Lizzie Marvelly: Time to have the real sex talk

Intergenerational sex talks can be fraught at any age. Photo / 123RF

We need to make information available to teens without being alarmist or awkward.

I thought I knew a thing or two about sex.

I didn't come down in the last shower. Like most other people of my generation, I learnt about STIs at school. I figured out how not to get pregnant. I have navigated the sexual world with about the usual amount of awkwardness for the last decade. I've made a campaign that focused on issues surrounding sex, and given a TEDx talk on similar subjects. I wouldn't have called myself an expert (nor, indeed, a sexpert), but I thought I was fairly well informed.

Then I started making an educational web series about sex for teenagers and realised how much I still had to learn.

I had never, for example, considered that contraception and protection are two different things (for the record, contraception is concerned with the prevention of pregnancy, while protection helps you to avoid STIs).

Also… menage a moi. I'd never heard that one before. I'm sure you can surmise what it means. It is just one of many fantastic euphemisms for that particular enjoyable activity that I've learnt over the last month or so. "Jilling off" has become another favourite.

After this week, which has seen me holding a wooden phallus while a cast member meticulously explained and demonstrated correct condom application, and discussing everything from consent to bacterial vaginosis around the writers' table, I'll likely never be able to utter a sentence again without giggling at a double entendre.

My mind has regressed to its teenaged state. That's the thing about co-writing and co-producing a web series about sex for teens. You remember just how much joy and humour there is to be found in the subject. You remember what it was like to say words like "vulva" for the first time. You remember what it was like to be in health class, desperately trying not to meet your friend's eye in case you both dissolved into laughter.

Sex is funny. It can be a bit awkward. There's no getting around it. So we're leaning into it. My Villainesse team is currently making a web series called The REAL Sex Talk (with the assistance of New Zealand On Air, the partnership of The Wireless, and the excellent guidance of Rape Prevention Education, Family Planning, and Rainbow Youth).

The goal of the series is to make sure that comprehensive and reliable information about sexuality is available to all Kiwi teens online, presented in a way that they will find accessible. That means that there will be jokes. There will be famous faces. There will also be an enormous amount of information packed in to help teens to be safe, make choices that are right for them and, yes, enjoy themselves.

When the conversation turns to teens and sex, so much of the discussion becomes alarmist. We seem to want to scare the living daylights (and, indeed, all and any "sexy feels") out of young people, in the hope that they'll abstain from any kind of sexual activity. The idea that sexual behaviour is totally natural and wonderful and fun if it's done in a way that is consensual, respectful and safe, when the time is right and everyone involved is into it, is not something we generally tell teens.

Indeed, the mere idea of having a conversation with young people about sex tends to turn grown-ups a fetching shade of puce. Which is one of the reasons why we're making the series. If having that conversation is just too awkward to contemplate, now at least there will be a free resource available.

Intergenerational sex talks can be fraught at any age. My parents and I went out for dinner one evening after I'd spent a day on the The REAL Sex Talk set, at which I told them, rather excitedly (and perhaps a little too loudly) all about my day. My mother's eyebrows seemed to rise higher and higher up her forehead until I finally said, "I'm not actually presenting on camera, Mum!" She sighed with relief, no doubt thanking her lucky stars that she wasn't going to have to explain this one to her friends. "Oh thank God!"

I became painfully aware that I'd been living in a fabulous, sex-positive bubble a few nights later, when I found myself at a board meeting, explaining to my (poor, very tolerant) fellow board members how to make a dental dam out of a condom. When I realised that I also had to explain what a dental dam was, and what it was used for, I was reminded forcibly of Dorothy turning to Toto and saying those immortal words, "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore".

But I was also reminded of exactly why I'm making this series. In this country, and in many places around the globe, we send people out into the world knowing very little about sex and sexuality and hope for the best. Our culture is one of shame, where things like masturbation and pleasure are largely taboo subjects.

I don't want any Kiwi teen to have to feel that shame anymore, and I'm going to do what I can to try to banish it. I want Kiwi teens to grow into adults who understand the idea of consent, know that they deserve to be respected and have safe and fulfilling sex lives. If I have to be the one who holds the fake penis in order to do that, so be it.

Sorry Mum. You're not out of the woods yet.