids about boundaries, right? So that basically the person who's doing the breastfeeding or the chest feeding isn't just having a horrible emotional experience.

I'm curious to know about the pushback you've had. I mean, I look at Twitter and there are a lot of people who describe, you know, some of the best sex ed sites I've seen as pornographic. I think there's a lot of anger and fear and parents who feel like sex ed should not be taught in school. It's the role of the parent. And, you know, here you are giving, you know, resources to maybe someone who is gay and their parents are very right wing and homophobic or questioning their gender identity. So I'm curious, like, what kind of pushback you get? And like, do you entertain that at all? I mean, how do you navigate the kind of negative responses you get maybe from some parents who don't feel like it's your role to be educating their children about sex?

I mean, one, like, look, I, in the amount of time that I have Been doing this. I definitely feel like I've been through the wars. I mean, I. I had to move out of state for a while because I got stalked in person in my apartment here. I use a special online security service because it's not safe for people to know where I live. You know, like, it's there. There have been times where I've had to go turn everything off because it's thousands and thousands of people threatening violence, sometimes sexual violence, even as survivor people do that, you know, saying, I should be put in jail, you know, and then when one person does that, especially if there's somebody with a big following, it drums up a bunch of other people, and it gets. It gets really violent and it gets really scary. We've had times that certainly sometimes what happens with this is that people come into our services and pretend to be young people to try and, like, catch us in whatever they think we're doing, which, I mean, inevitably, everyone just ends up really bored. It's not pornographic what we offer or particularly exciting unless, you know, you are for real a young person trying to get what you want from it. But when hundreds of people come and do that, it can derail what we're doing. That said, in my personal experience, it has been very rarely parents of adolescents. Who are the people doing this? Usually parents of adolescents in all of their diversity by the time that they have had a child reach adolescence, are well aware that almost no part of parenting is something that any parent even wants to be doing by themselves, because, oh, my God, how many things can you actually do? Like, it's a big lift. But also, usually by the time the parents have gotten to having an adolescent, again, not everybody. I wish, but I. I think more parents than people realize, however comfortable or not comfortable they are with this, they'll recognize that there's a need for it. And also a lot, you know, a lot of parents are pretty good about knowing It's a very specific thing to be a sex educator. So even the idea that any given parent could be the only person providing this information would require that that parent themselves be a sex educator to even have all that information. You know, our own personal sexual relationships, you know, even somebody who's been pretty slutty like me, you know, it's no shame, you know, that's just for real. But it's. More people than not have had a handful of sexual partners over a lifetime. It's a really. A very individual way of experiencing things like sexual health care or pregnancy. It's not you. If you were only Giving people sexual information based on that, that's like sex. 16 year old me in high school, right. Like it's not, it's not great information to just base everything that you're telling somebody about sex and relationships off of your one personal experience. I mean I almost never do it in the work that I do because I know too well from what I do that whatever any one of our personal experiences are, the idea that it's universally representative is just bananas. It's not, it's, it's usually nowhere near that. So I mean I. More when we've gotten stuff from parents it'll be like parents of three year olds that are being like well you should do this for children. And one what we offered Scarlettine is, is not for children. It's like, you know, because I don't even, I've tried to envision to be like if I were to build a website for a 3 year old then I wouldn't, I would. But it's not the right medium for a three year old. But also too there's, you know, if you can kind of get past the noise, you know, like the longer that you're in this, you know to be like I hear you now. I hear that you're mad because you're looking at your three year old and you've somehow projected your three year old to be like 18 but they're like still your three year old but when they're 18 that you're not going to feel that way. Right. Even when they're 13 you're not going to feel that way because they're, your three year old is not going to be sitting there, your 13 year old is sitting there. So some of it also too is like I, I don't usually engage with most of it. I mean if it's violent and yelling, I want, I'm Buddhist, I don't, I don't engage violently in any situation. Right. Certainly in my deeply underpaid workplace.

