Sunday School: Salutations

“Hypothetically speaking,” I asked my friends, “if I were a stranger on the internet with a newly-minted sex column, what would be the optimum content to inspire you to send me your potentially embarrassing sex questions?”

Since most of my friends are smartasses, their answers to this question were a lot less helpful than I had hoped. Since I am my own worst critic, my own answer was “Use shorter sentences than that one, ace. Who do you think you are, William Faulkner?”

My internal monologue: also kind of a smartass.

The most instructive answer I got was “your first column must contain at least two (2) hymen jokes.” However, this answer is mostly useful because it is pretty bad advice, at least as regards the goal of this column and this blog. I mean, not to get all RAWR HETEROSEXISM on my friend (who was, of course, making a joke), but one of the goals I have for Sunday School in the first place is to tear down the dominant narrative about sex. Raise your hands, dear readers: did your first sexual experience involve hymen rupture?

Yeah, mine didn’t, either.

There is a lot of messaging out there that seeks to normalize one kind of sexual experience and pathologize all others, and that is really, really frustrating. Because some of us are queer. Some of us are trans. Some of us are poly. Some of us are into kink. And navigating those parts of our identities is difficult as shit when the cultures we live in don’t acknowledge that we exist. Generally, social justice types call this “erasure,” but it’s impossible to erase something — or someone — that was never written down in the first place.

If you have a question that is too weird to bring to your friends, or a query that you’re embarrassed to ask Google, you shouldn’t feel weird or embarrassed. Because the fact that you feel like you can’t ask the question doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It means that your culture has failed you in a pretty meaningful way.

So what I want to do here, with your assistance, is to challenge our omission from that culture. I want to give all of us a safe space to talk about our experiences and share our resources with each other. And I want to do everything I can to make sure that as many people as possible are having healthy, responsible, totally awesome sex.

I look forward to reading your questions, and expect to learn a lot in answering them. As soon as we get the kinks worked out here, I’m sure it’s going to be a great, great show!

If you would like to submit a question to Sunday School, please use our contact form. We won’t publish your real name (unless you want us to), and creative pseudonyms get bonus points!

Featured image by flickr user alangrlane, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.