So instead, I did what every healthy human does and turned to doomscrolling through old Instagram posts… 🙃

And I found a coffee cup with just three words on it.

Just Keep Walking.

The mug was given to me by an entrepreneur who heard me tell the story of a man named Bill, whom I met for less than an hour in July 2016. He’d been lost in the Alberta wilderness for 17 days, and somehow, in the middle of one of the most stressful weeks of launching my business, CMNGD (Common Good), I ended up driving him to the Calgary airport.

I wrote about that encounter on Facebook ten years ago. Rather than retell it, here’s the original story, complete with my entrepreneurial enthusiasm, excessive capitalization, and a little more hustle culture than I’d care to admit today.

Ten years later

Back then, I wrote about hustle. Today, I would probably run screaming from anyone telling me to hustle harder. I’ve spent much of the last decade learning that doing more isn’t always the answer, and that rest and knowing when to stop are just as important as knowing when to keep going.

Trust has changed for me, too. After a divorce, rebuilding parts of my life, and navigating some unexpected turns, I’ve learned that I need to trust myself first. To trust that I can make decisions, change direction, ask for help, and figure things out without needing to know exactly how everything will end. And in learning to trust myself, I’ve become better at trusting others.

Even walking has taken on a different meaning. I had a hip replaced in 2018, something the 2016 version of me certainly didn’t see coming. And if you’ve tried walking two pugs through Edmonton’s endless rain, mud, mosquito infestations, and now the cold and ice, you’ll know that sometimes just keep walking is less an inspirational philosophy and more a negotiation with two stubborn little creatures who have absolutely no interest in personal growth.

But here we are.

The part I needed today

I think what struck me most about rediscovering Bill’s story is that we spend so much of our lives pretending we know what’s going to happen next. We plan careers, relationships, businesses, retirement, and futures as though we have some special insight into how the story ends.

We don’t.

And lately, that uncertainty has felt particularly heavy. There’s grief in watching the world become increasingly divided, grief in watching people you love age, and grief in realizing that some of the futures you imagined might look very different from what you expected.

Ten years ago, I thought Bill’s message was about perseverance. Today, for me, it’s about trust. Not the blind belief that everything will work out, but trusting myself to navigate what comes next. And remembering that just because I can’t see what others are doing doesn’t mean I’m walking alone.

I don’t need to turn that into a grand life lesson. I don’t have an uplifting conclusion about how everything happens for a reason, because I don’t believe that it does.

I just know that this morning, when I was feeling particularly lost, I went doomscrolling and found an old story about a man who walked out of a forest against all odds.

And I really needed to hear it again.

So I’ll just keep walking. And trust myself enough to trust others, too.

It’s Reading Week at Sex School (Graduate Certificate in Sexual Health at the University of Alberta), so I’m taking a little break from the textbooks for an important announcement. Apparently, I’ve stumbled upon an unexpected business opportunity.

I may have accidentally discovered a new business model. I think I will call it:

Situationship Residuals™.

And I have data. Not good data. Certainly not statistically significant data. But here’s what I know.

• 3 of my Substack subscribers are men I’ve dated or been romantically involved with.

• Two of them are paid subscribers.

Which means that, at the time of publication, 100% of the revenue generated by this Substack has come from the Hemphill Dating Alumni Association.

My DAs, if you will. 😜

Have I stumbled upon an unexpected revenue stream? The particularly ridiculous part is that I wasn’t even trying to get paid subscribers yet.

I started this Substack in September 2026, to share my learnings as I began my courses for the Graduate Certificate in Sexual Health at the University of Alberta.

I set up paid subscriptions with the intention of activating it later, once I’d built an audience. Eventually, I figured there would be things I wanted to write that were more personal. Dating stories. Sex. Relationships. The inside stuff. Things I might be comfortable sharing with paid subscribers, but didn’t necessarily want floating freely around the internet.

So I created paid tiers.

And then, within two weeks, men started paying.

More specifically, men I had dated, started paying. 😂

Initially, I panicked and wondered if I’d accidentally set the whole thing up wrong. Could people still subscribe for free?

Yes. I checked. And then I checked with the men who paid.

They knew. They paid anyway.

Both have also expressed enthusiasm about this alleged future “spicier content,” which has resulted in me having to remind both of my paid subscribers that this is Substack, not OnlyFans. 😜 I did not anticipate this being part of my subscriber onboarding process!

