Contrary to what you might surmise from this site, I do not always have fashion on the brain. Being a woman and a mother means navigating a myriad of complicated issues that often arise when you least expect it. This happened to me recently during a conversation with my daughter (if you read on will get the details) when I immediately realized my response to a conversation we were having was pretty cringey and old-fashioned. That night I decided I wanted to seek out an expert to discuss sexuality, kids, and all the issues surrounding it. Younger generations, like my daughters’, seem much more open to and comfortable with the ideas of gender fluidity, bi-sexuality and more. These days, you cannot assume anything about anyone, but tiptoeing around sexual issues, especially when it comes to your kids, is not the answer either. What is the best way to have an open, positive conversation with your kids? And with the rampant sexual harassment issues in the news these days, what do you do to keep your children from being a victim or perpetrator? The answer might surprise you and the steps you can take should start very young. Whether you see kids in your future, have babies or 20 year olds, I think there is a takeaway here for everyone. It is too bad that we can’t all have the frank, healthy attitude towards sex and sexuality that Dr. Logan Levkoff does; she makes something often so emotionally fraught seem so easy.
Can you tell us a bit about who you are, what you do, and how you got into your line of work? I have a PhD and Masters in Human Sexuality, Marriage and Family Life Education. I am a sexologist, but at its core, I’m a sexuality educator. What that means is that I work with kids, teens, and parents throughout the lifespan, not dealing with the issues that have super, deep psychological underpinnings, but really getting groups and individuals and media to think about the culture of sexuality, the messages that we get in a way that’s super accessible, and not so clinical.
I started in this field, oddly enough, as a 15-year-old HIV and AIDS educator. I grew up in Long Island, at that weird time where Ali Gertz was in the news with her family. My parents started working in HIV and Aids Awareness and fundraising when HIV was known as an indiscriminative virus. Even if you’d never talked to your children about sex before, all the sudden, you talked condoms and protection and testing because there was something out there. My parents had condoms and bananas waiting on our dinner table one night and my sister and I came home. They said, ‘You’re going learn how to use a condom and next week you go to peer training to be an educator,’ and I said, ‘Okay, sure.’ I don’t think I would have imagined that that would have been the fore into my career. I thought I was going to school to become a lawyer, but as it turns out, law was not for me, but sexuality was.
What do you enjoy most about your job? What do you get from it? The best thing about the work that I do is every day, every challenge and every opportunity looks different. There’s nothing better than taking a subject that is fraught with so much anxiety and misinformation and guilt and shame and all of those negative feelings and associations, and making it something that can be really empowering. Once I moved from HIV education to college, I really moved into this more as a passion project because I watched my friends, girls in particular, sophisticated and bright and unmatched in every area of their life, make really crappy decisions when it came to sex and relationships, myself included.
It wasn’t the not-using-protection bad decision making piece, it was the lack of pleasure, lack of equity in the relationships, lack of understanding that there was more to our personal success and worth than being someone’s partner or having a partner. I thought about the people who were out there at the time who could speak to me in a way that was relevant, there didn’t seem to be anyone. So I attempted to do that. It’s part of what I love about what I do, it’s to look at a young person’s face and see that, wow, their lives could be different and they could make choices that are different and know that they are entitled to make the decisions that are best for them, under what they perceive as the best circumstances, not the ones that the world or TV or anyone else has told them.
You’ve written books? A few. I’ve written, two parenting books and one on marital sex—a first person guide that is meant to be funny, meaningful. The parenting books are my labor of love. I can affect change in a classroom but I see kids sometimes for 45 minutes. It’s the stuff that gets done at home that really shapes who we are.
Which is why we’re having this conversation because recently my 16-year-old daughter came home and said, ‘A few kids I know are bi-sexual.’ I don’t remember how the conversation came up but my response was, ‘Are you sure they’re just not experimenting?’ Then I immediately thought, ‘Wow, that’s a really old-fashioned response and not okay.’ So I wanted to talk a little bit about that because I think that kids today seem much more open and non-judgemental about sexuality. What should you say to your kids and how should you broach the subject and bring it up? Okay, so I think there’s so much in there–all good stuff. One of the things that generation Z has adopted is this culture of, it’s not really a culture of labels, it’s more like this shape shift in the nature of labels, which is sometimes labels don’t matter at all. Facebook now has, I think, 62 different gender identifier labels, right?
Really? Yes. So the question is–are each of those labels totally different and do they mean totally different things? Not necessarily, right? I think we’re in this world where we find that certain labels resonate with us and we apply our own meanings to them. While labels can shift and evolve, the challenge with adolescents is that sometimes labels make us feel safe because we know that if there’s a label then there are more people like us and there’s a group. But I think that our young people today also know that labels can evolve and just because you are this at ‘this very moment’, it could be that you are this always, but you might not be and that’s cool too.
