Every year, juniors watch Al Vernacchio’s TED Talk, “Sex needs a new metaphor. Here’s one…” The Winged Post reached out to Vernaccio to get his take on sex, sexuality, and sex education.

Winged Post: What inspired you to select Pizza as a metaphor [in your talk]?

Al Vernacchio: I knew that, in selecting a new metaphor, I wanted something that people could easily understand. I wanted something that most people had a positive association with and I wanted something that was much more about choice and much less about rules than baseball was. I don’t actually remember the moment that I realized that pizza was what I was looking for, but it was way back in the early 1990s. I know that once I hit on it that I thought “oh”, and I have been using it ever since.

WP: Your website says that you are a sex educator. What is the most common misconception that you hear from teenagers about sex?

AV: I think the most common misconception is that somehow there is a right or a proper or expected way that it is suppose to happen. People often think about external criteria when their thinking about doing sex rather than understanding that every sexual encounter is created by the people right there and then who are involved in it and that is much healthier and much more satisfying for people when they forget about external expectations and they focus more on “What do we want in this moment together?”. I think once that you allow people to make those decisions for themselves you can get to avoid a lot of the gender stereotypes about sex and a lot of the pressures about sex because it really is about people looking at this moment right here right now and what is right for us. I think once we can help people see that, we can really help develop healthier sexuality rather than continuing a lot of unhealthy sexuality we see in society.

WP: Sex education has changed in recent decades. What was sex ed like for your generation?

AV: It was still pretty varied even back in my day, although it was pretty much limited to (I call it the) three P’s, like plumbing, which talk about body parts and how they all fit, temporals, puberty and how you’re going through special changes, but never really specified anything about that and problems. Here is all the diseases you can get, here are all the ways people can get pregnant and so it was very much based around those three things and not really based on a sense of knowing your own values and making your own deliberate decisions. I went to Catholic School when I was younger and so there was a lot of shame and a lot of sense that sex was something that was kind of dirty, and that it was not dirty only in specific ways. That’s a really hard message when you’re a teenager, because those ways that they are saying are not open to you, so you feel conflicted.

WP: When you talk to students, how do you overcome the awkwardness surrounding sex education?

The first thing is to acknowledge the awkwardness and give people the permission to feel whatever they are feeling, but then to help people understand that a lot of the awkwardness comes from the assumption that our sexuality is somehow dirty, shameful, or dangerous. I then ask people to consider the possibility that our sexuality is a very positive force rather than a negative one. Once you realize that sexuality is natural and normal, and that it is actually a force for good in the universe rather than a wild force that has to be controlled, people’s anxiety and awkwardness begin to drop because they’ve been given permission that there is not something wrong with you if you want to explore sex. But I also think you have to acknowledge that people often do feel awkward, which is definitely ok, it helps us figure out why they feel awkward. However, they have to make their own choice whether they want to learn about this or not.

AV: Where do we need to go from here in the future of sex education in this country?

My dream is that we can have comprehensive sexuality education, which I want in every school from nursery to 12th grade in the country. We are a long way from that, but the more the country can introduce medically accurate, fact based, value driven, comprehensive sexuality education into our schools, the better we are going to be in helping not only curve the negatives, but also promote a lot of the positive things like respect and communication that we all agree is essential. I also say that part of my dream is that there will be more people like me, who value healthy sexuality in schools, so it’s not just the biology teachers teaching it, or the health teacher. All of whom might be very good teachers, but they do not have specific training to do the specific work. I think we are moving in that direction, we will probably pass the stage that abstinence is beyond education, and moving towards the positive direction.

WP: What resources would you recommend to students who want to educate themselves about sex?

AV: One is website that is scarleteen.com out of Washington State, and another is a website sextc. Both of those are written by young people, for young people. They are medically accurate and respectful of people’s’ values. They also look healthy sexuality as a form of social justice, which is the way I look at it, more fair and more loving. They do a very good job conveying that message.