It'S not your job.

But you know we've had plenty of, of times when people have come to us and that's, and the motivation of those people also too is not usually to try and have a conversation. They, they want things to be violent, they want to do something yucky. So. But when we've had people come in any kind of earnest and we have had parents come whole state that they're conflicted about this thing, you know, whether it's about gender identity or sexual orientation or even that they're child is having sex. Right. Or they are thinking about having sex, but that they see what we do. And while they might not agree with us, could we talk to them about it? Always we engage with them. I mean, honestly, you know, the more parents that we have that come in that are like so concerned that they're doing it all wrong, usually we say to them, the mere fact that you're saying that probably suggests that you're doing just fine. You know, it's really the ones that kind of come in that there, there is a conflict. And then if they're asking for help, I mean, that's, that's the best thing we could possibly ask for. That's the best thing we could want for a young person. It's certainly a service that we can do to them. And you know, sometimes it works out well and sometimes they walk away and maybe nothing has changed. But I mean, as advocates for young people, I think that and for parents and families, you know, when people come in in earnest, I think that we owe everybody at least an attempt, right, to have those conversations. And I, you know, we're not made for parents, we center young people, but we, when parents come in, we always talk to them. And you know, some of the best conversations I think that I've had in my work year have been with parents. It's really, I'm like getting all teared up because it's really, it's really a wonderful thing to see a parent want so badly to serve their child well in this arena, you know, and it's so valuable. I mean, if you do, you give.

Them so much, that's wonderful. I mean, I, you know, I've been an educator for 20 years and I believe in the depths of my soul that knowledge is power and you know, to hide knowledge does not help us work through things. When I, you know, hear the right wing perspective on some of these topics, I feel like there's this thread where there's a belief that if you learn about gender identity, that will encourage you to change your gender, or if you learn about sex, that will encourage you to go out and have sex before you're ready. Could you share your perspective on this line of reasoning?

Yeah. No, I like it. I mean, here's the thing. Like, we have data on this stuff in the world and so far as I can tell by looking at the data, these are the things that the data has borne out. Talking about sex and sexuality not only does not incline people to be, you know, physically sexually active with people earlier, it seems to incline them to do it later. Not. I don't care to me, there's no one. Right timeline. The right timeline is when the situation is good and healthy and everybody feels ready and excited and happy at their stage in life. Right. That they're at. Because also two things, like, you know, 10 year olds experiencing, experimenting with kissing is sexuality. It is, it's 10 year old sexuality. Right. Like so it all kindergarten.

I was running after every boy in the classroom trying to kiss.

Right. I mean, you know what I mean? Like, and again, that would be a very different thing. Doing it the way you do it at kindergarten and the way you do it at 30 are not the same way. They're different because you're in different developmental stages of life. But they are, they are all sexual change slightly. Yeah, right, right.

So the data around teaching people about sex doesn't encourage.

