You’d Be Surprised How Many Sexual and Reproductive Health Issues Are Included in Bridgerton

“Bridgerton” is a 2020 Netflix show that follows the fictional Bridgerton siblings as they seek love in Regency-era London. The first season features plots relating to maternal mortality, consent, sex education, and much, much more. Laura D. Lindberg, Principal Research Scientist for the Guttmacher Institute, talks to us about the sexual and reproductive health issues that Bridgerton explores, and the ways in which sex education today may be just as hard to access as it was in 1813 London. 

Issues of maternal mortality arise a few times in Bridgerton; The Duke’s mother dies after giving birth to him, while Eloise expresses anxiety to Daphne when remembering their mother’s close brush with death after giving birth to their youngest sibling. Girls and women are seen carrying the emotional weight of pregnancy and childbirth, as both were a necessary social role at the time and yet carried a very large health risk.

Gender roles are also starkly explored, as gender constrained and shaped the paths that both men and women took in the show. Throughout the season, Eloise rejects her “coming out” as a debutante while proclaiming value in education and writing. Early marriage in Bridgerton underscores the ways in which women and girls could protect their virginity, while men and boys were encouraged to engage in sexual promiscuity. And, after the death of the family’s father, Anthony, the eldest son, takes over as head of the household and must make increasingly intense decisions for the Bridgerton family’s future-- which often puts him in conflict with his mother.

Daphne has grown up protected in her class-defined bubble and it has kept her far from any kind of comprehensive sex education. When it becomes clear she is uninformed, she seeks knowledge about sex and marriage from her lady’s maid. Daphne becomes increasingly angry with her mother as she realizes her mother sent her out into the world without important information about sex and marriage. The Duke takes advantage of the fact that Daphne does not understand the way sex works, depending on the withdrawal method to not get her pregnant. Ultimately, Daphne discovers the Duke’s insistence that he cannot have children is a philosophical one instead of a physiological one, leading Daphne to sexually assault the Duke and engage in reproductive coercion.

Bridgerton reminds us that self-managed abortion has been around for a very long time. Out of desperation, Marina unsuccessfully attempts to induce a self-managed abortion by mixing herbs into a tea. Thankfully, in the U.S. and around the world today, self-managed medication abortion is much safer and more effective. Still, it is a reminder that pregnant people want and deserve to have complete autonomy over decision-making about their bodies.

Today, while some things differ from Regency-era London, access to sex education is still shockingly lacking for young people around the U.S. There has been no expansion in how many teens receive formal sex education in 25 years. When teens do get sex ed, it’s often abstinence-only, without any information on birth control methods and usage. Adult’s un-comfortability with having these conversations sends a message to children in itself. This leaves teens today as in-the-dark as Daphne was.

Links from this episode

Guttmacher Institute on Facebook
Guttmacher Institute on Twitter
Has Sex Ed Even Changed From the ‘Bridgerton’ Era to Today?
COVID Won’t Stop Young People From Having Sex. Let’s Get Them the Health Care They Need
The Sexual and Reproductive Health of Adolescents and Young Adults During the COVID‐19 Pandemic
On the 20th Anniversary of Medication Abortion, Antiabortion Politicians Are Trying to Ban It
Pleasure and Sex Education: The Need for Broadening Both Content and Measurement

Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to RePROs Fight Back, a podcast where we explore all things reproductive health, rights and justice. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and I'll be helping you stay informed around issues like birth control, abortion, sex education and LGBTQ issues and much, much more-- giving you the tools you need to take action and fight back. Okay, let's dive in.