And somewhere in the middle of laughing about all of this, I realized:

I couldn’t turn these men into boyfriends, but apparently I can convert them into paid subscribers.

Is it their way of showing support? Are they curious? Or is this some sort of royalty payment for being emotionally unavailable to me?

Apparently men have difficulty committing to relationships, but they’re perfectly comfortable committing to annual billing.

I wish I’d known that part sooner! Just think of the business models I could have created by now!

And the most ridiculous part?

The very people I’m writing about are going to receive this post. (Hi 👋 😂)

But maybe they wanted to keep tabs on me and make sure I don’t tell any stories about them (you will have to pay me more than $50 a year boyz!!)

Either way, I’m literally publishing a story about my subscribers, for my subscribers, funded by my subscribers. Somewhere, a business school professor is trying to explain this customer retention strategy to students.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering if I’ve been looking at my target audience all wrong. I initially imagined women would make up most of my audience, particularly when writing about sex, dating, relationships and all the complicated stuff that comes with them.

But what if men are just as interested in these conversations? What if they’re actually a bigger part of my audience than I anticipated?

There is, however, one conspicuous absence from the Hemphill Dating Alumni Association. My ex-husband has not subscribed. I may need to create a separate (more expensive) tier for him. 😉

For now, though, the numbers remain the numbers.

100% of my Substack revenue currently comes from men I’ve dated and I’ve made a profit in my first month of launching.

Turns out I can monetize my dating history after all, and maybe I have successfully mixed business with pleasure… this time!

In the end though…

Healing is nice, but recurring revenue is nicer.

Class dismissed. 😉

___________________________________________________________________

Hannah Hemphill is a storyteller, facilitator and question-asker who, at 48, decided to go back to university and study something she’s been consuming content about since she was a teenager: sex and relationships. She’s currently completing a Graduate Certificate in Sexual Health at the University of Alberta and is excited to find out what happens when something you’ve always been secretly passionate about becomes the next chapter of your life. One of her brothers calls it “girth and length class.” She calls it “What I’m Learning in Sex School.” 🤷🏻‍♀️

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Subscribe now

Your feed is personalized. That doesn’t mean the advice is.

This week, my worlds collided.

We were talking about social media and sex. Which meant my marketing brain and my sexual health coursework were suddenly in the same room, asking the question:

How do we use the internet to help people learn about sexual health when it’s also where they can learn something completely wrong?

Because the internet has taught me things. Good things. And oh so, so, so bad things. And also things I might not have known to ask about otherwise.

But it has also taught me to ask… where the hell the information came from.

Think about how much has moved online. Porn that once lived under beds or in the back of closets now shares a device with relationship advice, sexual health education, body-image content, mental health conversations and your grocery list! Things we whispered about are available to search, watch and discuss; all from the palm of your hand now.

That visibility can open doors but it doesn’t tell us what’s waiting on the other side.

For this week’s assignment, I was challenged to create a social media post promoting sexual health. I kept coming back to that moment between encountering advice and acting on it.

So I made a six-slide Instagram carousel:

Lots of likes. But is it right?

I’m not a graphic designer, I am a marketing strategist and writer, so this is just a mock up and used for a class assignment. The point is to catch someone’s attention and give them something useful to do with that pause.

The campaign is framed around sexual health, but the questions travel. We can use them when we encounter mental health advice, relationship advice, or almost anything online that asks us to believe a claim or change our behaviour.

The checking approach draws on MediaSmarts’ guidance to find original sources, verify who is behind information, and compare it with reliable sources.

We can keep the curiosity, the conversations, and the relief of hearing someone put words to our experience. Then, before we try the advice or pass it along, we can ask:

Because… Questions about your sexual health deserve more than a guess.

I’ve learned about sex and relationships online from Sue Johanson, Dan Savage, and Esther Perel. They bring different backgrounds to those conversations: Johanson was a registered nurse and sex educator, Savage is a sex-advice columnist and podcaster, and Perel is a psychotherapist.

Those differences matter, they have different experiences and education.

And then there are the conversations that become possible because someone finally says something out loud online - it’s their personal experience. Hearing someone describe an experience can give us language for something we haven’t been able to explain.

Sometimes that’s the beginning of getting help:

“Wait. That sounds familiar. Is that what’s happening to me?”