So. Right. So, so that we know that it doesn't do that. We know that the data that we have around talking about sexual identity, gender identity, does not incline people to claim identities they wouldn't have or disclaim identity, period, when they wouldn't even think about identity. What the data does show that that does is protect people who without those conversations would otherwise feel isolated. We know that those conversations, for instance, cut suicide rates. When we're talking about things like having early conversations, you know, again, truly comprehensive sex ed conversations, not, you know, where do babies come from conversations. We know that while, yes, it doesn't make people be sexual earlier, what it does is it makes people feel consent is more likely to show up in all of these things when it happens. So I mean, like in a way that I think is almost nearly universal, all of the data that we have on what sex ed does when we have conversations, when people get, you know, good, comprehensive, inclusive, accurate sex ed, is that the good stuff that we, I think again, almost all of us hope happens in anybody's sexual life is so much more likely to happen. More people use contraception and safer sex. When we have these conversations versus when you don't. It is much more likely that people don't do this and then you wind up with people with unwanted pregnancies. I think one of the tricky things that comes into this though is that when I say it's almost universal, the part where it's not universal is that there, there is a group of people that whether it's based in religious belief or upbringing or gender roles, has it in their head that if you do sexual things in a way that again, maybe it's your religion, maybe it's your community, maybe it's Culture says you're not supposed to, that bad things should happen to you. Right. And it's, it's unfortunate. You know, we all probably have had. This is somewhere in our world that we've experienced this and you know, you're. A sex ed conversation is not going to turn those people around because this is based in a bigger belief system. And it's also one of these things where I don't, I don't know that someone like me would be the right person to have that conversation. Because to me it's reprehensible that you would want someone, for instance, to get pregnant when they don't want to get pregnant and be a parent when they don't want to be a parent or get a sexually transmitted infection that they're going to have to be managing their whole life or feel hopeless and like they have low self esteem. Right. Like, to me there's nothing that does that. But there might be other people for whom kind of those ways of thinking are more, you know, that's not how I grew up. It's not how I've lived my life, that's not my community who are more aligned with that to have those conversations. We do have a couple writers that we've had at Scarlatine over the years, for instance, who grew up in evangelical communities. And somebody like that, for instance, can be fantastic at having some of these conversations. Again, you're still, everybody's not going to change their mind on that. And when people have come up in that and live in that, it's usually really deeply ingrained. So one conversation is not going to change anything. Anyway, it's a long time for sure.

But when you come from that same perspective, you can certainly enter into a conversation more easily. And I think that you really do a beautiful job of actually not pushing a particular agenda. I mean, some site might be like, oh, sex is so wonderful. You should be enjoying your body. Not prudent and, but you, you know, you know, the whole gamut. People are coming because they're asexual, you know, and I think you do really an amazing job. I'm curious, like when you talk about sex educators who are some of the people who have influenced you or books you've read that have helped you really build this amazing, deft approach to talking about delivering sex education.

First of all, I appre. I appreciate what you said. I mean, I do want to say that at 25 years and we, we kind of, we do a constant content review, but then sometimes we do kind of a ginormous Contra review just to make sure that everything is getting updated, that needs updated or stuff that is just like it worked for somebody right. In 2002, but probably we don't think it will work for anybody now. We're going to retire it. When I read some of my early stuff, it's a little more what you were talking about, right? Like, it's a little more like, ah, this is great. I'm, I'm definitely a little more casual, I think in my conversation than I, than I would be now. And some of it again too is that first of all, the age, the age gap between me and who I'm talking to when it's me has grown. I'm 53, I'm not 28. And that's a big difference. To be talking to somebody who's say 18 and 28 and 18 and 53. But also the world has changed, right? The world has changed. A lot of things have changed in the middle to make it so that, that kind of. And you know, I mean, I do feel that way about sex. I do think that in the great diversity of human sexuality it really awesome and fascinating and all of these things. But, you know, that kind of way of coming to it because we have had things like, you know, when I first came into this, abstinence only was brand new. It had just started. We didn't have things like True Love weights and all this stuff. Right. So think about the young people that have lived through this. If you've lived through a culture of intense body and sexual shaming to have somebody meet you with, but sex in your body are great is not. They're not meeting you where you are, you know. Right. And also too, it's, you know, again, in my 20s, I was a very young educator still, you know, now at this point, I've been educating for almost 35 years. Right. So I'm a little more well seasoned in all of us. I mean, you know, anytime we're at like, we just like, you'd grow as a doctor, you'd grow as a cook. You, you grow. Hopefully if you're doing it right, you grow as an educator. But a lot of it to me is, you know, this is stuff, this is stuff that I learned as a Montessori educator. This is stuff that I learned as an unschooling proponent, which is that I listen to young people and I, I, you know, I try and follow their lead instead of starting with mine. I try and make myself. And this is the same thing that we treat our staff and that we Try and kind of imbue in all of the written content that we create and the outreach we do to make, to make it very clear to young people that if, if the way that we're saying something doesn't, isn't working for them or doesn't hit right. Or it even hurts their feelings or it scares them that they should tell us and we will correct course. Right. That there's no one right way that we think we're doing it and they're going to get it that way or they're not going to get it at all. Right. Like we're very clear. And there's a lot of times over the years that we just. In the human way you do where you can be as well intentioned as you want, you make mistakes, you step on somebody's toes, something that you didn't know was sensitive for somebody, is sensitive for somebody, something you assumed about someone is just not true at all. And so a lot of it is just really that we have been, we've set things up in a way so that we can be constantly engaging with the people that we're serving and that it can be two way and that we have been very responsive to what they say. And so, I mean, in so many ways, the quality of what we provide right now is in large part to do with the people that we've. That are. We're serving. Right. Because they've, they've given us the privilege of being honest about how they feel about what it is. And when we ask answer question, if it's not, doesn't really answer it for them or it's not complete or they didn't like it, instead of just sucking it up and walking away, of going ahead and taking the kind. You know, it's a positive risk, but it's a risk to tell somebody else, especially somebody even a little older than you. Yeah, that's not really what I. That's not really what I was looking for. Or I, I've heard that before. Right, we get that. Like, I've heard that answer before. And that answer doesn't work for me to come back and go, all right, let's try again.

