Sex(ualiteit) Werker

Ik ben een sex werker niet, maar ik ben een sexualiteit werker. I'm not a sex worker (exactly), but I am a sexuality worker. I spend a good portion of my working hours researching and teaching the finer points of human sexuality to the young and the old (senior citizens are the fastest growing population of STI cases in the US). There is a certain joy when I take my laptop to the IT guys and don't bother to erase the bizarre semi-pornographic website that are considered research in my line of work. I have to know what those crazy kids are doing, after all!

A recent highlight: I regularly visit Robin's Nest, the independent/transitional unit at a local behavioral and mental health residential facility for adolescents. Robin's Nest has 12 girls in house ranging in ages from 15-17. I meet with them (and their LCSW) once a week to teach from our curriculum- contraception, STIs, healthy relationships, gender and sex 101, pelvic exams 101, consent, etc. This past week was my last session with the girls for a few months. We did a go-around in which each person had to say one thing they had learned in the past three months. Carrie loudly proclaimed, "I know now that I shouldn't call people hermaphrodites, I should call them intersex." Good, Carrie, good. Someone else mentioned they had learned about dental dams. The lovely LCSW asked with total innocence and curiosity, "I don't understand. When would you need to use a dental dam on a man??" This put me in the situation of (ever so delicately) explaining rim jobs to a group of girls who think pelvic exams and oral sex performed on a woman are the "nastiest" things they have ever heard of. As you can well imagine, the rimming conversation had the young women falling off their standard-issue institutional, very uncomfortable "day room" furniture.

Today I tabled at a University health fair. Thankfully, I was not seated next to the Spiritual Health group, but rather KC Free, a local totally free health clinic that also does STI education and HIV case management. I sat alongside their Youth Prevention Specialist. To our fellow tablers, we surely sounded like freaks. We discussed the finer points of hepatitis b transmission through fecal matter; our anger the Saran wrap now comes in "vegetable steamer" variety, which means we now have to caveat when we tell the kiddos they can use Saran wrap as a dental dam; the lack of general knowledge that flavored condoms really shouldn't be used for vaginal or anal sex; and whether we prefer to use bananas or dildos for correct condom use demonstrations.

Ah! Yes! All in a days work!