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Jennie: Welcome to this week's episode of RePROs Fight Back. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and my preferred pronouns are she/her. So right now, I am in the midst of trying to get our annual 50 state report card out that I do as another part of my job at the Population Institute. So I have been just like spending so much time going through and proofing all of the final drafts, making sure everything is perfect. And, uh, it's just been a lot of just really close work and I forgot how much I hate having to edit proofs from the designer. It's just so time-consuming and you, I feel like you never catch everything, but there's just so many various things that have to keep track of. So it has been kind of sucking up my life right now, but we're almost done. It should hopefully be coming out very, very soon. So that's exciting. It's always nice to get big projects out into the world. So I will be happy when that is done. Also bringing me joy this week is I ordered a ton of girl scout cookies, I saw a link going around online for a troop in New York City that is un-homed. So I made sure to buy a ton from them and send some to friends. And I am enjoying having girl scout cookies. It's just bringing me joy right now. Just, it's the little things… and let's see, what else exciting is happening? I haven't done any really exciting baking. I made muffins this past weekend, cherry almond oatmeal, and they were delightful. Nothing like challenging. I think I'm going to try to make croissants again. So when I made the pain au chocolat last time I did a couple that were savory. So I think this time I'm going tomake more savory, maybe like some ham and cheese and maybe some cheese and have them for lunch over the course of that next week and have some, maybe chocolate ones or maybe some almond filled ones. Cause those are my favorite as well-- the almond filled one. So we'll see about that. Maybe I can do that too. So that is my big plan. So like I said, nothing too exciting, you know, as we're approaching a year of being at home with the pandemic, I feel like everything is so routine now. There's nothing like new and exciting happening, but that's okay. But one of the things I did so last week, uh, our last episode, I told you all that about book recommendations and that I'm a big reader and that you could find me on good reads if you were interested. But I've also started a, um, a book and bakes related Instagram. So my, my personal Instagram is private. So you can't follow me there, but this one will have, if you want to keep up on what I'm reading or what I'm baking, and also includes pictures of the cats. Sometimes you can follow me @allbooksandbread on Instagram and it's public. So y'all are welcome to connect with me. If you want to learn more about what I'm reading and baking. And like I said, special guest appearances from the kitties every once in a while. And with that, we are going to turn to this week's episode. I hope everybody did their homework and watched Bridgerton because this is the very special Bridgerton. So I know this obviously goes without saying, but spoiler alert for the rest of the episode, make sure if you don't want, if you haven't watched Bridgerton and you don't want to know what happened, turn away. Now we are going to be talking about sexual and reproductive health and rights, and there's a lot to talk about. So I'm very excited to have with me, Laura, Lindberg at the Guttmacher Institute to join us and talk to us all about Bridgerton and SRHR issues that we saw pop up. So from here on out spoilers, spoilers, spoilers!

Jennie: Hi, Laura. Thank you so much for being here today.

Laura: Hi, Jennie happy Valentine’s day!

Jennie! Oh yeah! I’m forgetting mostly cause I can't believe it's mid-February.

Laura: 11 months of this seems unreal.

Jennie: Um, so I guess before we get started, do you want to do a real quick, introduce yourself, include your pronouns?

Laura: Sure. So, I'm Laura Lindberg, she/her/hers, and I'm a principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute based out of New York.

Jennie: So I am so excited for today's conversation since we're doing something a little bit different and we're talking about Bridgerton.

Laura: It's great. I have to tell you that… so two of the things that have kept me whole since March have been bingeing TV and my work, and it's really exciting to get to combine them here today.

Jennie: So, you know, one of the things I noticed watching Bridgerton was how many different sexual and reproductive health issues it touched on. It was kind of amazing.

Laura: It was. And my phone was blowing up with tweets and texts from friends and colleagues going, “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.” Um, I did watch it. I binged the whole show over Christmas week. My mother, my 81-year-old mother was with us. Um, and she definitely thought there was too much sex. I did not, I just want to clarify. Um, but we had some interesting conversations about some of the other issues as well.

Jennie: Yes. I definitely binged it right when it came out at Christmas and you know, clearly doing my homework for this conversation, I felt like, okay, maybe I'll have to rewatch it, you know, for work.

