Our guest is a woman approaching age 40 who was diagnosed with herpes at age 14. This podcast Episode speaks to the important topic of "Sexless Sex Education", a talk I give teaching youth educators to talk to youth about sex, without talking about sex. It integrates these lived experiences of people who've had a diagnosis into sex education in order to aid std prevention efforts.

Much of what we learn from this guest's experience is that there was no leadership or direction, just what "not" to do, which as you'll hear in this episode is only 1 of 360 degrees of directions people can go. Take away that 1 degree of what NOT to do and you have 359 other ways people can go. We have to lead our youth otherwise they'll seek leadership from unsafe places and unfortunately we hear another reference to how common this can be like we heard on episode 97 (https://www.spfpp.org/podcast/episode-97-normalized-dysfunction). Apathy creates an environment of normalized dysfunction and we gotta do something about that as adults. I propose talking to each other and bringing back accountability. What she shares in this story is illegal and it sounds like the adults just neglected doing their job.

This STI minimization isn't exclusively for people living with herpes. It isn't just for sexually active adults. It isn't just for health care providers. It isn't just for sex educators. This is for all of us. The non-sexual components of sex education are omitted from the conversation because of peoples' fears and emphasis on the intercourse element. While this is PART of sex education, it's more important that it be accepted than avoided because we so quickly throw out elements of consent, boundaries, healthy relationship management skills, and the ability to seek support in the event of a boundary or consent violation.