If you’d have told me last year that I’d one day spend the weekend eating genitalia made from fondant icing and talking about the worst time I’d heard other people having sex, I’d have laughed. But that is exactly what I did, among other things, on the weekend of the 18-20th October.
Sex education is really important, and a key part of MEST- UP, but it’s difficult to educate through MEST-UP at only large events. Because of this, Louise came up with the idea to run a training weekend for leaders so that they’d be able to run sessions for their groups. The weekend was also inspired by the idea of trying out a new training event style and sharing more MEST-UP stuff with the wider folk. Just fewer than twenty people of different ages and homesteads gathered at Cudham to learn how to teach the mystery that was Sex Education!
When we arrived on Friday night we started with informal discussions about sex, our knowledge of teaching sex Ed and why we’d decided to come to the weekend. With leaders from all over the country of all ages, the varieties of skill and knowledge made the weekend an unforgettable experience. Saturday got us all engaged, stating with a session on the UK law and sex, run by Caroline, including a debate about the pros and cons of limiting what you teach young people based on their age. After that we looked at how religion and sex ed link up and did some role play about situations involving religious children and sex ed. Personally I found this session really helpful as my knowledge of religion is rather limited and the idea of discussing things that, to many, can be taboo because of their religion, or simply uncharted territory because of their family’s faith, had seemed quite daunting to me.
After that Will went on to tell us about anxiety in young people, how to recognise it and how to help. Although I knew about this already, to me this was a very important session because for many adults the idea of young people with anxiety is a difficult one to wrap their head around. Teaching them about how to help a young person who is struggling with anxiety or any other mental health issue is incredibly important. It’s really difficult going through childhood and puberty while struggling with anxiety, especially when the people around you don’t know how to support you. Having an adult you know that understand what is going on can be a really vital thing for learning how to cope with it. I actually got to run two sessions during the weekend the first of which was on how to put on a condom and how to demonstrate this to young people. The session was basically a race of who can put a condom on a banana the fastest while blindfolded. As you can probably guess the results were quite entertaining. We then got the answers to all our burning queer questions from Toby, and a brief introduction to the gender spectrum.
Three of the cupcakes we made on Saturday night.
Saturday ended the way all good days should: eating genitalia! These were obviously genitals made of icing and on cupcakes but they were still tasty. For those of you that have yet made genital cupcakes, the premise is pretty simple you make to flesh coloured icing and shape it into a penis or a vagina or any other genitalia you want and then add a bit of blood (red sugar water), or semen/discharge (sugar water) and a bit of pubic hair (crushed biscuit or Weetabix), All this glorious genitalia made of sugar on a yummy fairy cake!
Find out how to run this workshop yourself by clicking here.
After stuffing our faces with sugary treats and a good night’s sleep we started Sunday with a lesson in all the ways people protect themselves and their partner(s) when they do sexual activities. We learned about dental damns, femidoms, latex gloves and the pill as well as looking at other way you can protect yourself from other situations. We decided most important way to protect yourself and your partner from physical and emotional harm was to make sure both you and your partner(s) have given positive, enthusiastic consent to whatever activity you are doing. The last workshop of the weekend was a discussion on a few types of eating disorders and what leaders can do to help, how to recognise the signs of an eating disorder and how these things might change when at a camp or residential event.
After packing up (and scrubbing the world’s most burn rice pudding pan) we all bundled into our cars, trains and taxis home. The weekend was a success and one that will hopefully be run again so that even more leaders are able to run sessions on Sex Ed and other vital education. Alongside the weekend a rough guide is being produced with the key information covered over the weekend.
If you would like a copy of the Companion Rough Guide to this event email Louise using communications@spanthatworld.com.
If you’ve managed to read all the way through this article well done and thanks! And, if you’re sad to have missed out on a weekend of MEST-UP ness, don’t worry training is just around the corner (15-17th Nov and in spring 2014).
This post was submitted by Sophie H.