Sexuality: the Body Freedom Fighters dare you to talk about it
Written by Bruna De Cristofaro
When I was 13 years old my sexuality and body awareness were a work in progress process and so was my knowledge concerning sex education.
If you are a 13 years old girl in Italy, coming from a middle-class family like me, you are a privileged one. You will have access to good scholar education and your gynaecologist will be already monitoring your health condition.
That’s where the paradox comes into play: you are privileged and yet the wall of taboo and misinformation is in front of your eyes.
When I was 13 years old my sexuality and body awareness were a work in progress process, influenced, changed, impacted, controlled by a specific circle of persons: me myself, my parents, my teachers and my gynaecologist.
My own story and experience has been the starting point for identifying the target group of the Body Freedom Fighters’ project: the people whose precious opinion was important to hear in order to make our idea become real, concrete, commented and reviewed by those who are part of it.
We asked ourselves why and how information on sexuality among young girls is lacking something and chose to use a problem solving approach that puts people, humans, at the centre, using their answers to simple, concise questions as the answer to the whole problem.
Hence the beginning of the journey of our interviews, or to put it better of our talks, with Senta, a 14 years old German girl, two parents Martin and Nikola, Sophia, a school teacher, and the gynaecologist Dr. Klatt.
Let’s start by saying that interviewing a young 14-year-old girl about her thoughts on sex, menstruation and sexuality is no easy job.
To questions such as “where do you get your information about sex, contraceptives, menstruation?”, our young girl replied with a sharp internet and made us explicit that she is cleared up with the topic.
Once the interview was over I remember staring at the computer screen for another 5 minutes wondering how a 14 years girl cleared up about the topic could represent my ideal target group for a project that assumes that you are not cleared up about it all.
And then, after a brainstorming session with my colleague Antonia, it got clear to both of us: it is the fact that you think you do not want to know more that makes you our most suitable target group. It is the social bias affecting your answers that makes you the best candidate to the body freedom fighter project. This is the challenge we dare to: to make young girls re-discover and explore sexuality and related topics in a new, unexpected way.
Dr. Klatt’s opinion confirmed this view. We expected from her a scientific approach, difficult to decipher, but instead she presented the problem in a simple way, telling us that even the simplest topics, such as menstrual pain, are in need to be re-considered and set free from tabooed approaches.
She revealed that the figure of the gynaecologist is not a preferred source of information among young girls. That hardly anyone goes to consultation hours and that cultural and social differences even within the same country as Germany are the cause of huge imbalances among young women.
Finally, both Nikola and Martin showed us how parents wish to be careful, to do the right thing for their children, to protect them and at the same time raise them up in a stimulating environment. Together, they hope to be supported in sex education by society and schools.
Here the concerns of teacher Sophia come into play: she reveals to us how exciting it is for her to teach sexual education to her young students, because it is a topic that regards them, their body and their self-acknowledgement.
Nevertheless, her excitement somehow clashes with the school system that is accountable to the federal state of Bavaria where she works: her words and teaching approach have to be calibrated according to precise guidelines to be followed and, often, the ultimate message that institutions want to convey to students is still too hierarchical, hetero-normative, exalting the concept of the traditional family and not questioning asexuality, bisexuality or gender transitioning.
What our talks to such diverse people had in common is that the identification of the issue is evident and clear. The simplicity with which we could detect flaws and failings of the sexual approach makes our action urgent, before we could get used to the idea that things are the way they are and therefore impossible to change.
We dare to change it.
Our Website: https://bodyfreedomfighters.com
Our Instagram channel: @bodyfreedomfighters
Our Tik Tok channel: @bodyfreedomfighters
Meet my team member Antonia Olbrich