Laura: Yes. Well, so I started rewatching some this week. Um, it was, I found the show different to rewatch knowing some of what happened in the later episodes around consent. So my feelings about the Duke for example, had changed a bit, which was interesting.

Jennie: Yeah, I guess so then I should have mentioned this and I will definitely mention it in the introduction, but clearly we're talking about Bridgerton. So spoiler alerts people, if you haven't watched it yet, um, heads up. Yeah. So I guess to start, I know we're going to have like a fuller conversation around sex ed and kind of, uh, how that plays into all of this. But one of the first things that kind of comes up that really struck me was the instances of maternal mortality. Right? You see that the Duke's mother had died in childbirth. You hear Eloise talking about the scare around her mother almost dying. So, you know, they really illustrated maternal mortality. And that also struck me as well, seeing the Black woman died and the white woman did not, which kind of mirrors reality right now.

Laura: It does mirror our reality where Black women have higher rates of maternal mortality and morbidity than the U.S. but race is so complicated in the Bridgerton world. I think it's hard to unpack that to the characters. Race seems very neutral and the structural racism that undergirds racial differences in maternal mortality right now in the U.S. I don't think are part of Shonda Rhimes fictionalized world. So I'm not sure how to think about that, but I was very struck at the tension, the emotional weight that young women must've carried of having a child is the absolutely necessary social role for them. And yet it comes with this real risk. So you're damned if you do, and possibly damned if you don't --or the other way around, you're definitely damned if you don't and you're possibly damned if you do, and entering into adult womanhood with fear seems like a real weight for these young women.

Jennie: Yeah. And it was something you definitely saw, like Eloise really seem to be struggling with that. Like, she really seemed scared of the idea of like having, you know, a kid.

Laura: I love Eloise. She's so great. I haven't read any of the books. So this was new to me. And I don't know when we get the Eloise book, I hope she's out there fighting for women's rights to vote. I can count on Eloise to shake up the world a little.

Jennie: Yeah, I hope so.

Laura: Yes. Right. I think you definitely had with Eloise adolescent on the verge of adulthood, looking at it with fear in a variety of ways and the risk of getting sick and dying was part of that. She was also clearly struggling with her place in the world, right. Because the gender roles were so defined and you were really stuck in this bucket. And she really was struggling with, that's not the lot she wanted in life. Right? Like she wanted to go to school and continue her education.

Jennie: The gender roles just really stress another thing…in this area.

Laura: Yeah. So with Eloise, you got the sense that all the, she wouldn't say it this way, but that she did not think her uterus defined her and her role or what she wanted her life to be. But for other women and for the men, their gender absolutely constrains what paths they were going to take and how their lives were going to turn out. And in so many ways, I mean, one of the things that struck me about the gender roles is the very strong sexual double standard where women have to be pristine and virtuous and innocent and not have sex before marriage. Whereas the men are not just expected, but really encouraged to go out and “wet their wick” as Anthony said, which I think is a disgusting phrase, but there's this whole scene where he is upset with Collin. And he's like, “I should have taken you out to get sex. So you wouldn't be rushing to get married now because men should wait.” But for women early marriage is a way to protect virginity. And we know this historically, and we know this even now in the world that in settings and cultures, in which virginity is highly valued, it's important to marry girls off early. So that virginity is still in place. That's really constraining. And then, you know, another thing on the gender roles, I thought, I mean, from my position now, I, my heart was just breaking for Daphne's mom.

Jennie: Oh yeah, for sure.

Laura: Right. So her husband dies and now her son is in charge of her whole life. And he's the head of the household in a real way, not just to sit at the head of the table, the dining room kind of way. And having that control of her life just felt heartbreaking from today's vision point. Yeah.

Jennie: Yeah. There were a number of times that kind of the gender dynamics really struck out, but it was the relationship between Anthony and his mother. There were times you just wanted to throw things at him.

Laura: Yes, absolutely. Have you read the books? Is she German? I was trying to figure out what her accent is.

