Knot In Time

..By Olivia Bee (& of Rookie Mag fame). I have a soft spot for Olivia’s work. Like everyone else i’m completely amazed at her portfolio for her silly age of 17. Though it is also quite obvious that her dream-like documentation of adolescence could only be taken through the eyes of someone at that age, and lend themselves almost too perfectly to everything the world has to say ever about teenagers and sex ed. These photos are a set used in an article for the NY Times “Teaching Good Sex”. 

“The latter has been called “disaster prevention” education by sex educators who wish they could teach more; a dramatic example of the former comes in a video called “No Second Chances,” which has been used in abstinence-only courses. In it, a student asks a school nurse, “What if I want to have sex before I get married?” To which the nurse replies, “Well, I guess you’ll just have to be prepared to die.”

“If kids are starting to use their bodies sexually, they should know about their potentialities,” Vernacchio told me later. “It’s O.K. that boys ejaculate, that’s totally normalized” — wet dreams have been standard fare for middle-school health class for decades — “but girls, gross! Girls will think they’re peeing themselves, and it’s really shameful.”