I’ve seen a version of this with my kids and myself, too. I have concerns about social media and our mental health. At the same time, my kids brought me ideas they encountered from counsellors or psychotherapists online: ideas that led to useful conversations and taught us something.

I can hold both experiences. I don’t have to pretend the useful conversations didn’t happen to question what else is showing up on our feeds.

But it does leave us with work to do. A title in a profile is a starting point for checking, but not the end of it. We need to question what we consume:

• Who is this person?

• Can we verify their credentials?

• Is this advice within their expertise?

• What supports the claim?

And increasingly, we’re asking another question: is this even a real person?

AI makes that question more complicated, but “it’s AI” doesn’t settle whether something is accurate. An AI-generated explanation could communicate accurate information. A real person could confidently give us nonsense too.

Either way, we still have to check the claim.

Which would be enough to think about if we were simply choosing what to read. But our feeds are choosing things for us, too.

Instagram recommends content from accounts we don’t follow and uses our activity to shape future recommendations. What we engage with can influence what we see next. Meta describes that process here.

So the algorithm has a theory about me.

It’s working with what I watch, like, and engage with… and also what my fat thumbs accidentally clicked on! It doesn’t know the full story of why something caught my attention or what question I actually need answered. Yet it can keep serving me material based on those signals.

That’s where repetition gets tricky. If a claim keeps appearing, it can start to feel like everyone is saying it. But I may be seeing a pattern in what’s being recommended to me, rather than a consensus in the evidence.

Your feed is personalized. That doesn’t mean the advice is.

Being in University has made me much more conscious of that gap.

Everything needs a source. Then you read the source and realize it doesn’t quite say what the person quoting it said. It studied a different population. It found a relationship between two things but didn’t establish that one caused the other.

You have to slow down long enough to notice.

Where did you see/hear/read that?

I truly hope we don’t lose our ability to think critically and be curious. I think we need to make more room for it in places where we can move from watching to believing to sharing in a few seconds.

Especially when the information could affect what we do with our bodies. So remember when encountering any advice or education online, ask these questiions:

Class dismissed. 😉

__________________________________________

Hannah Hemphill is a storyteller, facilitator and question-asker who, at 48, decided to go back to university and study something she’s been consuming content about since she was a teenager: sex and relationships. She’s currently completing a Graduate Certificate in Sexual Health at the University of Alberta and is excited to find out what happens when something you’ve always been secretly passionate about becomes the next chapter of your life. One of her brothers calls it “girth and length class.” She calls it “What I’m Learning in Sex School.” 🤷🏻‍♀️

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Apparently, diarrhea can be sexually transmitted!

Shigella is a gut infection that can spread when tiny amounts of infected stool reach someone’s mouth, including during sexual activity. It also spreads through food, water, and other nonsexual routes. Recent U.S. reporting has highlighted increasingly drug-resistant strains.

That was not on my sex education bingo card this week!

It’s also a reminder that getting the right care involves more than saying, “Test me for STIs.” What symptoms you have, what kind of sex you’re having and what tests someone actually orders all matter.

I learned part of that the hard way.

I was in a long term relationship. We were monogamous, well that’s what we commited to, yet years into it, I found out I had an STI.

Because I was in a long term relationship, I wasn’t getting tested.

Luckily, mine was able to be treated with antibiotics, but the experience changed how I thought about my sexual health and what I assumed I knew.

Being in a long term relationship can make testing feel unnecessary. So can not having sex for a while or long time. And if nothing hurts, itches, or looks different, it’s easy to assume everything is fine.

But some infections can be present without obvious symptoms for a long time.

HIV, for example, can remain undiagnosed for years. That doesn’t mean testing couldn’t detect it. It means feeling healthy doesn’t tell you everything.

When I was younger, I also struggled to ask for testing. I grew up in a Christian home and carried shame into those conversations with doctors and scared I would get judged.

It matters though, because healthcare providers use our sexual history to help decide which tests to offer. Oral, vaginal, or anal sex can mean different samples are needed. A urine test may not identify an infection in your throat or rectum.

We need providers we trust: people who explain why they’re asking, respect our boundaries, and respond without judgment. Sharing relevant details is easier when the conversation feels safe.

Saying “I’ve been tested” is not enough.

