So as you know I have bishUK.com, which I hope (eventually) to be a really good website for young people to learn about everything to do with sex and relationships. That is free for young people to access and always will be. But I don’t earn any money from it

So I was thinking today about offering a subscription package at bishtraining.com for sex educators/sexual health workers/youth workers/teachers. This would be on-going and something that I would add to each week and would include:

• most of my blog posts from bishUK.com in A4 pdf downloadable and printable form.
• all my leaflets in a downloadable and printable form
• activity ideas and session plans to accompany which would mirror the content on bishUK.com Safer Sex, Bodies, Relationships, About You, Porn (yes porn), Doing It, Not Doing It and Doing Stuff, and Rights and Wrongs (to start with there would be at least 25 / 30 activities in total)
• powerpoint slides with moveable images, so that a facilitator could move labels around (eg for anatomy lessons, contraception slides etc)
• instructional videos that can be played to young people (downloadable) (currently I have 6 videos but plan to make one per month) as part of a lesson to introduce a topic
• topical blog posts turned into pdfs with discussion ideas for use  (there would be an email alert service for this)
• access to email support for lesson ideas etc

This would be a yearly subscription and I’m thinking of a price around £50. This would give the user a password to download and a licence to use the resources in their workplace.

So feedback would be welcome. Would you be interested in buying this? Do you think it would be popular? Would at least 500 people pay £50 per year for this?

Comments here or @bishtraining on twitter would be fantastic.

Many thanks

Justin

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Sex Infections and Safer Sex Leaflet. £7.50 per 50 inc p&p

In my humble opinion, a lesson which is entirely about STIs is a sex negative lesson. Even if it’s a really interactive lesson which involves mixing fluids or trying to work out how many millions of people you have effectively had sex with after having sex with just one person, if it’s just about STIs it’s sex negative and will only have a limited effect.

Giving young people lots of information about STIs, prevalence, names, causes, symptoms, long term effects, damage, tests, treatments won’t work by itself.  It may convince some young people, who weren’t ready for sex yet, that sex generally is a bad idea. However in my experience, young people who are about to or have already started having sex will just switch off. If they are feel ready to have sex, they are going to have sex and they will just ignore information which they think is trying to put them off. They may think ‘I’ll wear a condom’ but they may also think ‘sod it, I’ll just get a chlamydia test and some anti-biotics.’

This is especially true if we use images of diseased genitals (something the kids are now referring to as blue waffle, I wouldn’t image search that if I were you) to try and scare people. In addition to portraying an inaccurate picture of STIs (symptoms are usually unrecognisable or absent) they stigmatise STIs and the people that have them, they portray people with STIs as dirty but also they ‘other’ STIs. They are very very common, sometimes shit happens, we can all get them.

So how I would go about teaching a lesson about STIs is to give a brief overview about the key messages (see the leaflet above), either through a quiz or a brief talk. But then I would introduce an activity which looks at how to make sex safer (see the back of the leaflet above). This makes the information relevant to young people because it reflects the experience of many young people who want to know how to have enjoyable safer sex.

I give young people in small groups a pack of sexy behaviours: sexy things you can do with someone else (or I get them to brainstorm their own sexy behaviours) and I ask them to put them in order of safety. No or low risk, some risk or high risk (I also explain that this in terms of safety from STIs rather than whether you can get in trouble doing it!). They have a conversation with each other about what they see as safe, which in itself is giving them the language confidence to negotiate this in relationships.

We run through what is in the various piles and it’s a good opportunity to clarify things, to provide a little bit more info on STIs. Processing this part of the activity we want the key message to be that penetrative sex can be made safer by using condoms, but also that non-penetrative sex can be super hot but also super safe.

How To Be An Amazing Lover Without Having Sex. £7.50 per 50 inc p&p

Then I ask the young people to sort them out into 4 new piles. 1st base, 2nd base, 3rd base and 4th base. Bases are how far people might go sexually at different stages of a relationship. 1st base might be a first date, 4th base might be when you trust each other loads and know each others middle names. See my bishUK post with a poll about this here

To process this I ask whether there is any link between what was in their risk piles and what is in their base piles. Usually the higher risk activities are also the ones which go on 4th base. So not only are condoms and non-penetrative sex methods of having safer sex, but also the ability to negotiate risks and to communicate within the context of a mutually trusting and intimate relationship.

See? Sex positive is not that scary.

The post Ideas on Sex-Positive Ways to Teach STIs appeared first on Bish Training - Sex & Relationships Education.

This is called having a sex-positive approach and when I was trained and schooled as a sex educator 10 years ago I was taught that we don’t just teach about STIs and unwanted pregnancy but that we should also teach about the good stuff and how to get it. How to ask for and how to have great sex within trusting intimate relationships.

I set bishUK.com up and designed and printed my own leaflets because young people were asking me this stuff all the time: particularly young men. They wanted to be good at sex as well as staying safe and there’s only so many times you can draw the clitoris on the back of a condom bag before you get bored, or your pen runs out.

However as a marketing strategy it sucks. People are wary of these resources. Many of my emails bounce because they have sexual references in them, many sexual health professionals can’t even access this website let alone bishUK.com.

I was going to go into partnership over the summer with an organisation that I thought were very sex positive. This was massive for me as I thought that the work I was doing was going to finally get a wider audience. Unfortunately this work got cancelled because their funders thought it might upset the Daily Mail, which to be frank has been a massive kick in the bollocks.

Everyone is still scared of the Daily Mail and the right wing press, I can understand that. I was on the front cover of the Uxbridge Gazette once with the headline ‘Sex Tips for 7 Year Olds’ (which was rubbish of course) after a conference I ran about working with young men. If the Iraq war hadn’t started that day, it would have made it to the Evening Standard too. I know what it’s like, it sucks.

But sex education is always going to be controversial. Sub-editors are always going to bend the truth to get a cracking headline. There are always going to be out of context quotes and, believe me, there’s no money in sex-positive sex ed. But if we don’t do things because we are scared of what might get mis-reported or scared of controversy then we may as well just pack it in. Seriously. Sex-positive sex ed might be controversial, but it’s the only kind of sex ed that works.

Rant over. Comments? Thoughts?

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