Let's try again. Yeah, Wonderful doing it. Yeah. And you have so many years of fine tuning. You touched a bit on cultural relevancy. And I was wondering if you could maybe address how sex education can be tailored to neurodivergent kids, maybe especially kids on the autism spectrum.

Sure. I mean, for us online, we're kind of in a really great space because we have been mostly text based, right? And text based is really great. I mean, there's no. Neurodiversity is called neurodiversity for a reason, right? Like there's no one way that people are neurodiverse. There is in fact quite a lot of diversity in there. And so the one thing is not gonna work for everybody. But for a lot of neurodivergent people, you know, being in a group, you know, for instance, where you're talking face to face is not so great. Having videos or lots of animations or lots of bells and whistles or presentations and movies again, also because of that being so stimulating, that's not necessarily so great. One of the things that we also really try and do is show young people when we're engaging them how to look for their own information in good ways. And when you're doing that, you can be using, you know, kind of standard skills to do things like assess the quality of the information that you want and find what you want, but build in your needs, right? So maybe like TikTok is not a place for you to look what you want because everything is too fast and too flashy, but learning how to use a search engine works for you because it's, you know, more kind of from a sensorial point of view, it's quieter and you can do it on your own time, you know, or maybe reading books is the right thing for you and videos is not the right thing. So even I think kind of showing people how to tailor their approach is a big one. I mean, I think another thing that makes the way that we do things very adaptable is that this isn't school sex ed in the sense that for two weeks no one is required to go here to listen to everything, to engage in things in the way that we have decided in whatever our two week sex ed curriculum is that they're going to engage. Everything that we do is opt in. Nothing is non optional. There's also no one path. So everybody that comes here gets to really tailor what they're reading based on what they want and what they need. And also what again meets them where they are. Our direct services are there in part for people that let's say they're doing that, but they want a little help finding things or they some one on one conversation is for them a component of how they're going to learn. You know, we've had people that will come into a direct service and they have read an article, but they don't understand some of it. But so then we can be there to be like, oh, well, let me try and explain this differently, or let's maybe try this other, this other shorter piece instead, right? Because the length and depth of our pieces is not all the same either. So sometimes some of it is. You know, when you're talking about how we train our staff in some ways, especially at this stage of the game, we have thousands and thousands of pieces, we have different direct services. Everybody's kind of a librarian a little bit, you know, to be like, oh, you're here at the library. Let me show you how to use the library in a way that the library will work for you. But I mean, one of the nice things that I will say too is that, you know, when people. There's a nice norm at this stage of the game culturally, I think with neurodiversity, where neurodivergent people are finally getting the message that one, this is not about us being broken, right? Like, this is, this is just. Brains are different, right, In a bunch of different ways. And this is one of the ways. But that coming to things in the way that we come to things is, is fine. And like wanting to have long back and forth conversations is fine. You know, it's like. And these are also all things like tailoring your learning to yourself and your, and your needs and asking for the accommodations that you need and the points of access that you need, focusing on the things that you are most interested in, right? These are things, especially if you have people that kind of teach neurodivergent people, is our cornerstones of that, that way of educating people. But that turns out to be a really good way of educating everybody, right? Like everybody. It's really hard to learn any if you're not interested in something. And this is one of the tricky things of school, sex ed, right, Is that it's not year round anywhere, I don't know of any school on earth where it's year round. It's in this one period of time, a very short one. So if everything in it or anything in it is happening at a time when somebody's not interested, they are not that that information is just going to go like this, right? You know, like we don't have the. In Montessori, we call it absorbency. You know, we don't have an absorbent mind. We have an absorbent mind when something is like within our geek dump or it's relevant to us at the time, right? That's the other thing. And that's the tricky thing with some sex ed is that you know, for. For kind of planning things and preparedness. It makes sense that we think, okay, it would be ideal if we all knew all of the things ahead of time. But we can't hold all of the things in our head ahead of time. You know, and sometimes we'll have learned something years before, and then it's years until we're in the situation in which we need it. And it's. It's gone. You know, it's gone.