Jennie: I don't know. I don't think so. I read them a very long time ago. Like when maybe, when they first came out. Um, no, I don't remember her being German.

Laura: Yeah. I couldn't figure that out. And then, yeah, I don’t know if it was like trying the accent of like the time…

Jennie: Yeah.

Laura: …Perhaps, you know, what was fashionable at the time. I've been laughing at the number of women who told me that they couldn't tell the difference between the three brothers. Benedict and Colin. It just makes me giggle, but I had no problem. I thought Benedict looks like a Brady brother. Colin looks like some boy band thing, but Anthony's role really is the head of the house is very uncomfortable.

Jennie: Yeah. So I definitely struggled much more the first time I watched it, um, Colin was easier to tell, but the other two, like I struggled, like, who was who, uh, the second time was a little easier. Cause like you had a better feel for their personalities. And so it was a little bit easier to tell who was who, but yeah, they definitely look very like, yeah. You know, another place where you kind of saw this was okay, so gender roles, but then there was also the social dynamics and looking at, you know, class in the way it showed up in Bridgerton.

Laura: Right. And that really, you see playing out with Daphne. Daphne is the daughter of an upper-class family has been so protected in this bubble that she has no information about sex. So who does she learn it from? She learns it from the household staff. So first it's the head housekeeper or whatever her role is, the older woman in the house who says something to her about how her mother always told her, “you need strong seed to make a strong baby” or something like that. And the idea that there’s seed involved in this seems completely new and eye opening to Daphne. And she runs to her personal lady's maid and says, “tell me how babies are made. All the details. Don't be shy. I need to hear this.” But underlying that is her complete expectation that her lady's maid, because she was lower class, would of course know all the details. So there's just this expectation that depending on your place in the social strata, what information you have access to, I thought was very strong. The other place I really noticed social class was with the opera singer. So my son is an opera singer and I was very struck by what was common during that period. And really perhaps, even up to now with the idea that people in the arts are low morals, more sexual. Now, you don't become an opera singer because you have low morals. You become an opera singer because you have talent. Yet, once you were in that role, in that time period, apparently sex for money, whether directly paid for the act or more of a mistress kind of role is one way to help support yourself. So the opera singer who was having the affair with Anthony could do that because of her social class position and was encouraged to do that at the gentleman's club. For example.

Jennie: Yeah. You definitely saw that again, also, even with, um, the modiste right, like, uh, with Benedict having a relationship with her where, because of her class, it was more, I guess, acceptable for him to have a relationship with her versus one of the upper-class women where that would have been utterly unacceptable, and he would have had to marry her right away.

Laura: Right. I mean, it's very…the women you would sleep with, aren't the women you would marry and it's okay for you to sleep with those women because their reputations either don't really exist or don't matter to you, or because they're of a lower social class, their reputation is essentially already ruined, seem very troubling. I mean, the other funny thing about the modiste was this slight suggestion that being French with classier. Yes. So just being a British working woman, wouldn't be enough, wouldn't be adequate, but being French adds a level of panache to that.

Jennie: Yes. And you saw the impacts of, you know, when an upper-class woman lost her virtue, right. With the Marina storyline, where she was pregnant and what the steps they were going to to conceal that and get her married right away. And then the step she went to when it was fine.

Laura: Yes. But, so I'm also thinking about Downton Abbey, where, so in Downton Abbey, there are some storylines that involve the lower class women, either in the house or outside of the house getting pregnant. And the tragedy is for their life. It is not that being pregnant out of wedlock was okay for these women. It ruins their lives. It's just the upperclassmen don't feel any moral responsibility for it as they would for a woman in their social class. Yeah.

Jennie: Again, all of the dynamics are pretty good.

Laura: Yeah. Yeah. So Marina's really in many ways, such a sad story. And then in some ways you have to appreciate her backbone and the fight that she has instead of, you know, crawling under the bed and just crying, she gets up and does stuff. We can, we can question what she does, but I appreciated that she took action for herself.

