What Do Sex Educators Do?
Cathy: What does a sex educator actually do? I’m here with Reid Mihalko from https://reidaboutsex.com/
Reid: I’m here with Cathy Vartuli from http://theintimacydojo.com/ sitting right next to me.
Cathy: Yup. So Reid, what is it that a sex educator, if you were defining sex educator, how would you define it?
Reid: How do I define it?
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: I would say in all seriousness because I was about to be jackass, sex educator is anyone because it’s an umbrella term because it can look like a lot of different things, but somebody who is helping people understand more about sex, intimacy, I would say communication in relationships too
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: although how I’d be like a relationship communication but it also kinda depends on what you look at sex
Cathy: Sexual health
Reid: Sexual health, communication, intimacy like healthy, healthy relationships that would also probably include sexuality, sexual health, birth control, contraception, all kinds of stuff, hormones for when we get older like it can cover all kinds of stuff.
Cathy: Right and it can include at least a transgender, people that are transitioning and I think that sometimes people focus on certain demographics, they might be LGBT or youth or some people that focus on
Reid: I mean, if you’re talking to your kids about sex, you are a sex educator I mean you might not be pro making a living at it but you know like whenever you’re educating people about sex I think you’re a sex educator, it’s kind of like “Good Samaritan,” right? Whenever you’re helping somebody you’re a Good Samaritan and there are people that claim that title sex educator, very seriously because it is their career, it is their living, it means something very specific to them, for me, being a sex educator, being a relationship geek, people you know say I’m an expert at certain things…for me, what I would like to do is empower all of us to be sex educators for our friends, for ourselves, for our children, for our communities so anybody who’s helping people get access and access and the tools to implement and empower themselves to utilize, the agency to use that information around you know accurate information around sexual health, and pleasure, and well-being that for me, regardless of your demographic or your niche whatever your genders you know that you serve or if you’re serving yourself like I think…I think you can be a sex educator to yourself.
Cathy: Right, it definitely can and I think there’s a whole range of what people….some people just do written or they might just talk about sex, other people might do demos, there’s like there’s a lot of range of how people teach or share their message.
Reid: There are people that do show-and-tell
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: sex education where they’re like “This is how hand fuck somebody like here, come closer. Ask us questions.” We could you know I have friends in the adult industry who also consider themselves sex educators and porn performers in adult you know adult performers you have to be like ask them how they identify around that because you know there are people that are just performers and entertainers, right? Like a cirque du soleil performer might not consider themselves as a teacher of cirque du soleil or an educator of cirque du soleil in a certain way so you know there are
Cathy: Some people do
Reid: there are performer friends of mine and sex worker friends of mine who you know they don’t consider what they do sex education, although I know a lot of them answer a lot of questions, especially my sex worker friends who do a lot of time educating people like they’re doing the certain kinds of sex education.
Cathy: And if someone wanted to find out more about being a sex educator, you have a link for free videos they can go to?
Reid: Yeah, the easiest link would be to go to https://reidaboutsex.com/sexgeekpro because that’s my mailing list and my information list for resources just around sex education and again, then there’s like social workers that are doing sex education works, there’s everyone who works at planned parenthood
Cathy: Yeah
Reid: there are people that work at sex toy stores and things like that mean there’s so many different ways to look at sex education
Cathy: And it’s so valuable because there’s a lot of people that just don’t know a lot about it.
Reid: Yeah.
Cathy: So, thanks for the question. Please keep writing them in.
Reid: Yeah, leave a comment.
Cathy: Yeah