Learning to be Nude

Children who are taught proper anatomy of their sex organs are more likely to report being sexually assaulted.

Using anatomical terminology helps people who are being sexually assaulted or abused explain what is happening to them, especially younger kids. Not everyone will know what euphemism your family uses to refer to genitals. If you teach your young daughter to call her vulva her "cookie" and she tells her teacher that a member of her family "touches her cookie", it muddies the waters immensely. Give children the tools to advocate for themselves and speak up when they are being abused.

Children go through puberty as young as nine. The more they know about their bodies, how they work, and what to expect, the less adults we will have who don't know what is normal for them.

Proper sexual education and access to safe sex practices is proven to reduce teenage pregnancy.

Sex education isn't just about how babies are made. Sex education is about anatomy and puberty and what is normal for your body. It's about what is healthy and what is not. It's about understanding if your body is functioning normally or if you need to see a doctor. Educating children on this will literally only help them.

The girl is rightly anonymous, but her case has become the 'Resusci Anne' of the safeguarding world, where one girls unfortunately story can hopefully go on to save others.

In short, the girl told one of her teachers that her "uncle touched my cookie", to which the teacher dismissed the story as nothing to be concerned about, because they assumed the girl was talking about an actual cookie.

The girl tried again some time later reporting that her uncle "licked my cookie" and how she felt scared around him. Again, the teacher dismissed her story because she thought the girl was making a big deal out of nothing.

It wasn't until the girls mother made an off hand comment about her "coochie" (a slang term for a vulva), that anyone began to put the pieces together. I hope you have worked out the real issue and story here; it seems the girls mother taught her daughter that her genitals were called her "coochie", but as a lot of young children do the girl didn't pronounce it right or misheard it, so called it her "cookie" instead. The mother saw no issue with that because she would know what her daughter was really refering to.

The girl's teachers, did not.

And so, this girl ended up being sexually abused by her uncle, which is bad enough in it's own right, but because the girl wasn't taught the right words two things then happened:

The girl was abused for longer, and severity of the abuse increased over time.

The girl learned that if she was in danger, were she to tell her teachers about her situation she would be ignored.

Just focus on that for a moment. You're a young girl and someone who is supposed to be taking care of you starts harming you, and when you look for help from another adult who is supposed to taking care of you, they think you are making it up.

I had to turn this off, but it's something that allows Windows and anyone using your device to generate text/images.

my mom is a professional film critic. when i was a kid, she'd often take me with her to film festivals and let me see whichever films i was interested in with her. now, the thing you've gotta understand about film festivals is that pretty much all the films being shown there have not seen any kind of wide release yet; maybe they've played at a few other festivals, maybe this is the first-ever public showing. iirc many of the films didn't even have official ratings yet

which is all to say: my mom took little ~10 year old me to watch films that she knew basically nothing about. she had a 1-2 sentence description of the film from the festival guide. sometimes she'd have a press kit with more info. so she may know that a film is about, say, a serial killer, but be unsure how explicit the violence would be

so when we were walking into movies together and she wasn't sure how heavy/dark/violent/sexual it was gonna be, she'd tell me beforehand "hey, this film might end up having stuff in it that makes you uncomfortable. i need to stay through the whole film because it's my job, so if you get scared, your job is to decide if you can keep watching and go out to the lobby if you can't. get some popcorn and i'll find you after the movie is over."

out of all the countless screenings i watched with her, i only remember walking out of one (a movie about a school shooting). i hit a point where i realized "oh, i'm not feeling fun-scared anymore, i'm feeling Real Scared", so i quietly left. one of my mom's friends saw me in the lobby and asked where my mom was, and i explained what happened, and she chatted with me for a while. i got some popcorn. i checked out the arcade games in the corner. by the time the movie was over, i was feeling fine, and now as an adult i don't even remember what the exact moment was that freaked me out so bad i had to leave

similarly, starting several years before that, i remember a few nights where i was having trouble falling asleep and feeling pretty restless, so i'd go out to the living room and ask my parents if i could watch whatever tv show/movie they were watching with them. and they'd say "yep, you can, but this our time to pick what's on the tv, so if you don't like what we're watching you can go back to your bedroom and read until you're sleepy". there were a handful of times when i decided that the thing they were watching was too scary, so i left. the rest of the time, i stayed, and it ended up being an interesting exposure to tv shows and movies i wouldn't have otherwise seen

the points i'm drawing to here are:

exposing kids to media that's "too mature" for them is Good For Them, Actually. adults have a tendency to way underestimate how much kids can handle! i watched mulholland drive when i was like 9! my favorite cartoon in elementary school was futurama!

teaching kids how to judge for themselves when they need to stop engaging with a media experience does a much better job at setting them up to have a healthy relationship with media than just banning them from anything deemed Too Mature For Kids

People have such strange reactions to nakedness - and one of my least favorite is the concept that by revealing your body, you are somehow ‘giving too much away’ or ‘not leaving enough to the imagination’. Along with those phrases comes the implication that by letting others see your body, you lose some of your mystery, and thereby some of your allure.

To those of you who feel that way, I ask this:

What have you learned about me by seeing me naked?

If you think about it, you’ll realize that there are very few substantial answers to that particular question. Seeing my naked body may tell you things like how much I moisturize (a lot), or how much time I spend in the sun (none), or whether I’m a natural redhead (obviously)… but that’s just about where it stops. 

And if that, my friends, is as far as you’ve let your imagination wander when it comes to other human beings, I would venture that you don’t have much imagination at all.

Looking at a naked body can’t tell you a person’s dreams or motivations. It can’t tell you what someone is like when they’re in love. It can’t tell you about their fears, or their heartbreak, or their loneliness. It can’t tell you of their triumphs or their failures. It can’t tell you about family histories or past loves. It only gives the barest hint of what it might be like to touch their skin, or how it would feel to hold their hand, or kiss them. It cannot tell you how you might feel waking up in their arms.

This is another one of those thoughts that's been rattling around my head for a while, and which I need to write down to make it make sense.

For the record I've only been thinking about this in terms of aromanticism, but I think it can also equally apply to asexuality. With that in mind I am going to stick with just aromanticism for the sake of this post, but feel free to substitute in asexuality if you want.