Do you think kids and sexuality is changing? Some people say, ‘Maybe they’ve always been like this and nobody ever wanted to talk about it.’ It’s funny, that’s what I was going to imply next, which is when I talk about sexual orientation in a classroom or with grownups–gender, biological sex, so much of that stuff is based not so much the biology part, but in stereotypes. Often those traditional stereotypes really never apply to us anyway. I always say to my kids, ‘Think of what it means in culture to be male or female. Do either of you fit neatly into all of those categories?’ And they say, ‘No.’ The way we use words, gay means attracted to our own sex or gender, heterosexual means you’re attracted to the other, whatever that other is. Even that starts to get blurred because what does it mean to be the other? Is it simply about body parts? I don’t think it’s just about that. When I talk to young people I always say, ‘Bi-sexual doesn’t mean that someone is 50 percent attracted to you and 50 percent attracted to you, it’s really that you have the capacity to be attracted to someone regardless of what their sex or gender is.’
I think that’s a lot of what the term queer has adopted, it’s this capacity for attraction and sexuality beyond these traditional pillars. And I always say to my students, ‘If you identify as gay or straight or anything for that matter, do you simply walk around and find yourself attracted to someone because of what they have between their legs? Do we walk around going, ‘You have a penis, we’re good’? And they all laugh, they’re like, ‘No, that’s so silly.’ I say, ‘But often times that’s what those labels feel like.’ So as a long winded answer to your question, I think most of us don’t fit squarely into one box or the other. I think we have the capacity to find different things attractive. We may just, most often or always, physically engage with one particular person but I think from an attraction standpoint, I think there’s a lot of fluidity to attraction. We just don’t always have the language.
I don’t think the ability to be attracted to people all over the spectrum is new, I think it’s always been there. I think that we are giving a new generation freedom to acknowledge that sexuality isn’t so binary, whether it’s orientation or gender.
When it comes to talking about relationships how should a parent approach this so they don’t pigeon hole their child in a way that makes them uncomfortable? This is when language counts. Also I think being really upfront about our limitations as parents, that sometimes we don’t have all the language and that makes us feel awkward and insecure, but that we are on this journey with our kids. If we say something or ask something that may come off insensitive or old fashioned, to let us know because this is an evolving world and that means we’re learning with you.
I always think when I talk to my kids, who are younger, my son is twelve and my daughter is eight, the way I’ve spoken to them has always been, ‘Whomever you find yourself attracted to or whatever partner you have, at some point you’ll tell me who that partner is and you’ll figure it out.’ I think that language lets them know you understand that you’re not going make a judgment about them. I always like to tell my groups that I get up every morning to deconstruct the sexual double standard, it’ s sort of my reason for existence, and this system is bad for everyone, regardless of your sex. It either assumes that boys have to be predatory or are innately predatory, girls have no sexuality until it’s activated by someone else and if it’s not then you’re a slut or a prude and none of those are good either. It sets everyone up for disaster, let alone assuming everyone is heterosexual in the end of it.
When I work with parents we talk about how we do this a lot, all with the best of intentions, when we tell people, protect yourself from boys, or that girls get attached, or assume heterosexuality or this default setting that people are predatory. I get why we do it, but there is a better system, which is to not make assumptions about your children. To say that at some point you’re going make decisions, you have the right to this, someone else also has the right to this, and it’s not limited by what you have between your legs or what you identify as.
Can you talk about gender fluidity since I hear about it more and more? Is there a difference between bi-sexuality and gender fluidity? This is a subject that most people get confused by because we often confound so many of these things together. So, there’s a lot that makes us who we are. Yes, there’s our biological or assigned sex, which may or may not reflect how we feel. There’s our gender identity, so that’s where you have labels like cisgender, my body and my identity are aligned, transgender, gender fluid, gender queer, Agender, all the newer-for-mass-media gender terms. And then there’s sexual orientation, which is who we are attracted to, which is separate. Then there is how we express our gender. Which is masculine, feminine, androgynous, and often those things are based on stereotypes of what we think those things are supposed to be.
But all of those things are four totally different categories. Often we assume that if we are one of those categories, we’re also something else. But they’re all really separate. One doesn’t dictate the next one and that’s really challenging when so many of us have been socialized to make assumptions about someone based on one of those categories.
The the topic of sexual harassment is so prominent in the news. How does it relate to children? What do we tell them? Is it the same for both males and females? I think that healthy cultures, healthy relationships, healthy sex is on everyone, it’s not just on one to defend themselves against the other. It’s not the whole, ‘boys will be boys’ thing. Raising a son, I hate the idea that there’s an assumption that he would ever be innately predatory because that’s not how he’s socialized or raised or taught to be, even though culture might say that.
I think the first thing is that we need to do is we have to get rid of the double standard for all of our young people. We can’t have mixed messages for our kids. What’s good for one has to be good for the other. With the respect of what’s going on in the world today, sexual harassment and abuse, I think sometimes we’ve let culture and power take our parental and care giver’s powers away. We’ve been afraid to have conversations about consent. One of the best tips I could possibly give is that we’ve talked about consent and used the word consent and permission in our house as soon as our kids could speak.
