Gendered expectations for sexuality begin at a young age, with girls far more likely to associate sex with pain, Rutgers study reveals
Ninth grade. Second period. First sex ed seminar. "Any questions?" the teacher asks.
Sexual education classes don't always start this way. But when they do, as Rutgers graduate student Grace M. Wetzel reports in a study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, student answers offer insights into the uncertainties, anxieties and fears young people - especially girls - have about sex.
"Young people recognize a gap between sex education as taught in the classroom and the reality of their sexual experiences," said Wetzel, who is studying social psychology. "Comprehensive sex education should consider the perspectives of its target population."
To measure youth's sexual uncertainties, Wetzel and Diana T. Sanchez, chair of the Department of Psychology at Rutgers, assessed the sex education questions of 1,335 middle and high school students in three New York counties: Westchester, Rockland and Suffolk. Questionnaires were anonymously administered at the beginning of the programs, which were taught in person by Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic educators.
Respondents were racially diverse and between the ages of 10 and 21, with 75 percent of participants between 15 and 17 years old.
Using content analysis, Wetzel and Sanchez identified 49 recurring themes in response to the prompt, "What's something you've heard about sex but are unsure if it's true?" Answers were organized into 16 categories, including "condoms," "birth control," "sex negativity" and "consent."
Most responses centered around pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections and how to prevent these outcomes, the researchers found.
But other questions highlighted topics that aren't always covered with nuance and transparency, if at all, in sex education courses, Wetzel said. These included "withdrawal" (otherwise known as the pull-out method), the "effectiveness of condoms and other contraception," and "anal and oral sex."
What's more, when the researchers coded the responses by gender, they found a troubling pattern: girls were far more likely to associate sex with pain, while boys were more likely to link it with pleasure.
"By showing that girls have more questions about pain, and boys are more likely to talk about pleasure, we've demonstrated that a gender difference in expectations for sexuality starts at a really young age," said Wetzel. "It's important to combat this with sex education that includes discussions about women's pleasure specifically."
Wetzel is no stranger to asking questions about copulation. During a TEDx talk she gave as a junior at St. Lawrence University in 2018, she discussed her "problem" with sex. Her concern?
"We live in a sexual world that revolves around the pleasure of the penis," she said.
A video of that talk has been viewed nearly 8 million times on YouTube. Today, she advocates for pleasure equity on an educational Instagram page with more than 22,000 followers.
Wetzel hopes that interest in the topic, coupled with these data, will propel the conversation into unfamiliar territory.
"Very early in the sex education discourse, perhaps before participants are even having sex, girls are already expecting that sex is going to be painful," she said. "By quantifying these concerns, we can push for changes in how sexuality is taught and discussed."
