By now you’ve seen the hate-rant making its way around the internet from Vlogger, The Activist Mommy. In her latest video, she calls for Teen Vogue to be banned from shelves because it is informing its readers about sex.
While it’s a shame to give this scarecrow-headed town crier any more press than she deserves, I have to weigh in at this point, because she represents an unhelpful, outrage-happy segment of the population that needs a reality check.
How do I describe The Activist Mommy?
She is an Alt-Right fear monger who appears to ask her hair stylist for “The Ramen Noodle” cut.
She is a thin-lipped banshee who never seems to look directly into the camera.
She’s like a Chik-fil-A, if it became sentient. Or like Hobby Lobby, if it became a person, and that person had hair made from the wicker baskets in aisle 13.
She’s your run-of-the-mill crazy church lady who tweezes her eyebrows into oblivion, all the while warning that the sky is falling, in Chicken Little fashion.
While doom-and-gloom diatribes are the best way to get followers these days, may I suggest we CTFD for a minute and discuss teenage sex education like reasonable people?
The Activist Mommy claims that Teen Vogue is targeting kids as young as eleven and encouraging them to have sex.
I’m sorry, what?
Last time I checked, Teen Vogue was written for teenagers–not eleven-year-olds. If your eleven-year-old is seeking teenage content, that is a gate-keeper issue. And that gate-keeper is you as a parent.
But what exactly is the controversial material within the pages of the magazine over which she is hemming and hawing? Sex education.
Teen Vogue has written an almost clinical explanation of things like masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, and good old-fashioned penis-in-vagina sex. The publication even offered anatomical charts.
Guess what? My 5th grade niece learned more about sex from some random kid’s iPhone in the back of a school bus, so maybe the Activist Mommy should pull her ropey haystack of a head out of the sand. Kids are looking for answers, and Teen Vogue is providing some answers.
What is the deal with the far right’s obsession with sex? It’s like they hate their privates, but they love their privates, but they hate that they love their privates. They equate any communication about the human body as some sort of heathen incantation. And this is nothing new.
When I was a teenager, it was common practice to teach us absolutely nothing about our bodies and then shame us for any questions we had. This did not keep us from the natural curiosity we had about sex. It just muddled things up, with often terrifying results.
Several girls I knew didn’t understand when they had been sexually assaulted by their boyfriends because no one had talked to them about consent.
Another friend of mine ended up having oral sex she wasn’t ready for because she simply didn’t know that a spectrum of sex acts existed between kissing and intercourse.
As a teenager, I went farther than I was comfortable with sexually because I was unprepared for what might happen in the back of my date’s car.
The generation just younger than mine turned to pornography to learn about the birds and the bees. Which is kind of like learning how to be a dad from the paternity segment on Maury Povich–not only is it unhelpful, it’s downright fictional.
Young people have always had questions about sex. To pretend those questions don’t exist does a great disservice to our kids. Giving more information about the human body is not a bad thing. It simply arms our kids with the ability to make autonomous decisions about sex, because, whether we like it or not, young people will find themselves in sexual situations. They always have, and they always will.
Equating more anatomical knowledge with more sex is a fallacy.
Here’s an idea, Activist Mommy: If you don’t like Teen Vogue, don’t buy it. We live in something called a Free Market Economy where you can simply choose not to purchase a thing that offends you. Shocking, I know.
But maybe hang on to that Teen Vogue subscription in case they’re offering an eyebrow tutorial and a free sample of Frizz Ease, ok?