So you want to become a sex educator
I didn’t plan any part of my career, so don’t worry if you don’t have a plan
Hello! This week’s awesome indie bookstores where you can pre-order Come Together are:
More Than Words Bookshop + More in Moorhead, MN, Gathering Volumes in Perrysburg, OH, and The Book Burrow in Pflugerville, TX. (Pflugerville so pfun to say.)
And now for one of the questions I hear more than almost any other:
As I’m finishing up my undergrad, I’ve questioned more and more what I’d like to focus in on as a career. I know you’re not a therapist, but I think the work you do is fascinating. I was just curious if you could reach out to tell me a little about what your college career looked like and how you came to be where you are now!
And
I’m trained as an MD/PhD in systems biology and currently work in biotech, but would love to pivot into a different career path. Something like what you are doing with teaching at Smith and being super knowledgeable about psychology seems very appealing. Possibly combining teaching at a liberal arts college with private practice and bodywork offerings could be of interest to me. I am not sure what the next step for pursuing this would be (MA in counseling, PhD, PsyD, MDiv, residency in psychiatry?) What would you suggest?
And
I am a family doc in Toronto, ON. I currently run a medium-sized family practice and am realizing, at 52yo, I want to use my skills in a different way. I was so moved and engaged by “Come as You Are.” It was a timely read in my life both professionally and personally. I would love to get some advice or suggestions about how I might go about becoming qualified to provide education and counselling about sex to the broader world, as a Family Physician. I certainly do not profess to have a Ph.D. in this arena, and sadly training in sexual health is totally lacking in family medicine. I wonder whether, as a Family Physician, I might find a career for myself providing a blended approach to educating folk in a similarly positive, hopeful, and factual way, about sex.
And
I see a lot of individuals in India who practice sex therapy without going through any formal training. I’d really like to understand what’s the recommended training a sex therapist should go through. Is background in psychology, counseling, medicine mandatory? Seems like there are few 4 week global programs in human sexuality. Are they enough to start practicing on patients? I’d be grateful if you can comment on what’s the minimum training you’d look for before recommending a friend to a sex therapist? I’m willing to invest and set up a training system or liaison with the government to do the same if that what’s needed but would like to get the clarity to get started.
And
I’m kind of having either a midlife crisis or just a realization that my current job is not doing it for me. I sat down and made a list of what interests me to get a better idea of what I should be doing instead and one thing that has stuck out to me is my desire to work on some element of sex education. Not just in schools and for children as I feel like there is so much that the general population needs to learn and know about human sexuality and that being more informed will have a domino effect and help make the world a better place. […] It’s something that I feel strongly about and have a huge interest in and it is feeling more and more like my calling. So, I’m writing to you in the hopes that you might be able to point me in a direction to get started on this. Any advice or words of wisdom would be more than appreciated.
Dear everyone who’s interested in working in sex therapy, education, and/or research,
It’s the best job in the world! I am STOKED that you’re interested in being part of this work, and I’ll do my best to offer information to help you get started. There is an almost infinite variety of ways to be involved, from a few hours of volunteer work per week to building a whole ass career!
Let me start with a universal caveat: It is rare for someone to make a good living solely as a sex educator. When I was at Smith College, I was the Director of Wellness Education; I did sexual health education, yes, but also stress management, sleep hygiene, alcohol education, nutrition and eating, relationship education, and whatever else my boss asked me to do. I also did research and policy work. (College health education is a whole profession in its own right, and it was my original professional home.) Note, also, that I wrote a successful book about the science of women’s sexuality, but it was when I wrote a book about stress that I got a lot of corporate wellness speaking gigs, which offers an order of magnitude more money than sexual health speaking gigs. So be prepared to have sexuality integrated into all the other stuff you do.
But as I say in Come As You Are, the best predictor of someone’s sexual wellbeing is – shocker! – their overall wellbeing! So other health education work is an essential part of sexual health promotion.
A second caveat: I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I never had a plan mapped out for how to get to any professional goal. I went where opportunities took me; sometimes they were handed to me out of the blue, like a gift, but sometimes they were the only opportunity available after I had spent months searching for something to do next. Maybe you’ll map out a plan to achieve a specific goal, and that’s great. But maybe you’ll take each opportunity as it comes and allow your role in the world of sexual health promotion to grow organically. Both are great.
Here is my most general advice about What To Be When You Grow Up, which I offered to students when I worked briefly as an academic advisor to first year students:
What kind of problems do you enjoy solving?
What people do you enjoy working with?