There isn’t one universal test for everything. Here’s what might, and might not be included in your sexual health testing:

• Chlamydia and gonorrhea: commonly tested through urine or swabs, with throat or rectal swabs depending on your exposures.

• HIV and syphilis: blood tests that need to be specifically ordered. Ordinary blood work doesn’t automatically include them.

• HPV: cervical screening is separate. A Pap looks for abnormal cervical cells; an HPV test looks for high-risk HPV. Neither is a comprehensive STI screen. Alberta screening information

• Hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and other infections: ask whether testing is appropriate and included.

• Herpes: generally not included in routine screening when you have no history of genital lesions.

Herpes has a particularly important testing gap.

Tests exist: a clinician can swab a sore, and blood testing can help in selected circumstances. But routine blood screening without symptoms isn’t generally recommended because results can be misleading. Some people never recognize symptoms.

So someone can seek regular screening and still have an infection they don’t know about. That deserves a little more understanding than we tend to give it.

Could we make this conversation less weird?

In her TEDx talk, Ella Dawson says telling someone you have an STI should be “normal and kind of boring.” She talks about being called brave for discussing her herpes diagnosis and wanting a world where that conversation doesn’t require courage in the first place.

That’s what I want from a conversation with my doctor. I don’t want to work up the nerve to ask for a test or feel like I’m making a confession. I want to ask a health question and get a helpful answer. Normal and kind of boring sounds pretty f*cking good.

Then there’s the New Zealand Herpes Foundation’s campaign to make New Zealand the best place in the world to have herpes. Humour, familiar faces, and short lessons, all aimed at reducing stigma.

My marketing brain loves it. The younger version of me, embarrassed to ask for testing, might have needed it even more.

I want sexual health conversations to be an ordinary part of healthcare, throughout our lives.

That means routinely discussing whether testing is due, rather than waiting for someone to feel brave enough to ask or when symptoms appear. Canadian HIV guidance already encourages that approach. It doesn’t mean every person needs every test annually though.

Here are four questions worth bringing to your next health professional appointment:

1. Which infections are we testing for, and which aren’t included?

2. Based on my history and the sex I’m having, do I need other tests or swabs?

3. Is the timing right, or might I need repeat testing after a recent exposure?

4. How often should I be screened, and what prevention options make sense for me?

I wonder whether regular conversations and appropriate testing would have helped me find out sooner that something needed attention in my relationship. A test couldn’t have told me the whole story of my relationship but it might have told me something important about my health.

And I deserved that information.

We all do, for ourselves and for the people we are intimately involved with.

Class dismissed. 😉

__________________________________________

Hannah Hemphill is a storyteller, facilitator and question-asker who, at 48, decided to go back to university and study something she’s been consuming content about since she was a teenager: sex and relationships. She’s currently completing a Graduate Certificate in Sexual Health at the University of Alberta and is excited to find out what happens when something you’ve always been secretly passionate about becomes the next chapter of your life. One of her brothers calls it “girth and length class.” She calls it “What I’m Learning in Sex School.” 🤷🏻‍♀️

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Orgasms during masturbation may be more physiologically intense than orgasms during intercourse.

I’ll give everyone a moment. The men may have some questions. I suspect a few women are quietly nodding along with the research. 😉

This comes from research by Masters and Johnson discussed in one of my sexual-health readings this week. But before anyone cancels date night and starts shopping for batteries, there’s an important second half: physiologically more intense does not necessarily mean more pleasurable or fulfilling.

The same reading talks about multiple orgasms. Women can be physiologically capable of having them. Some women have them, some don’t, and some are perfectly satisfied with one.

In other words, just because a body can do something doesn’t mean it needs to. But that’s not always how we receive information about sex.

Capability can quietly become expectation.

If women can have multiple orgasms, should I be having them? If this is how sexual response is supposed to work, what does it mean if mine doesn’t? That’s where information can start to feel like a standard. A bar gets created, and suddenly our own bodies are being compared against it.

We’re not just learning about our bodies anymore. We’re grading them.

The funny thing is, multiple orgasms aren’t actually what got me thinking about “normal” this week.

Disability did.

One of our readings was a sexual-health guide from the Sex Information & Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN) for service providers working with disabled youth.

The guide talks about challenging assumptions about disabled people and sexuality. It recommends broadening our understanding of sexuality to include diverse bodies and preferences, supporting people in defining their own sexual identities rather than expecting them to conform to nondisabled sexual scripts, and centring consent, bodily autonomy and self-determination.

