Womanly Interview: Danielle Bezalel of the Sex-Ed with DB Podcast

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Words - Article by Lilian Zancajo Lugo

Recently I sat down with the founder of Sex-Ed with DB, Danielle Bezalel, and picked her brain on what it means to be a sex-educator.

How did you begin Sex Ed with DB?

While teaching English in Jerusalem, I had a challenging experience with a Rabbi. He showed us a religious community and said that, "When his six daughters turn 17, they’ll be married off by the matchmaker and they won’t have sex until their wedding night.” I asked, “What about their choices?” To which he responded, “This is just the way it is.” I returned knowing I cared about sex education, reproductive rights, which became the impetus for me starting a podcast and getting my Master in Public Health. I took a podcasting bootcamp class, did some crowdsourcing, and now we are about to launch our third season!

A lot of sex education is based on how you grew up- tell me more about the type of sex education you received- where it faltered and where it worked.

My mom is an OBGYN. So, I learned a lot about what she cared about and that really permeated to me and my values. She cared about women's rights and talking about your vagina. All awkward moments were a little elevated because I was always able to just text her like, “oh, a weird discharge is coming out of my nipple, what do I do?” So that was important. I was in 5th grade when sex ed started. What really stuck out for me though is the fear. The underlying message was always, "Sex is bad; don't do it.”

Is there any single piece of sex ed that you feel you really could have dealt with better if you had it earlier on in your life?

Yes, everything around body image. I was always consistently 15 pounds overweight. If I had been able to connect with folks on Instagram who were also just as “big as me,” it would have been a help to my self-esteem. Growing up on Long Island, most of my friends were skinny-mini white women and I am half Afghani and half white, so I was also different in that way. It was really easy for me to put myself down..

What is a parent’s role when it comes to sex-ed?

I think much of the sex education young people get comes from parents' one way or another; sex-ed is happening whether it's bad sex-ed or good sex-ed. I do think that parents should get on board with either going to a class to learn how to affirm their child's identity, and how to talk about certain things like: gender, sex, abortion. Only 13 states in America require medically accurate sex education. So, if schools aren't doing it and kids are having these conversations, there is room for a lot of misinformation and fear. The internet can be an incredible place to get knowledge and to build community - especially for queer and differently-abled folks. There are a lot of ways to connect folks on the internet and at the same time, there's a lot of misinformation. So, parents should make it a priority to seek out meaningful sex education tools and make sure their kids are equipped with what they need to be healthy and happy in their sexual lives.

A lot of the conversations I’ve been hearing surround parenting and sex-ed, particularly queer sex-ed, is that kids aren’t “ready” to talk about queerness in conjunction with sex-education. Or when is the proper age to introduce them to queerness as a concept, when in reality we have been taught about heterosexuality since birth.

As soon as kids are able to comprehend words and speak, you can begin talking to your kids about the LGBTQ+ community and identities in the spectrum. It's just a matter of breaking it down to where they can understand. For example, I just had an interview with an amazing person who's been on the podcast before, Andy Duran, an education director at Good Vibrations. He was telling me that at Good Vibrations they have a book on their shelves that's about a crayon who is a certain color crayon, but the label is wrong and what that looks like when they know everyone else sees you in a way that you don't see yourself. Parents should be able to articulate “whoever you are, I will love you” and however anyone wants to be seen, that's how they're going to be seen.

Regarding the political state, largely because of Trump, people have been able to feel more confident about their hate and ignorance, which in turn can make those same people reject comprehensive and accurate sex-education even harder. With all that really loud negative energy, how does that play a part in your Sex-Ed with DB mission?

The third pillar of why I created this podcast was definitely to combat anger, fear, and hate that [Trump] has perpetuated. We’re actually doing a politics in 2020 episode. So it’s important for us to have this podcast not only as a fuck you to you-know-who and the norms that he is trying to set, but also to delve deeper into the things you can do and what you should look out for when it comes to politics and who out there in terms of democratic candidates care about sex-ed.