Consent doesn’t just have to be about sex and bodies and dating. In fact, it becomes scary when it’s about sex and health and bodies. For example, if my daughter takes my sons hairbrush, I’ll ask her, ‘Did you get his permission before you used it?’ And she’ll say, ‘Maybe,’ and I’ll say, ‘Let me hear it, go ask him if it’s okay to use and you have to respect his answer, the yes or the no.’ The same thing applies to my son. We start developing the language at a young age so they have a script about asking permission and hearing and having to deal with whatever the response back is, so that it’s much easier later on when it’s about sex and bodies because you know the script. They’re words you practiced, it’s not a big deal.
When my daughter was really little, maybe two or three, my husband came home and she was walking around, I guess in her underwear, and he squeezed her tush and she turned around and said, ‘Daddy, you did not get my permission to squeeze my tush.’ And he said, ‘You know what Memphis, you’re absolutely right and I’m sorry.’ He took ownership, ‘I’m sorry, may I please squeeze your tush?’ And she looked at him and said, ‘Yes you may.’ Here was a perfect scenario. She said, ‘You did not ask.’ He said, ‘I’m sorry, I made a mistake and yeah, I’m going ask now and I’m going hear your answer one way or the other.’ Those are great skills to teach when it’s about anything, the language is there. Imagine…
Once you’re comfortable doing it all the time then when it’s a hard situation….Right, and when it is a hard situation and you have all these new feelings and maybe you do want to be sort of sexually active–you don’t want to go to this place but you’re willing to go to someplace else, and you have all those feelings and complexities, it’s hard to come up with that language on the spot. So often times instead of saying anything you say nothing and that’s when so many mixed messages and problems happen because we don’t even feel comfortable using the voice we have.
So I think that sets us up to have certainly healthier interactions. I think also, for me as an educator who’s really sex positive and feels like sexuality and sex are wonderful parts of our lives, I think we do a disservice also to tell young people constantly about the ‘no,’ how to say ‘no,’ wait for the ‘no,’ all those things, instead of saying, equally, how do we tell our kids how to evaluate the decision to say ‘yes?’ When is it okay to say ‘yes?’ How do we say ‘yes?’ How do we hear the ‘yes'” But we don’t always do that. We’re so focused on the ‘no.’
With boys and girls is there a different conversation parents should have with each to encourage them to have a better relationships? The bottom line is that the conversation should be no different. All of our kids should be entitled to feel good about their bodies, have agency for their activities and that they have a voice and should feel empowered to use their voice. There can’t be a discrepancy between suggesting that boys are innately sexual and girls aren’t.
That’s ridiculous. Of course, but we wind up doing it all the time. Every time you hear someone say, ‘Boys only want one thing,’ consider the recipient of that, which is a girl saying, ‘But I’m curious about sex too and I have these feelings too and what does it mean that the person I love and trust who I’m looking up to doesn’t acknowledge that?’ That’s when the bad decision making and bad sexual health happens, because we don’t feel comfortable speaking out, we feel badly as if we’re going to be judged.
That’s the whole slut shaming piece of it. We don’t tell girls that you’re going to want to do things too and the rules are the same, which is make good decisions, ask permission, be responsible, communicate, know how to be in a healthy relationship. The expectations are equal. I think the conversation is the same. And when talking to boys, also saying, ‘Look, this isn’t just about waiting for your partner, whatever the sex or gender of your partner is, just being concerned about their answer to something, you have to be comfortable. And if you’re not, you’re entitled to not be comfortable too.’
Has anything changed recently in this conversation? Yes. It’s interesting, I think that all the little things that we’ve chalked up to adolescent ‘flirting’ or, and I’m going to use the flirting in quotations because I think that assumes that it might be wanted. But some of those unwanted things that so many of us experienced as young people, like being grabbed on the butt or snapping bras or saying things and looking at our chest, all of those uncomfortable unwanted situations that we’ve always chalked up to ‘that’s a part of growing up and those things happen’, I think it is becoming very clear that all of those things are part of a culture that creates significant problems for all of us in that moment, but also later on.
I was thinking today that I hadn’t contributed online to the #metoo piece. And I was thinking about why. The first is, I’ve never been sexually assaulted, but the other piece of it is for all the other stuff, the harassment stuff–feeling the need to cross the street because I saw someone look at me funny or say something, or I had to leave a club as a teenager because someone grabbed me the wrong way, I couldn’t identify one of those moments, there were so many, that at some point I thought, have I, in the back of my head, just assumed that those things were just part of my growing up experience? That’s not what we should want.
And I remembered an incident, literally this morning, when I was a sixth grader, I was the first to develop and wore a bra, and a kid in my class went to grab my breasts in a stairwell. I remember pushing him back and he fell down the stairs and I had to go to the principals office. Something my parents must have said to me, empowered me enough to be able to say, ‘Get your hands off me,’ and shove back. And I think that regardless of who our kid is, male or female, we need to talk to them about, ‘You have the right to have ownership over your body and no one else has that power.’ And that goes for girls as well as boys, because boys are silenced in so much of this conversation too.
What’s next for you? I’m constantly toying around with, Is there a next book? What is next? I don’t know what comes next. I think the nice thing is that I think that as I get older, my voice evolves. I think that my passion projects and focus evolves. I’m curious to see what comes next. I feel like inspiration hits at odd moments and I’ll wait to see.
Follow Logan: Instagram.
portrait by Claudine Williams
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