A Sex Ed Comic Book

When I was doing research for my first novel, The Sex Ed Chronicles, I briefly examined the materials used in sex education classes during the late 1970's and early 1980's, while I was in high school and college.

While I saw nothing "wrong" with the materials used in those classes--they were no less appropriate than academic texts used in other classes--I wondered if students would pay attention. However, more than three years after I graduated from my central New Jersey high school, parents protested against the materials used in the sixth grade curriculum; several topics were considered taboo.

Today I read that a New School University (NY) graduate designed and refined a sex education comic book called "Not Your Mother's Meatloaf" for a senior year project. With a printing budget of $300, the editor, Liza Bley, researched sex education courses, then conducted field trips across New Jersey and New York city to interview sex educators, visit sex toy shops, and talk with students who had completed sex education classes.

Bley learned through these interviews that literature on sexual education was built on a hollow foundation: for all those pages of precautions and reels of film, there wasn’t a single actual story. “Personal sexual experience,” she says, “is not a narrative that’s shown anywhere in sex education.”

So, she contacted students to collect experiences and got everything from accounts of lost virginity, to dating conservative Christians and drunken hook-ups. On the back of the book is the definitive one-liner: “Experiences, Not Answers.” A year and a half later, Bley has distributed 400 copies to health centers, LGBTQ support centers, and zine libraries throughout the country. A blog exists to collect and continue new stories.

I have not read the comic yet, but I did go to a sales page at Microcosm Publishing, a vendor of online zines. My only concern, so far, is that the comic appears to be "for women only." I don't know if that was the editor's intentions, but one problem with tradition sex education is that it is too often positioned as a woman's issue. But give Bley and Co. credit. They developed a tool that can successfully reach a female audience 12 and over through effective stories. That is no small accomplishment.