And as I was reading it, I kept thinking:

Shouldn’t this just be how we talk about sexual health?

Ask instead of assume. Don’t decide what somebody else’s body should be able to do. Don’t assume what kind of sex they want, whether they want sex at all, or what pleasure is supposed to look like for them. Let people tell you what matters to them.

The guide is specifically about disabled youth, and that matters. Disabled people face particular barriers, stereotypes and assumptions around sexuality that shouldn’t be erased by turning disability into a metaphor for everybody else’s experience.

But it also made me notice something bigger about the way we teach sexual health.

Who is the “normal” body we’ve built our sexual scripts around?

We have an entire cultural language for talking about sex without actually saying sex. Peaches. Eggplants. Cherries. Sex sells beer and perfume. It’s in movies, music, advertising and social media. Women’s bodies in particular are sexualized constantly.

Yet ask an actual question about your own sexual body and suddenly that’s private.

We’re surrounded by messages about what sex is supposed to look like while having surprisingly few comfortable places to talk about what it actually looks and feels like in our own lives.

So where do we learn what “normal” is?

Growing up, one of my sources was Sue Johanson, the Canadian registered nurse and sex educator who became famous for answering people’s questions about sex on radio and television with a wonderfully matter-of-fact lack of scandal.

Today, we’re just as likely to ask Google, TikTok or Instagram. The difference is that the person answering isn’t necessarily Sue Johanson.

Sometimes it’s an algorithm.

Which means the answer to ‘What’s normal?’ depends partly on who, or what, is doing the teaching.

And even the word dysfunction gets complicated.

One of my readings points to research in which only about half of women who reported sexual dysfunction also reported being distressed by it. It also notes that women may seek sexual-health support without meeting the criteria for a dysfunction at all. They might be experiencing differences in desire with a partner, have another concern, or simply want to improve their pleasure or enjoyment.

That feels important.

Because maybe “normal” isn’t actually the most useful question.

A body can be capable of something you don’t particularly care about doing. Something can fall outside a clinical definition of dysfunction and still matter deeply to you. Something about your sexual functioning can change and not bother you at all.

Maybe sexual well-being is less about matching a standard and more about understanding your own body well enough to know what works for you.

And our bodies are not static.

Illness happens. Injury happens. Medications change. Hormones change. We age. Relationships change. Our preferences can change. Stress and mental health can affect us. The sexual body you live in at 48 isn’t necessarily the sexual body you lived in at 22.

So why did so many of us get most of our formal sexual-health education at the beginning of our sexual lives?

Here’s your condom. Don’t get pregnant. Watch for chlamydia.

Godspeed. 🙏

Maybe sexual-health education shouldn’t be something we graduate from.

Maybe knowing our sexual selves is something we continue doing over a lifetime, as our bodies and our lives change. And maybe conversations about sexual health should simply be a routine part of healthcare, rather than something we wait to have until we think something has gone “wrong.”

Because perhaps the goal isn’t to spend a lifetime measuring ourselves against some sexual standard we learned somewhere along the way.

Maybe the better question is:

Class dismissed. 😉

___________________________________________________________________

Hannah Hemphill is a storyteller, facilitator and question-asker who, at 48, decided to go back to university and study something she’s been consuming content about since she was a teenager: sex and relationships. She’s currently completing a Graduate Certificate in Sexual Health at the University of Alberta and is excited to find out what happens when something you’ve always been secretly passionate about becomes the next chapter of your life. One of her brothers calls it “girth and length class.” She calls it “What I’m Learning in Sex School.” 🤷🏻‍♀️

____________________________________________________________________

And, disappointingly for some of you, not that kind of sex.

Sex as in sex characteristics and classifications. Gender as in identity, expression, expectations and the meaning we attach to all of it.

Less tantalizing, perhaps…

But even the language we use to describe sex and gender has changed. The words we use for ourselves change. Pronouns change. Definitions change. Sometimes the words stay exactly the same while everything we understand them to mean changes around them.

A couple of weeks ago, in my first sex school post, I wrote about discovering that heterosexuality wasn’t always the “normal” one⁠.

In 1901, Dorland’s Medical Dictionary defined heterosexuality as an “abnormal or perverted appetite” toward the opposite sex. In 1923, Merriam-Webster described it as a “morbid sexual passion.” By 1934, the definition included “normal sexuality.”