As an example, here are my answers:
I love solving complex, nonlinear problems that turn out to have unanticipatable solutions. This means I love to solve puzzles related to sexuality itself, but I also love to solve puzzles about how to teach those solutions. How can I most effectively support people in learning to integrate all this amazing science into their lives? What is the best sentence to explain a complex idea?
When I began my sex ed training as a college student, I really loved working with college students, and I still do. They’re at a fascinating developmental stage where they’re exploring the world more independently than ever before and they have a thirst to understand themselves and their relationships. Sexuality is often at the forefront of their intellectual and emotional exploration, so they’re hungry for insights that can help them grow. But after Come As You Are was published, I was invited to lead trainings with therapists, and I discovered that I love working with therapists! Those remain the groups I love working with the most. I have also had a good time working with the publishing professionals who have supported my work as a writer.
I was halfway through my Masters degree in Counseling when I realized that I do not have the magical something that it takes to be a therapist, to sit in a room with one or two people and listen to their feelings and painstakingly support them as they find their way to themselves. I don’t have it. I’m an educator by temperament, and I love prevention more than treatment (though that distinction is fuzzy, to say the least, when it comes to sexuality; we are all already broken by the world, by the time we get to adulthood). Are you a therapist? Are you an educator? Are you an activist, a policy analyst, a researcher? Do you want to spend your career lobbying governmental organizations? Swabbing mouse vaginas? Teaching in public schools? Writing books? These are all part of advancing sexual health globally! Again: What kind of problems do you like to solve, and what people do you love to work with?
And if you’d like guidance while you explore questions like these and more, my friend Nadine Thornill leads a Sex Educator Super Starter training!
If you’re currently in undergrad, your field of study doesn’t matter much, but I recommend taking any sexuality-related class you can find. They’ll be in lots of different departments, from biology to psychology to public health to sociology to gender studies to African American studies to philosophy. Sexuality can be examined through literally any academic lens! Again, which kind of problems do you like to solve? I love the health ones, especially the mental health ones. But I recommend adding a minor in Philosophy, if not a major. Knowing how to think clearly and skeptically is just about the most valuable skill you can have, and the willingness and ability to interrogate your own opinions will get your farther than almost any other quality. Also, find the sex educators on your campus! They may be a student organization or they may be a peer health education group run (most likely) through Health Services or Student Affairs.
If you’re transitioning from undergrad to grad school or returning to grad school after being a professional, or adding specialized certification to your existing professional credentials, look for programs like this one in St Louis or these in Michigan or this one in Philly. Also, here’s a convenient big list!
For training as a sex therapist in North America, I would want to know that a sex therapist has been certified through a professional organization such as AASECT or BESTCO, as well as having at least a Master’s degree in Counseling, Psychology, Social Work, or similar field. (I want to be clear that just because someone has great credentials doesn’t mean they’re a great fit for you personally; finding a great therapist is very often a process. But great credentials are an excellent place to start.)
Sex research is a whole field of its own and it happens both within institutions of higher education and in private industry, such as pharmaceutical companies and tech such as OMGyes, as well as in nonprofits, such as the Guttmacher Institute, which is one great example of research and policy. (Policy! Advocacy! These are growing fields that aren’t my specialty but wow do I rely on the people who do this work!)
If you would like an academic or research career, choose a graduate program based on the faculty. I highly recommend reading the current research in publications like the Archives of Sexual Behavior and the Journal of Sex Research to see who’s publishing what kind of work, from which institutions.
And all of this is specific to my knowledge of North America and Europe, but mostly the United States. I am deeply underinformed about sex therapy, education, research, and even norms in the Global South, but I know of someone who includes South Asian sexuality as part of their specialization! Sonalee Rashatwar, also known as the Fat Sex Therapist, runs “workshops for all audiences to better understand South Asian individuals and families living within the North American diaspora.” They also consult, and my first suggestion would be to reach out to them to ask if they’re available to talk about sex therapy (and training for sex therapists) among South Asian populations. I don’t know if they know about sex therapy in India, but they’re the person I’d start with. You might also get in touch with the Pleasure Project and the International Planned Parenthood Federation South Asia Region.
And there you have it! A comprehensive guide to everything I know about getting into the field of sexual health promotion. I didn’t plan any part of my career, so don’t worry if you don’t have a plan. And even if your contribution is working hard to weed your own sexual garden so that the people around you feel more permission to weed theirs, that is a lot! I consider anyone doing their own personal work to be part of making the world a better place for the future of sexual health.
Hope some of that is helpful!
Emily
📕💻📗 And please check out these awesome indie bookstores: More Than Words Bookshop + More in Moorhead, MN, Gathering Volumes in Perrysburg, OH, and The Book Burrow in Pflugerville, TX.
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