The Power of Sex Positive Sex Education

Ruby Rare is a pink-haired sex educator on a mission to get people talking more confidently and inclusively about sex. She’s curious to have the conversations many shy away from, and her work is influenced by her experiences as a bisexual, non-monogamous, dual-heritage woman.

Ruby is also a body positive champion. In 2018 she co-founded Body Love Sketch Club, a body positive life drawing class where everyone is invited to pose (nude or clothed) as well as draw, as a way of exploring our relationships with our bodies and celebrating nudity in a non-sexual setting. She discusses body positivity on social media, and in 2019 was part of @BBCBodyPositive’s body positive Campaign.

I’ve been teaching relationship and sex education (RSE) for over 5 years. I was drawn to it because of my own terrible experiences of sex ed as a teenager. The vast majority of us were denied inclusive, informative, and positive sex education, and I wanted to do something about that.

We’ve come a long way: RSE is now a mandatory subject in schools across England and Wales, and there’s so much information we can access online. And yet we still have a long way to go. The recently reformed RSE curriculum still has no mention of pleasure, which in my professional opinion is bloody ridiculous, and while online spaces can be a wonderful place to learn about and celebrate sexuality, there’s also a huge amount of online censorship and misinformation to contend with.

For me, it’s about educating with a sex positive mindset. Traditional RSE is focused on limiting risk and telling you what not to do - which feeds into sexual shame. Sex positive sex ed is about countering. This involves lots of fun chats about pleasure, but it’s just as much about fighting for better education and access to services for all. There’s still so much inequality and injustice surrounding sex and pleasure.

You don’t need to have a 100% positive relationship with sex and your body in order to be sex positive (does anyone?). It’s about recognizing the challenges and feeling confident to ask for support to face them. And in a world that still shames many of our sexual experiences, embracing sex positivity doesn’t happen overnight – it’s a gradual process.

But sometimes sex positivity can feel counter-productive, pushing people into feeling they need to be the ‘most’ sexually confident, which just isn’t true. Sex positivity is about unpacking shame and discovering your sexuality at your own pace - there’s no rulebook here, it’s all about what feels right for you. If that means buying every toy imaginable and diving giddily into sexual adventures - go for it! But exploring your pleasure at a more gradual pace or choosing not to connect to it at all if that’s what’s right for you, is equally as valid.

Sex toys can be a wonderful way of taking ownership of your pleasure and expanding your solo and partnered play, and I love that they’re becoming more normalized and celebrated.

Everybody is different, so it’s great that there’s such a wide range of products for us to choose from. But this abundance of choice can make it tricky to find the right toy for you.

A toy can be a big investment, so before buying it’s worth identifying the kind of sensation you’re looking for. Do you want something that mimics the way you enjoy being touched (in which case, what does that feel like?), or maybe you’re looking to experience something totally new? Answering these questions will give you lots of information about the kind of toy you’re after, which I always find useful to have before going into a shop or browsing online, to avoid that overwhelmed ‘kid in a candy shop’ feeling.

Once you have your toy, the real fun can begin! Remember, sex toys are just tools; it takes a bit of creative thinking to really get the most out of them. Toys can be a wonderful way to explore sex with more curiosity, to open up new horizons of what sex can be, and to take agency over your pleasure.

Your relationship to sex has the potential to impact your whole life, and it’s worth putting the time in to learn and explore. Remember that you are worthy of sexual pleasure, and by actively taking on more positive messages, sex can become a more nourishing and exciting component of your life. Enjoy!