The Importance of Standardization in Sex Education

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There's no standardized training in the UK so you're relying on people to train out their own pockets. There are very very few universities in the UK that offer a kind of graduate postgraduate program to become someone who in a school would be a super well trained sex educator. I have such complicated feelings about that as well because there will be so many people who come from like more marginalized or less privileged backgrounds who would make excellent sex educators. Would you mind sharing the the personal story in the penetration chapter sure? In that chapter I talk about if we think about some of the myths that are mythologised in sexual education.

In this episode, Hannah is joined by Sophia Smith Galer, who is an award-winning journalist, author of Losing It: Sex Education for the 21st Century, and Tiktok creator. Sophia unpacks the main sex myths she tackles in her book from virginity to the hymen, and also shares how she identified the gap in social sex education to start with. She and Hannah talk about Sophia’s journey into becoming a TikTok journalist as well as social media’s censorship of sex education and how Sophia hopes SexTok can continue to help us and the next generation with sexual, mental, and physical health. Finally, Sophia shares a personal story of vaginismus, and Sophia and Hannah discuss why sex education should never come from just one person.

CW: discussion of consent nuances, consent withdrawal, and non-consensual sex. (roughly between 22 - 24 minutes). A brief mention of self-harm.

✨MORE ABOUT SOPHIA SMITH GALER ✨
Sophia Smith Galer is a multi-award-winning journalist, author and TikTok content creator with over 100 million views on the app. Credited with pioneering TikTok journalism in the UK, she has been named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list this year for her work as well as in Vogue's list of 2022's 25 most influential women in the UK alongside Emma Raducanu, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and HRH Queen Elizabeth II. As a Senior News Reporter at VICE World News she has covered everything from gender violence and technology to the climate crisis and Europe's Christian hard right, and this year published her first book debunking what she has branded a worldwide sex misinformation crisis. Losing It: Sex Education for the 21st Century is out now, debunking sex myths surrounding virginity, penetration, virility, sexlessness and consent. The Evening Standard, who called Sophia a 'Face to Watch' in Books this year, said: ‘It’s the kind of book that makes you wonder, ‘why wasn’t this written before?’ It could change lives.’