Jennie: Yeah. For sure. You know, and that leads us into, you know, she tries to self-induce an abortion, which was very dangerous.

Laura: Very dangerous and very unsuccessful. Jennie: Yes.

Laura: Yeah. I mean, so I think the show should remind us that self-managed abortion has always been around historically and is still around and in fact exists again and again, in many Shonda Rhimes shows, she has brought us back to this issue, which I appreciate from, you know, Shonda has really lifted up a range of sexual reproductive health issues across her shows. And I watched Grey's Anatomy for 17 years religiously. So I think with Marina, the self-managed abortion is coming from desperation and she faces a lot of risk for it. Whereas motivations for self-managed abortion now in the U.S. I think are more mixed. There's a study by Abigail Akin from, um, University of Texas found that self-managed abortion increased during COVID, which is an increase disproportionately in places where access was more, less had become more limited. So that's ordering pills through the mail, which was how they, most self-managed abortion was going on. But what she was studying was ordering pills through the mail that mail delivery offered a means to access abortion when you couldn't get to the clinic, either because the clinic was closed, or you were concerned about COVID or something like that. So access is certainly one piece in the U.S., but I think autonomy is also playing a role now that women want to be in charge of their own bodies and in charge of their own decision-making, not having these laws and healthcare structures telling them how and what they can and cannot do. And when used properly, medication abortion, self-managed abortion in the U.S. is not dangerous, certainly not in the way it would have been a Marina.

Jennie: Yeah. I think that, that is a really important point now, I think is that self-managed abortion now is very different in the U.S. than what Marina faced.

Laura: For women who know how to access the appropriate and quality medication. Yeah. And, you know, the internet has changed the way women can get information and made it much more equitable and accessible, but we shouldn't leave out that again, the starkly, and up to the current time, we have conversations between women which give them information about self-managed abortion that are more home approaches to that, which may come with different levels of risk.

Jennie: So another thing that really came out watching Bridgerton was the impact of the lack of sex education; as somebody who went to Catholic school and had sex ed from a nun, I very much appreciated that conversation this brought up because it shows what some of the impacts are of not having information [can be].

Laura: Yes. I mean, I think the lack of information in sex ed instruction about sex and sexual wellbeing really plays out so much in Daphne's world. And I assume in Marina’s also, somehow the show sets her up as knowledgeable, but she got that knowledge through experience. I don't know that she went into that relationship with the soldier, knowing all of that. And if it feels heartbreaking, I think through today's lens, I mean, it was certainly heartbreaking for them, but heartbreaking through today's lens in part for me, because Daphne appears to have this close relationship with her mother, and the Bridgertons are held up as the picture-perfect family, where everyone cares about each other and cares for each other. And yet her mother let her down in this area because of her own discomfort and Daphne in the end becomes very angry at her mother for sending her out into the world without the information she needed. And I think she was right to be, I mean, for her mother to have that conversation, to try to have that conversation before her wedding and 99.9% of any information out of that. Jennie: Yeah. Saying “rain leads to flowers” is not exactly helpful information.

Laura: I mean, I was almost expecting some version of lay back and think of the queen, but that doesn't come through here. And in fact, I think that Bridgerton is very much that sexual pleasure is a good thing. So that kind of paradigm doesn't get played out here, but still her mother really withheld information that was so basic and put Daphne in a very difficult situation that she had the right to be angry about.

Jennie: And that had real ramifications for her relationship with the Duke.