Same word. Completely different meaning.

The word didn’t change. What we believed about it did.

Language has always moved

Sometimes our systems actually preserve those beliefs for us.

In 1837, the Parliament of Upper Canada put the default masculine rule into law⁠. Legislation could be written using masculine language with the understanding that it applied to women too.

Build the language around men. Declare everyone included but instead it really excluded.

Yet over time, due to many movements, fireman became firefighter. Policeman became police officer. Chairman became chairperson. Most of those changes in language barely register now.

Language that once required a conscious change became ordinary.

Which makes me wonder how much of the language we’re debating now will feel completely unremarkable later.

Sometimes language is supposed to make something visible

I saw this firsthand through my participation with an organization originally called SheEO. And yes, I hated the name. But I understood why it existed.

SheEO was created to address a very specific inequity in how capital was distributed to women entrepreneurs. The gendering wasn’t subtle.

It wasn’t supposed to be.

The gendering was the point.

Look at who isn’t getting funded. Look at who isn’t in the room. Look at the system we’ve built and who it was built for.

The name was doing work.

And then the movement moved.

As the community evolved, so did the understanding of gender and inclusion. We experimented with language like womxn and folx, intentionally trying to signal inclusion beyond the gender binary.

Then we learned that some of the language intended to include people could actually make people feel othered.

Womxn is a good example.

If trans women are women, why are we creating another spelling to demonstrate that they are included? Sometimes language intended to solve one problem reveals another.

Eventually, SheEO changed its name entirely. In 2022, after a community-led process, it became Coralus. The name combines coral and us, with coral representing the kind of community taking shape: interconnected, collective and alive⁠.

SheEO wasn’t the wrong name.

It did the work it was created to do. A word can be exactly right for one moment in a movement and completely wrong for the next.

Inclusive language is a practice, not a vocabulary

We really want there to be a list.

• Say this.

• Don’t say that.

• Use this acronym.

• Don’t use that one anymore.

Memorize the rules and congratulations, you are now Inclusive™.

Except language doesn’t work that way.

Language moves because people move.

Our understanding changes. Communities change. People reclaim words. People reject words. Language intended to liberate can start to constrain. Language intended to include can other.

And language that once sounded radical can become so ordinary we forget anyone resisted it.

I model inclusive practice in the spaces I facilitate. I share my pronouns.

Last week, I screwed up someone’s pronouns.

I also make mistakes.

I knew their pronouns. But the wrong one came out.

Knowing something and making it automatic aren’t necessarily the same thing.

A 2026 study on personal singular ⁠they⁠ found that recent exposure could shift how readily people interpreted they as referring to one person. Language adapts through use.

It’s an invitation to practise.

• Listen.

• Correct.

• Acknowledge.

• Do it again.

Give your brain the opportunity to become familiar with something it hasn’t had as much practice using yet.

Inclusive practice can’t require perfection. The minute it does, people become so afraid of saying the wrong thing that they stop saying anything.

But practice does require participation.

Because Language leaves receipts

Language gives us a record of what we believed at a particular moment. And sometimes changing the language is evidence that we’ve learned something since.

Movements have to be willing to outgrow their own language.

Maybe that’s actually one of the signs that they’re alive.

And this is not exactly where I expected studying sex and gender to take me.

But I’m starting to realize that studying sexual health means studying systems.

• Who they were built for.

• Who they leave out.

• And what happens when our understanding changes.

Turns out I never really left systems-change work! Maybe I just found another way into it.

Class dismissed. 😉

Ted Talk from Anne Curzan: “What makes a word ‘real’?”

Quantitative. Qualitative. Mixed methods. Sample sizes. Variables. Data collection. Somehow, we managed to make human sexuality sound incredibly unsexy.

But then I had to actually read a research study. And that’s when things got interesting. I chose a study about gender, sexual pleasure, and something called sexual scripts.

In regular-person language?

We have a whole bunch of ideas about how sex is supposed to go.

• Who initiates.

• Who leads.

• Who follows.

• Who is dominant.

• Who is submissive.

• What counts as sex.

• What masculinity looks like.

• What femininity looks like.

• Whose pleasure gets prioritized.

• Even what signals that sex is over.

And suddenly I wasn’t thinking about research methodology anymore. I was thinking:

Wait. Who wrote these rules?

