America’s Sex Ed Crisis: Why We’re Shocked Every Time (and Why We Shouldn’t Be)

Let’s play a quick game of compare and contrast.

In the Netherlands, children start learning about consent, healthy relationships, and “good touch, bad touch” in kindergarten. By high school, they’re getting comprehensive, evidence-based sexuality education that treats sex as a normal part of human life—something to be understood, respected, and navigated with care. The result? Dutch teens report some of the highest rates of positive first sexual experiences in the world. Around 85% describe their first time as “positive and enjoyable.”

In the United States, we have… well, a patchwork. Less than half of high schools teach key topics related to sexual consent. Only twelve states require sex education or HIV/AIDS instruction to cover consent at all. Meanwhile, federal funding has long prioritized abstinence-only programs that are, by every measurable standard, ineffective and often actively harmful.

So when another scandal breaks—another campus, another fraternity, another group of young men accused of something horrifying—the collective gasp of “How could this happen?” rings a little hollow. We know how it happens. We’ve built a culture that refuses to teach people how not to do it.

A Culture That Sells Sex but Won’t Talk About It

Here’s the paradox: America is absolutely drenched in sexual imagery. Sex sells everything—cars, burgers, perfume, streaming subscriptions. We’ve industrialized sex-for-sale from burlesque to porn to the algorithmically curated thirst trap. And yet, when it comes to actually talking to young people about sex, consent, pleasure, boundaries, or relational ethics, we suddenly develop a case of collective laryngitis.

We socialize children into a culture that commodifies bodies while refusing to give them the language to understand their own. We broadcast hypersexualized content 24/7 and then act scandalized when teenagers don’t intuitively know what enthusiastic consent looks like. We treat sex as a product to be consumed and a secret to be ashamed of—simultaneously.

This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

The Political Theater of “Grab ’Em by the Pussy”

In October 2016, Access Hollywood released a 2005 recording of Donald Trump bragging that because he was “a star,” he could “grab them by the pussy” whenever he wanted. He described pushing himself on women, kissing them without waiting, and moving on a married woman “like a bitch.” The tape was met with outrage—and then, roughly a month later, he was elected president. He was inaugurated in January 2017. In 2025, he was inaugurated again.

Let’s sit with that for a moment.

A man who was recorded describing sexual assault as a perk of celebrity has been elected to the highest office in the land twice. Whatever your political affiliations, the cultural signal is unmistakable: sexual entitlement is not disqualifying. It’s barely even a speed bump.

And yet, we act surprised when that entitlement manifests in frat houses, in locker rooms, in boardrooms, in Hollywood casting couches.

The Weinstein Reckoning and the Amnesia That Followed

Just before the pandemic, the Harvey Weinstein scandal detonated. In October 2017, The New York Times and The New Yorker published explosive reports detailing decades of sexual misconduct, harassment, and rape allegations against the Hollywood producer. Over eighty women came forward. The #MeToo movement, founded by Tarana Burke years earlier, exploded into a global reckoning.

For a moment, it felt like something might actually change.

Then the pandemic hit. Then the news cycle moved on. Then the backlash arrived, as it always does—a chorus of “witch hunt” and “believe all women was a step too far” and “what about due process” from people who had never once worried about due process for the survivors who were silenced for decades by NDAs and settlement money and the sheer weight of institutional power.

We are a country that periodically discovers sexual violence, performs outrage for a news cycle or two, and then returns to brunch. We assume we’re progressive because we’ve heard of consent. But hearing of something and teaching it are not the same thing.

The Mental Health Toll of a Broken System

This is where I put on my therapist hat—though I’ve worn a few others. I’m a psychotherapist who works from a leftist-liberationist lens with QTPoC clients. Before that, I was a state-certified Sex Offender Treatment Provider in Virginia and California, running individual and group therapy with people who had sexually offended and were on federal, state, or county probation. In the early 2000s, I also spent over five years in child protective services in a specialized Incest Unit. So when I say this isn’t abstract, I mean it. I’ve sat with the aftermath in multiple rooms.

And what I see is this: the failure to educate about consent, the cultural glorification of sexual conquest, the commodification of bodies, the political tolerance of predators—these are not abstract policy problems. They are mental health problems. They are trauma generators. They are the soil in which anxiety, depression, and complex PTSD grow.

And they do not fall on everyone equally. Colonization, capitalism, white supremacy, structural racism, patriarchy, bigotry, and class divisions shape who is believed, who is protected, who is punished, and who is left to carry the weight of survival alone. The sexual trauma inflicted on Black bodies during slavery, the ongoing epidemic of violence against Indigenous women, the hypersexualization of QTPoC bodies, the ways class and immigration status determine whether someone can access care—these are not side notes. They are the architecture.

When nearly half of women and more than one in six men experience contact sexual violence in their lifetimes, we are not talking about a few bad actors. We are talking about a system that produces harm at scale—and then asks survivors to heal in isolation.

What Would Actual Sexual Responsibility Look Like?

It would look like comprehensive, age-appropriate sex education from kindergarten through high school—not just once, but as a spiral curriculum that revisits consent, boundaries, pleasure, communication, and relational ethics at every developmental stage. It would look like federally funded programs that teach skills, not shame. It would look like dismantling the patriarchal and white-supremacist logics that treat bodies as property and pleasure as entitlement.

It would look like a culture that stops pretending sex is simultaneously everywhere and unspeakable.

We are not a beacon of sexual responsibility. We never have been. We are a country that outsources its sexual education to porn, pop culture, and whatever half-remembered locker-room talk a teenager managed to absorb. And then we wonder why the reckoning never sticks.

The reckoning won’t stick until the education does.

Disclosure: This blog article was written with the assistance of AI, after the author wrote a 2-page/11-paragraph prompt and then wrangled, wrestled, and edited the shit out of it to remove any remaining traces of patriarchal, bigoted, capitalist, right-wing, whiteness-centering bullshit. That said, the topic, themes, sociopolitical perspectives, tone, and style were derived from the author.

The author uses AI because—despite the wreckage it’s causing—this shit isn’t going away. The author was a MySpace user in the 90s. She knows how these things go. And as a sole practitioner with a full practice, there is no way in hell she could keep up with writing a relevant, timely, thought-provoking, and inspiring weekly blog that speaks to the regular gaslighting the marginalized face, while also serving clients without the use of AI.

So yes—contrary to the saying, sometimes you do need to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. Sorry, Audre.