Laura: It certainly did. And the Duke was this contradiction because sometimes he was trying to encourage her to learn more. And sometimes he certainly took advantage of what she didn't know. So when they're dating, I guess courting, when they are courting, there's a scene where he encourages her to go home and masturbate, which seems shockingly provocative in the context. Right. But the idea that she should learn about sexual pleasure, because it will make everything else better down the road was wonderful to share that piece of information. And in fact, she does, so good for her. So, you know, two thumbs up or whatever thing do you need to use for the sexual pleasure. I think that's great here. So again, big spoiler. We hope you all know this, but the Duke relies on withdrawal to not get her pregnant. He doesn't want her to get pregnant. He tells her he can't have a baby, which she assumes means that he physiologically is unable and incapable. And instead, it is that he doesn't want to. I think he's assuming that she doesn't understand what the withdrawal is doing, but I guess it remains an open question. If he thinks she understood that. I'm not sure. I, again, I watched with my mother, she didn't understand it. She certainly knows what withdrawal is, but she found this…she didn't understand the scenes, what he was doing, but I think he's counting on her lack of knowledge to get away with this for as long as he can. And then she goes to her maid and figures out that when he's doing that, it's keeping her from getting pregnant.

Jennie: Yeah. It really used to me came across as he was taking advantage of the fact that she didn't know.

Laura: Oh, absolutely. He was taking advantage of her. And I think this is where issues of consent because she lacked the knowledge. She couldn't give consent in this situation. She had no understanding of what she was consenting to explicitly or implicitly when he pulled out. And she doesn't say, “wait, why are you doing that? How would we get pregnant?” She can't say that because she doesn't know. I mean, there is the scene where she says like, “doesn't that hurt” when he has an orgasm and a Jackie lights and he laughs at that again, more of the positive, rigid idea around sexual pleasure, but she can't consent to what he's doing because she doesn't understand it.

Jennie: So when Daphne figures out what the Duke is doing, she then forces him to ejaculate insider her without his consent, or in her without his consent. So, then we have another consent issue that shows up in the show.

Laura: Yeah. So both Daphne and the Duke engage with each other in ways that are harmful and don't ask for consent. And this is really troubling in general sex without consent and birth control sabotage. [It is] highly problematic and here where you have a couple who are supposed to be in love with each other to fact that they can't talk with each other and that they lack the communication skills to build a basis for having consent is really troubling. And I think this helps us think about what good sex ed needs to include. We want sex ed that teaches about consent and we want sex ed that also encourages the development of communication skills, whether in an intimate relationship or even skills about communication and consent that can carry over to other parts of people's lives.

Jennie: Yeah. And it makes me think back again. So, like just some basic sex education could have answered a lot of these questions and helped them navigate the information of like what consent is, you know, the easiest one, like what exactly needs to happen for her to get pregnant? I mean, the good news is that things are completely different now, right?

Laura: Oh right, Sure. Absolutely. At least, you know, we don't ask our teenagers to wear their hair like that and that, and the hair was beautiful, and the gowns are beautiful and the jewelry was beautiful. Beautiful. The lack of sex ed was pretty ugly. And in today's day and age, while some things have changed, I actually think that we may look back at our current time as an opportunity for its own period drama. We may see Shonda Rhimes’ daughter making a show about today's young people and abstinence only instruction and a lack of access to contraception. In my own research, I count things for a living. Um, and mostly I count things around sexual and reproductive health. So the things that I study are trends in who receives sex education and what's taught in schools and I've been doing this for a long time. So there's been no expansion of how many teens receive formal sex ed in 25 years in the U.S.

Jennie: That is wild, I did not know that.

Laura: It is wild and it is troubling. Now I do think the quality of that sex ed instruction may have improved, but the fact that we have not increased the number of teens getting formal sex ed in more than two decades is really a failure in our policies and systems in meeting the needs of young people. And when teens do get sex ed, many of them are getting focused instruction and messaging around not having sex until marriage. What they're not getting is information about using birth control, where to get birth control, how to use it correctly and properly. And that leaves young people really without the skills and information they need today, just in the same way that Daphne didn't have the skills and information she needs. And in our society right now, at least among adults, there is still a discomfort around young people's sex and sexuality that keeps them from providing information. I think in the same way that we saw with Daphne's mother-- it's adult’s discomfort.

