Big Issues

We Need More Books Like ‘Welcome To Sex’, Actually

by Ky Stewart  26 July 2023

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The fallout from Yumi Stynes and Dr Melissa Kang’s book Welcome To Sex: Your No-Silly-Questions Guide to Pleasure, Sexuality and Figuring it Out highlights once again Australia’s struggle to have conversations about sex education. 

Every so often, we like to import an American moral panic. Apparently, it’s not enough to watch it play out overseas. We need to experience it for ourselves. And so we get the outrage over Yumi Stynes’ sex-ed book, a trumped-up culture battle over how to discuss sexual autonomy, consent, and sexuality with young people. Of course, this isn’t a purely American phenomenon. Australia has long resisted the idea of empowering young people to learn about their bodies. 

To help contextualise the current situation facing Welcome To Sex and what it reveals about Australia, I chatted to director Tosca Looby and journalist Jess Hill, who have worked in the consent space for quite some time. But first, let’s unpack the backlash to the book. 

Why Are People Mad About Dr Melissa Kang And Yumi Stynes’ Book?

Yumi Stynes, a writer and podcaster, created a sex-ed book with former Dolly Doctor expert Dr Melissa Kang to help break the ice and introduce sex and sexuality to teens in a “frank, age-appropriate” way. 

Welcome To Sex is actually the fourth instalment in a series on topics like menstruation, consent, and human anatomy. However, controversy followed the release of the newest addition to the series after conservative campaigners —including Women’s Forum Australia, a self-described thinktank with a keen interest in anti-trans campaigning — pushed to have the book banned from stores. Big W then announced it took down Welcome To Sex from physical shelves after staff members were abused. (At the time of writing, the book remains on sale at Big W’s online store.)

Yumi Stynes has also been subject to horrific treatment and even death threats from people calling her a “groomer” or a “paedo”. All this just for writing a book that teaches children about their bodies.

Making things worse, federal senator Ralph Babet has also seemingly justified the threats made against Stynes, saying “She is not a victim she knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote that book.” 

Babet added that people shouldn’t let “left wing extremists gaslight you into accepting perversion and early sexualisation of children as normal.”

Where Has This Backlash Come From? 

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the style of backlash — going into shops and abusing staff members over “woke propaganda” products they believe are “grooming” children — feels very American. That’s because it is. 

“I think it’s a very US style reactionary feedback loop. It’s just so destructive and seems to be getting worse,” Tosca tells Junkee.

Being prudish and opposed to having frank conversations about sex and sexuality has always existed in Australia. The only difference is that now people who hold those views here in Australia can learn from the protests of far-right groups in the US, and adapt it here. Hence the Big W staff abuse. That’s a lot of anger over an educational book, but where has it come from? According to Jess Hill, it’s coming from a “puritanical cohort” in Australia that’s been around for years. 

“There’s a lot of heat to draw on at the moment, just generally around sex and gender,” she says. “Obviously, a lot of that heat is being directed towards the LGBTQI community and particularly trans people.”

“So it’s a bit of fertile ground… for this kind of backlash. It also really reflects the fact that Australian adults — or a minority of loud Australian adults — really do not know how young adults are experiencing sex and how they’re being educated on it without their knowledge.” 

Another aspect of the Welcome To Sex backlash that feels imported from American conservatives is the label “grooming” that’s being thrown around. Characterising young people’s sex education as “grooming” isn’t just a patently incorrect way to use the word, it waters down the potency of the word for actual survivors.  

“This is where it particularly becomes a US style because it’s taking an idea that everyone is trying to explain what grooming is and why it’s difficult to understand,” Tosca explains. “It’s like this word has been co-opted and turned against the people who are having that conversation, and they become the groomers.”

“It’s kind of Trump’s trademark — not that I want to conflate it that far — but that trademark technique of saying, ‘Alright, I’m going to take information and I’m gonna turn it on its head so you can’t use the words that you’re trying to explain,’” she adds. 

Grooming, of course, is a form of predatory-defined abuse that really couldn’t be more different to a book that helps teach kids about sex. According to Jess, the very use of the word “grooming” to describe what Welcome To Sex is trying to achieve shows how ill-informed some Australians are. “To be blunt, it’s because they don’t have adequate education on what grooming actually means,” she says.

