The Power in Pleasure: Practical Implementation of Pleasure in Sex Education Classrooms

Abstract

Pleasure is an important aspect of healthy sexual development. Moreover, public health researchers and feminist scholars suggest that pleasure-inclusive sex education is effective for reducing pregnancy and rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections and may create a more inclusive classroom environment for underserved individuals. Although scholars have called for the integration of pleasure into sexual health education, these theoretical suggestions have rarely translated into classroom practices. Educators often face myriad challenges in including positive messages about pleasure in sex education curricula. Resources are needed to make the inclusion of pleasure easier for educators. This article helps address this gap in two ways. The first part offers a new, holistic definition of pleasure, exposes deficits in current classroom practices, and explores how including pleasure may address many axes of inequality and enhance classroom experiences for diverse adolescents. The second part applies this understanding of pleasure to offer guidance for performing a curriculum analysis of pleasure deficits and then provides clear recommendations for how educators can fill those deficits by incorporating pleasure into their existing curricula. The analyses and resources presented here will, first, help educators better address the sexual health needs of students and, second, provide feminist academics with a new definition and theoretical approach to pleasure.