Jennie: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, I I've definitely talked about this before, but the sex ed that I got was definitely, I would say of the Mean Girls variety, right? The like you'll have sex, you'll get pregnant, you'll get this horrible disease and you'll die. Like it was definitely not a helpful in any sort of going forward, sexually helpful conversation. There was definitely no talk about birth control. And if there was, it was, it doesn't work, you know, good old Catholic church teaching really great things that really took a long time to unlearn. And you know, some of that shame and stigma is really hard to shake.

Laura: For sure. And it's both, what's taught, I think, to reduce the shame and stigma. In fact, it's built into some of these programs, uh, you're like a chewed-up piece of gum metaphors. It's literally built into the program or there's shame and stigma in exactly what is thought and what people don't talk about. So parents may feel uncomfortable about talking about sex with their kids and they figure, well, I'm uncomfortable. So I'll just skip it. But not having that talk is sending information.

Jennie: Yeah. It's not information neutral.

Laura: And kids pick that up and know that they didn't have these conversations and realize it must be because about being uncomfortable and being it being shameful, and it being stigmatized, and then carry that forward. You know, while I think our schools can be doing a much better job, I think there's no, there's no one single actor who is responsible for this. There's no single solution. We need an ecosystem of sex, education and information. That's provided by schools, by parents, by healthcare providers. And they need to be working together and not passing the buck to the other person. I don't need to do it at home because the school is going to do it. The doctor's saying, this really isn't my thing. I'm going to let the parent do it-- wrong. Everyone needs to be stepping up to give kids information, to give young people the information they need. And I think part of that stepping up, isn't just about individual discomfort or that you can address individual discomfort by building and systems that support and train the adults in these roles. So we can have policies that support good sex ed on the books, but there is trust this slippery slope of not following the policies as you go from the state policy that the school district to the school, to the classroom on a particular day and in the end, it's what that teacher does in the classroom on the particular day, that's going to matter. And some teachers are going to teach about contraception. Even if the school says it's not supposed to happen because they think it's important. And some teachers aren't going to teach about it because it makes them uncomfortable or they don't value it. And that's a problem when one of my sons took middle school, health education, which was supposed to include a sex ed component. He missed out on a lot. So, here's what happened. I live in New Jersey, which has a fairly progressive set of state policies around sex education, which include teaching about contraception. So, my son should have gotten contraception instruction and his, his health education class. Well, the teacher came up with the curriculum that would teach contraception in a single lesson, pushed it to the end of the semester and called in sick that day. My son learned a lot about whole wheat bread and his middle school health education class, and nothing about contraception, but that's not what the law says. That's what the reality was in the classroom. So, we need teacher training that supports teachers in getting the information they need and being comfortable with doing this and the same way we need to be holding healthcare providers accountable and giving them the training they need. You would think doctors should be fine with this, but they're not. And that is really a missed opportunity for bringing another educated and caring adult into young people's lives to support them in getting information and asking hard questions.

Jennie: One good thing of information that Daphne's did get that you did touch on was pleasure because that is one of those things that is so often just not involved, right? Like it's so focused on either abstinence or health implications that so often we forget to talk about people have sex because it's fun. Laura: Yes. And sex ed really leaves pleasure out far too often. So I have a paper I wrote last year with Leslie Candor at Rutgers, where we really call out the need for including pleasure in sex education and showcase how the guidelines in Europe for what should be taught in sex ed included much more than here in the U.S. --we just like to overlook that part and how leaving out the idea that you may want to have sex, because it can be pleasurable makes it really very impossible to consent to sex. If you don't understand what you're agreeing to, how can you do it? How would you know, if you were treated poorly, if you didn't have the expectation that this should be something that you would enjoy? And when we don't hold up, particularly for young women that their pleasure counts, then they put themselves in a situation where being treated poorly by a partner is just considered the norm.

Jennie: I think right now another struggle is sex ed and information that young people are getting during COVID like everything. Is there distance learning? There's just, I'm assuming much harder to get access to some of this info.