“Research shows that the more educated children are on sex, the less likely they are to be taken advantage of,” Jess stresses, adding that groomers tend to target children who are naive and isolated. “The kinds of kids that are going to be reading this book — which is going to be purchased by their parents — are the opposite of naive and isolated.”

Young People Need Books Like Welcome to Sex

When conversations come up about keeping children “safe” from education about sex, sexuality, and gender, it makes me rather irate. As a queer person, I had to resort to learning about sex, pleasure, and my body from the internet – which is not a good place to learn from at a young age. 

I went through the Catholic education system and grew up in extremely heteronormative environments. As a result, I received no proper sexual education that was relevant to me and my sexual preferences. The only thing that was taught to me in an educational setting was that gay sex was going to send me to hell after I inevitably get HIV and die. I can certainly say that I would have been much safer learning about sex from a book written by two experts than from the dark corners of the internet. 

It makes you wonder: is this really about “protecting children”? More often than not, the people who are incredibly vocal about protecting kids against books like Welcome To Sex are very quiet when it comes to other aspects that put children in harm’s way, like unregulated internet porn. 

“Where it counts, these people are invisible,” Jess says. “Where you can get the outrage clicks, they’re everywhere. They’re not going to actually do the hard yards and really pursue the political fight that’s necessary to protect kids adequately. They’re just there for the click outrage.”

The outrage poses an interesting question: would you rather your child be informed about their body, sex, consent, and their agency early on, or have them run into problems when they’re older because they are ill-informed about how sex works? 

“If you aren’t armed with information about your own body, what is OK and what’s not OK, that sex is meant to be about pleasure, and about healthy sexual relationships, you don’t understand that you’re willing to accept all sorts of things that are not good for you,” Tosca says. “You’re so much more open to exploitation.”

Although sex education has come a long way in Australia — much of which can be attributed to the tireless work of people like Tosca, Jess and consent advocates — it is still up to individual schools to interpret how they want it to be taught to their students. That means that there are still massive gaps between what students are actually learning about their bodies and pleasure. 

Until we get a comprehensive, inclusive and broad sex-ed curriculum in Australia, books like Welcome To Sex are a positive way for young people to learn about sex, pleasure, consent, STIs, pregnancy, and their bodies in a safe and age-appropriate way. 

Meanwhile, a recent national survey of Aussie high schoolers revealed that 67.5 percent of young people turned to the internet for information about sex and sexual health – 56.7 percent from websites and 48.3 percent from social media. What’s interesting about the survey’s findings is that despite young people seeking out information online, their trust in the source is low. Only 19.4 percent of young people said they moderately or extremely trusted social media. When it came to porn, nine percent of young people said they used it as a source of information and the average age of first engaging with porn was 13.6. Given the rise of the “manosphere” and misogynistic personalities like Andrew Tate, wouldn’t those concerned about the corruption of children be better directed elsewhere? 

Surely, then, it is books like Welcome To Sex which can be a trusted source of sex-ed for young people so they don’t have to turn to sites they don’t trust. And while Tosca understands that parents might be worried about having their children be exposed to information before they might be ready, she says it’s something they need to overcome. 

“The better we get with consent education — and we are getting better with it — and the more books we have like Welcome To Sex that are really well-researched, put together and age appropriate, the more I think we need to lose our fear over what we think our kids shouldn’t know,” Tosca says.

Parents Actually Want Their Kids To Understand Sex

Despite the backlash from small (but very vocal) groups online, Welcome To Sex has actually skyrocketed in sales. In fact, it’s currently (at the time of publishing) sitting at the top of Amazon Australia’s Best Seller list. As Tosca says, all the backlash and controversy around the book has actually started meaningful conversations around young people and sexual literacy. 

“After this has all happened, sales have really gone through the roof because parents have been alerted to it and thought, ‘Oh, I need to get that book,’” Tosca says. “I am glad that the conversation is continuing and it is making headline news. We’ve come far enough that we know this conversation needs to happen.”

While it continues to be alarming to see conservative groups mimic US far-right modes of protest, the success of Welcome to Sex shows that parents in Australia do in fact want to raise well-informed children who know the facts. Hopefully, it signals a future where all children are able to receive comprehensive sex education. Who knows, maybe the experts involved can even one day live their lives without having to deal with violent threats against them. A person can dream. 

Ky is a proud Kamilaroi and Dharug person and writer at Junkee. Follow them on Twitter. 

Image credit: Getty