Happy new year Agents!
We decided to begin the year with the theme “Being Young” not only because the year is young.
In the last three years, Agents of Ishq has done dozens of workshops with young people. And if there is one thing we understand, it’s that young people need all the care and information and conversation around sex and love that we can give them.
Sex education in schools is nil to minimal. Parents hesitate to talk about sex or relationships. The most natural feelings of desire and attraction are increasingly stigmatised in schools and public life.
All young people are left with are pornography, highly Americanised, English language content online and no one to guide them through their confusions.
In workshops, emails, messages, young people ask about everything from STIs to rejection to how to have sex. They struggle with ideas of gender, heartbreak, queerness and peer pressure. They doubt their likeability, their attractiveness, their rights.
At the start of the year it feels like a good time to remind ourselves to commit to thinking about young people and what they need; to talk about first love, and first time sex, to talk about nightfall and puberty, to think about what we can do to make sex-education possible in schools.
This month we will bring you
- A useful checklist for first-time sex
- Our new, unique monthly column on Sex-Ett - sexual Etiquette starts this month! And it's in an exciting graphic format
- A very important and thought-provoking essay about what AOI sex-education workshops have revealed about young men and their dilemmas and how we can find a way forward to a more sex-positive consent culture. You do not want to miss this.
- Two teen women talking about the ups and downs of love, desire, body image and peer pressure
- A series of video portraits of young women's dreams of Being 18
- Facebook Lives and Twitter chats with sex-educators, sex-ed fundas, a video for kids explaining how sex is formed and much more!
Have a great 2019, Agents, and here’s looking forward to doing lots together to give sex a good name!
