Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, this blew my mind as well. I think just the idea that something going on in national politics would impact such a personal decision, like whether or not to engage in sex. But then I also remembered that a lot of women of my generation and a lot of friends of mine have had climate change be a major, major factor in their decision about whether or not to have kids, and I was like, oh, I do think this is Gen Z’s version of that phenomena.
Carter Sherman: Absolutely. I think we want to pretend that we have total control over our sex lives or our reproductive lives or our family lives, but the fact of the matter is we don’t. We do live in a country, we do live on a planet, and it is always this emotional balancing act of figuring out, OK, how can I still feel in control when I might not actually have the total control that would make me able to live my life fully?
Zoë Schiffer: OK. I want a chance to touch on something that we talked about before, which is the kind of sex ed classes that Gen Z is having or has access to, particularly in high school. I remember when I was in high school, we had a very, very, very explicit sex ed class, but maybe that was very unique in my generation, I’m not sure. But what is happening now?
Carter Sherman: Where did you grow up?
Zoë Schiffer: Well, I grew up in Santa Barbara. I think they were like, “Santa Barbara, these kids are partying way too much and having way too much sex, so we need to really tell them what’s going on,” and it rocked all of us.
Carter Sherman: It sounds like it’s left some scars, I have to be honest with you. I think that very much, your sex ed is so determined by the zip code in which you grow up, and so a state like California is going to have a really different sex ed curriculum than a state like, I don’t know, Alabama or Mississippi. And I grew up in Seattle, and I feel like I had, relatively speaking, fairly comprehensive sex ed, but my sex ed did try to pathologize sex. It did try to make sex into this kind of scary thing, and I don’t think we have a lot of sex ed in this country, even in the most progressive states that adequately addresses things like pleasure and healthy relationships and communication. It does try to say, “OK, here’s STIs. Here’s pregnancy. Stay away from sex.” but the thing that I found really interesting as I was reporting in this book is I did not know that when I started to go to school in 2000 as a kindergartner, that I was basically one of the very first guinea pigs in what I call a billion dollar federal virginity campaign, because it was during the George Bush years that the federal government started pouring more and more money, hundreds of millions of dollars, into abstinence only sex ed, and that money has continued throughout the Obama administration, throughout the Trump administration, throughout the Biden administration, and I assume it will again continue throughout this current Trump administration. I think we take for granted that sex ed is bad in this country, that the teachers want to scare us or that the teachers are incompetent, but there is sex ed that is comprehensive, and the young people I talked to who had comprehensive sex ed I think had just much healthier lives in general. They didn’t feel the degree of shame that I think so many of us feel around sex.