Apparently, we’ve all been reading from a script

The study I read looked at how gender shapes sexual interactions and pleasure across cisgender, transgender, non-binary, and intersex participants.

What stopped me was how persistent heteronormative sexual scripts were.

I expected those scripts to show up most clearly between cisgender heterosexual men and women. We’ve had generations of messaging telling us that men are masculine, women are feminine, men pursue, women are pursued, men are dominant, women are submissive.

But those scripts didn’t simply disappear outside heterosexual cisgender relationships. They travelled.

Participants described changing their expectations and even how they behaved sexually depending on their partner’s gender. Familiar ideas about masculinity, femininity, dominance, submission, genitalia, and sexual roles appeared across gender-diverse relationships too (Harvey et al., 2023).

And that’s when I thought:

Oh shit, this runs deep.

Do I want it, or was I taught to want it?

This is where the research became personal. I’m a cisgender heterosexual woman. I consider myself a strong, independent woman. And yet, when I really examine my own relationships, I carry plenty of gendered expectations into them.

I have expected men to be masculine. I’ve made assumptions about roles in the bedroom without ever actually discussing them.

And here’s the part that really got me: I thought I was good at communicating about sex.

• Safe sex? Yep.

• STIs? Sure.

• Contraception? Absolutely.

• Orgasms? We’re getting better at talking about those.

But what about:

• What role do you actually like?

• What makes you feel desired?

• Do you like initiating?

• What does pleasure mean to you?

• What do you want from me?

• What assumptions am I making about you because you’re a man?

Those are different conversations. Which brings me to the question I haven’t been able to shake:

How much of what I think I want is actually desire, and how much is default?

Big. Strong. Masculine. Feminine. Dominant. Submissive.

What do any of those things actually mean when we’re talking about two individual human beings trying to figure out what feels good together?

Maybe we’ve been having the wrong sex talk

The researchers found a positive association between sexual communication and orgasm. They also found that when familiar gender scripts didn’t fit as easily, participants described more explicit communication about sexual roles and behaviours (Harvey et al., 2023).

That doesn’t mean queer, trans, or gender-diverse people are automatically better communicators. But it raises a really interesting possibility:

When we can’t rely on the script, we have to talk.

Maybe the rest of us could learn something from that. We’ve spent a lot of time teaching people to have “the sex talk.”

Pregnancy. STIs. Condoms. Consent. All critically important.

But that’s only part of the conversation.

Harvey and colleagues argue that sexual communication education should extend beyond safer sex to include roles, desire, and pleasure. Imagine if we actually learned how to have those conversations.

• How do I figure out what I like?

• How do I tell somebody what I want?

• How do I ask what makes them feel desired?

• How do we talk about roles before we’re already naked and trying to negotiate them in real time?

• How do I hear something unexpected about my partner without judging it?

And maybe having these conversations earlier doesn’t kill intimacy.

Maybe it builds it.

Because if I can’t safely talk to you about sex, I probably want to know that before I’m having sex with you.

Desire or default?

Maybe sexual scripts aren’t inherently the problem. Maybe the problem is that nobody told us we were reading one.

We inherit ideas about sex and gender from everywhere. Family. Religion. School. Media. Pornography. Previous relationships. Culture.

Eventually, some of those ideas become so familiar that they stop looking like ideas.

They just look like the way things are.

Until something makes you stop and ask:

• Do I actually want this?

• Does my partner?

• Have we ever even asked each other?

Maybe better sex education doesn’t need to give us another set of rules. Maybe it needs to teach us how to recognize the ones we already have.

To get curious about them. To talk about them. And then decide for ourselves which ones actually belong to us.

Because questioning a sexual script doesn’t mean rejecting it. You might look at it and realize, Yep. I fucking love that.

Great.

The point isn’t whether your desire fits the script.

The point is knowing whether it’s desire or default.

Welcome to Sex School.

Apparently, we’re learning how to talk dirty to our social conditioning.