Absolutely. Wow. Well, Heather, is there anything you feel, I mean, after these 25 years that you just really wish parents and educators would know about when they're approaching sex ed that we might not have touched upon today?

Oh, gosh, that's like. That's its whole own thing. I mean, there's a lot of things. I mean, one of the things is, and I talked about it a little bit earlier, is that I do think that there. I think way more parents think that they suck at this or they couldn't possibly good at this than is actually true. Right. Like, I think that there needs to be a little trust in yourself. One of the things that I think sometimes happens is that when adults and certainly parents talk to younger people about sex and they get that, like, cringe reaction right away, they think that that cringe reaction is that they've done something wrong, they've picked the wrong time, they've set it in the wrong way. I think that cringe reaction is straight up ageism more than anything else, and just people not being comfortable with it yet. And that probably. I mean, again, sometimes, yeah, you're right. You did say something that's like, not the best fit. But this is true about so many things not known to sex. I think with respect to everybody's boundaries, I think that when people get that reaction, instead of thinking, oh, that needs. I need to back off and we need to not talk about this. I think that staying in curiosity about it and asking the young person or people that you're talking to to kind of be like, ah, I. Like, I'm sorry. I see that you feel uncomfortable. Why do you think that it is? Right? And there, even that conversation right there, we're talking about sex, we feel uncomfortable. Why is that is such a core component of sex ed? Because, of course, if we can't be comfortable even talking about it, how do we have sexual relationships with anybody? We can be sure consensual, where anyone's happy, having a good time, where we can kind of work through conflicts or changes. We can't. So, I mean, I'm not going to say push through a cringe reaction because push is not what I mean. But I think don't. I would not consider a cringe a closed door. I would consider a cringe a place to get curious and invite everybody to be curious.

It's about listening and really just listening to our bodies. And cringe is something that's happening inside our body. Well, Heather, I am just so grateful for this resource. I think you've probably just changed millions of lives and people should know that they can go to scarlettine.com and make a donation because Scarlettine would not exist without donations. And Heather is incredibly courageous building this resource with so many insane people in the world navigating all the discomfort around sex. And I'm so sorry that, you know, there are hurtful, cruel comments because I think the work you're doing is so compassionate and beautiful and supportive. So I think people are going to benefit enormously from hearing this. And just thank you so much for your time and for being here today.

Yeah, my pleasure. I love these conversations.