Laura: Well, so access is a funny word here because…

Jennie: I realize access was not the right word.

Laura:…Yeah. I mean, so if we think about schooling shifting to online during COVID, we don't have the documentation yet, but I think it's completely reasonable to say that as schools have shifted online and are reducing the number of hours of zoom classes, that their sex education curriculum hasn’t been the major priority and that that can is just getting kicked down the road and may never be addressed. So when schools reopened, are they going to make up the missed sex ed curriculum? I doubt it. So you may have a whole cohort who misses that class and misses that information. And yet this is such a missed opportunity for schools, because in fact, there's some wonderful online resources that have been developed to teach sex education such as the Amaze videos. Those are great. And they could and should be incorporated into online learning. I mean, this is an opportunity to pivot and expand how instruction is happening. Not just walk away from it. But I think realistically schools are so overwhelmed that just isn't happening much. But the other thing is that young people certainly know how to go on the internet and look up information. However, you can't search for answers to questions you don't even know to ask. So imagine if Daphne had had an iPhone, what would she have started looking up before she married the Duke? She doesn't know what the questions are. So I don't think that online resources are the simple answer for getting young people's sex education information. They can't do it alone there, but it can be a resource.

Jennie: So we always like to wrap up with a, a question of what can our audience do. So what steps can our audience take to make sure that young people are getting access to the best information or anything kind of related to this topic? Because we did talk about a lot.

Laura: Yeah. Okay. So if you're a parent, you can hold yourself and your healthcare providers and your school accountable. So what does that mean? That means having conversations that may not feel comfortable, expanding your skills so you do feel comfortable recognizing that conversations with your kids and teens about sex. It's not a single conversation. The “we'll do it in the car while you're driving somewhere.” I mean, I hear that all the time, fine, but not in one car ride. It's not one conversation. So hold yourself accountable for talking to your kid, as they age, about developmentally appropriate topics and making yourself an adult they can trust with that, hold their doctors accountable. And in particular, when I want to hold up here is leaving your teen with time alone with their healthcare provider. That time alone is critical to them. Being able to ask questions about things that makes them uncomfortable, if they want to know more about, and maybe don't want you to be included in that. And we know from a lot of national data that far too often, they don't get that time along with their health care provider. And then finally school systems are an opportunity to advocate. I mean, it's, in some ways, it's good that decisions sex ed are getting implemented in your local community. So your local school board, your local principal, your kid's classroom, teacher, has the ability to make their sex ed better and hold them accountable for that. If you don't have a young person at home, you can still be advocating for better policies around sex education, whether at the federal or state level, and even in your own town, the voices need to speak up that comprehensive sex education would provide medically accurate information is a human right for our young people and need to drown out what are actually relatively few voices who are against this. When we poll people about sex education, no matter their political party, they support sex education for young people, the majority. So we need to make that majority voice loud and strong.

Jennie: Well, Laura, thank you so much for being here. It was wonderful to get to talk to you.

Laura: It was really fun to talk to you and we'll have to keep waiting for season two. I know in the time I'm seriously bingeing an Australian show called Offspring, just completely different, but has lots of sexual pleasure. And I highly recommend.

Jennie: Oh, I'll have to check it out.

Laura: Yes. Well, thank you. Thank you, Jennie.

Jennie: Okay. Everybody. I hope you enjoyed our conversation about Bridgerton. If you liked it, maybe we'll do something like this again. I'm sure there are plenty of other shows that have sexual and reproductive health issues that we should talk about. So if you have ones that you would love to see us bring somebody on and talk about, let me know.

Jennie: Thanks for listening everyone. And we'll see you on our next episode of RePROS Fight Back. For more information, including show notes from this episode and previous episodes, please visit our website at reprosfightback.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter at RePROS Fight Back, or on Instagram at reprosfb. If you like our show, please help others find it by sharing it with your friends and subscribing, rating and reviewing us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.

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