Class dismissed. 😉

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Reference

Harvey, P., Jones, E., & Copulsky, D. (2023). The relational nature of gender, the pervasiveness of heteronormative sexual scripts, and the impact on sexual pleasure. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 52, 1195–1212. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-023-02558-x

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Hannah Hemphill is a storyteller, facilitator and question-asker who, at 48, decided to go back to university and study something she’s been consuming content about since she was a teenager: sex and relationships. She’s currently completing a Graduate Certificate in Sexual Health at the University of Alberta and is excited to find out what happens when something you’ve always been secretly passionate about becomes the next chapter of your life. One of her brother’s calls it “girth and length class.” She calls it “What I’m Learning in Sex School.” 🤷🏻‍♀️

____________________________________________________________________________

Fair. 😂

But I can tell you I did not expect Week One to have me sitting at my computer saying:

What do you mean heterosexuality was INVENTED?

Because excuse me?

I have spent 48 years assuming heterosexuality and homosexuality were just… things. Words we’ve basically always had. Categories that have always existed because, well, people have always had sex with people of the same sex and people of a different sex.

Turns out those are two different things.

People didn’t suddenly invent opposite-sex attraction in the 1800s. What changed was how we named, categorized and understood people according to sexual desire.

In one of my required readings, The Invention of Heterosexuality, Brandon Ambrosino traces how relatively new these categories actually are.

Before the late 19th century, Western societies certainly categorized sexual acts, but people weren’t necessarily categorized into “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals” as identities in the way we understand those words today. Ambrosino writes that the terms themselves were coined in the late 1860s.

And before that?

One of the dominant ways of dividing sexual behaviour was essentially:

Procreative. Not procreative.

Which sent me down another rabbit hole. Because I grew up in a Christian home and had always associated the sex is for procreation thing with Christianity.

Except Ambrosino describes an older procreative sexual ethic influenced by Stoicism, which was later taken up by early Christian theologians.

Again: WHAT?

But here’s the part that absolutely broke my brain. Watch what happens to the definition of heterosexuality over just a few decades:

1901: PERVERTED.
Dorland’s medical dictionary described heterosexuality as an abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex.

1923: MORBID.
Merriam-Webster described it as a morbid sexual passion.

1934: “NORMAL.”
Merriam-Webster had shifted its definition toward “normal sexuality.”

THIRTY-THREE YEARS.

A word went from describing something abnormal and perverted to describing what society would eventually position as the sexual norm.

And that was only about a hundred years ago. Considering how long humans have been doing the deed, knocking boots, getting down and dirty 😉, a hundred years ago is basically yesterday.

I’m not particularly interested in memorizing definitions so I can tell you the “correct” meaning of sexuality. What I am interested in is something I’ve taken as fact, something I’ve assumed has just always been that way, is already being challenged. It’s Week One and I’m questioning my own views, my values and even what I think of as “normal.”

I’m interested in finding out that something I have treated as fact for my entire life has a history.

Somebody named it.

Somebody defined it.

Those definitions changed.

Society changed around them.

And eventually we inherited the finished product and stopped noticing that anybody had built it in the first place.

Except maybe we’re starting to notice.

I look at my kids, the younger generations, they are questioning gender norms, sexuality, labels and binaries in ways I don’t remember doing when I was young. We had 1 gay student who was out in a school of 1600 people and that was considered progressive back then.

And it makes me wonder what happens when we start pulling some of these constructs apart.

Even that old procreative/not procreative distinction has me thinking.

I’m not suggesting we replace our current categories with another binary. But as a thought experiment, what if we stripped away all the sexual identities and categories we’ve inherited and, just for a moment, looked at sex through that old framework:

Procreative. Not procreative.

What disappears?

What becomes irrelevant?

What do we notice differently?

And if heterosexuality could go from “perverted” to “morbid” to “normal” in just 33 years, what might we understand completely differently about sexuality + sexual health 33 years from now?

I’ll be 81. Ooooff. And suddenly that doesn’t feel very far away.

What will 81-year-old me understand about sex, sexuality and sexual health that 48-year-old me currently assumes is simply “the way things are”?

Welcome to Sex School.

Apparently, we’re going to be unpacking a lot more than dildos.

Class dismissed. 😉

_________________________________________________________

Hannah Hemphill is a storyteller, facilitator and question-asker who, at 48, decided to go back to university and study something she’s been consuming content about since she was a teenager: sex and relationships. She’s currently completing a Graduate Certificate in Sexual Health at the University of Alberta and is excited to find out what happens when something you’ve always been secretly passionate about becomes the next chapter of your life. One of her brother’s calls it “girth and length class.” She calls it “What I’m Learning in Sex School.” 🤷🏻‍♀️

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