By Ethan Freedman
Introduction:
We live in a world where sex education is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It is in the classroom and in porn, in tweets and in silence, in sexts, syndromes, TikToks, and toys. It is heteronormative and allonormative, filled with contradictions, compulsory assumptions, and excludes and renders agents invisible. It is a system in itself designed not to work fully for any mind or body – especially for those who refuse to be neatly categorized.
So how do social workers – those charged with showing up for justice, for community, for bodies and their stories – step into the abyss of sex education and sexuality advocacy not as reformers of old models, but as architects of new ones? What does it mean to queer the very idea of advocacy in a world where media, sextech, AI technology, and adult content are already acting as educators.
To queer advocacy is to unhook it from ideal scripts. It is to stop pretending the classroom is the only legitimate arena for learning about intimacy. It is about naming that social workers must show up in spaces considered unspeakable by the profession’s own comfort levels. In doing so, social work can forge new ethics of engagement, education, and desire along the lines of social justice.
Narratives, Not Norms:
To begin, breaking away from the notion that sex education should aim for normalcy is something Sheronda J. Brown reminds through her analysis of asexuality from a Black Feminist perspective (2022). Compulsory sexuality, or the idea that everyone should want to engage in sex, is a form of violence that renders the asexual spectrum invisible and queerness peripheral (Brown, 2022). When we ask if someone is normal because they have not had sex, we are reproducing ableism, allonormativity, and heteropatriarchy. Instead, social workers should be asking: What does safety, pleasure, and agency look like for you personally?
From Abstinence to Algorithms: Rethinking Curricula:
Social work must become literate in the digital landscape of desire and fantasy. While pornhub might be the most influential non-legitimate sex educator in the U.S., it teaches without consent, equity, or ethics (Hellinger, 2023). Yet, feminist and ethical pornographers argue that adult content can offer windows into realistic, queer, nonviolent sexuality when done with care (Smith, 2015). Ethical adult content, sexual technologies (Social media, adult toys, dating apps, etc.) are already teaching intimacy to users left behind by school-based sex education curricula (Deponti et al., 2023). The question is no longer whether these mediums and modes count as education–but whether we are brave enough to meet people there with social work values in hand.
Pleasure as Praxis → Praxis as Social Work:
Pleasure, as Adrienne Maree Brown (2019) teaches, is a measure of liberation. But it is often excluded from sex ed, especially for Black, queer, trans, and disabled bodies. Lorde (1978) writes that the erotic is a source of power, but it is mistaken for the pornographic–and erased as something that can be wielded. Social workers must advocate for holistic health and healing through naming pleasure as a public health and justice issue. What might it mean to organize around pleasure as a right, as care, as resistance?
What Advocacy Actually Looks Like:
Though it is beyond important in this context, advocacy goes far beyond solely lobbying in legislative chambers. Advocacy is refusing to teach curricular that erases queer youth and people. Advocacy is building coalitions that include sex workers, adult performers, and asexual activists, artificial intelligence leaders, and sexual technology developers. Advocacy is creating intersectional spaces where students explore how algorithms reinforce normativity (Silliman & Kearns, 2020), and it is challenging organizations and institutions that tokenize identities under the guise of diversity (Jana & Diaz Mejas, 2018). Advocacy means centering lived experience, not academic expertise alone, and honoring emotional labor as a form of knowledge production and resistance (Mendes et al., 2019).
To advocate is to research, organize, and imagine all at once. As Lane and Pritzker (2018) note, effective advocacy campaigns are strategic, intentional, and rooted in community power–not simply individual agent’s efforts. It means power being fluidly placed into the hands of decision makers in the legislature, but mitigating and eliminating their roles as gatekeepers of curricula development, tech platforms, funding sources, and public narratives. Advocacy looks like resisting the seductive temptation to sanitize the message for respectability and digestibility politics, and instead choosing truth, embodiment, and radical engagement (Finn, 2021).
Advocacy includes understanding the emotional complexity of showing up as supporters. Whether burnout or collective joy, advocating historically takes the positionality as an insider and outsider in areas of social work (McGowan, 1978; Finn, 2021). It is policy and poetry, casework and confrontation. Advocacy in human sexuality and sex education is not just supplemental–it is central to the work of building justice oriented futures for the communities and agents engaged with via social work and as social workers.
The Future is Now and it Necessitates Resistance:
We cannot wait for policies to catch up. Sexuality education is happening now, through every media click and digital interaction one can possibly contemplate. Every sext sent, every OnlyFans subscription turned commitment, every ethical porn stream, every queered TikTok feed, every shared meme on topics of a comprehensive curriculum – it is all within the realm of pedagogy. Ignoring this means letting someone else write the curricula and losing the agency that is innately part of human sexuality.
As Teles and Schmitt (2011) argue, advocacy must be evaluated not by immediate wins, but by strategic capacity or the ability to remain responsive, reflective, and radically adaptive. Social workers must learn to view advocacy not as a one time campaign, but as ongoing political labor capable of building ecosystems and collectives that resist capitalist understandings of success and production. “The tools that we have to organize and to resist are fundamentally different than anything that existed before,” and to advocate in the present is to acknowledge an ever changing and growing toolkit (Stephen, 2015).
To advocate via queer practices of resistance is to insist that the theories which inform us become rooted in our practices for staying accountable and imagining the most expansive social justice dreams. It means decentering whiteness, maleness, and respectability in advocacy models, and building movements rooted in Black feminist organizing, trans futures, and justice for sex workers. It means asking how we can show up in solidarity without replicating systems of harm.
Social workers must embrace advocacy as a queer, messy, intersectional, personal as political project that dares to value intimacy, embodiment, and liberation. Social workers must design, disrupt, deconstruct, and dream–until every agent has the tools, language, and freedom to learn about their sexuality, bodies, and desires without fear.
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