Your Friend, The Therapist

An Ice Age Dildo That’s Older Than Jesus: The Sex Ed You Didn’t Get In Purity Culture

Erica Smith is an award winning sexuality educator and consultant with over 20 years of experience. Throughout her career, she has provided comprehensive sex education and advocacy to young women and LGBTQ+ youth in Philadelphia’s juvenile justice system, worked in abortion care, and supported HIV+ and transgender adolescents and their families. In 2019, she developed the Purity Culture Dropout™️ Program to help people learn all of the sex education that they missed growing up in purity culture- sex ed that is accurate, queer inclusive, trauma informed, compassionate, and comprehensive. She has since worked with hundreds of people to help them learn about healthy sexuality after high control religion. Erica lives in Philadelphia with her partner and house full of rescue animals.

You can follow Erica on Instagram at @ericasmith.sex.ed or learn more about working with her on her website purityculturedropout.com.

Summary

In this conversation, Kari Fillian interviews Erica Smith, an award-winning sexuality educator and consultant, about her work with individuals who have experienced purity culture. Erica shares her personal background and her motivation for working with those who have been harmed by high control religion. They discuss the impact of purity culture on people's relationship to their bodies, sexuality, pleasure, and gender identity. Erica emphasizes the importance of defining one's own sexual values and challenges the harmful messages of purity culture. They also explore the history of sex and sexuality, including the history of sex toys and abortion. In this conversation, Erica emphasizes the importance of understanding the history of sex education and the cultural influences behind it. She discusses her current offerings, including individual sessions, private client work, and the purity culture dropout private community. Erica also shares the upcoming theme of her classes, which will focus on bodies. She explains how working with her one-on-one involves tackling specific topics and providing resources. Additionally, Erica discusses the value of her non-purity culture background in helping clients navigate their experiences.

The resources mentioned in this episode are:

The book Shameless: A Sexual Reformation by Nadia Bolz-Weber

Our Bible App

Your Friend, The Therapist is hosted and produced by Kari Fillian. You can follow the show on Instagram at @yourfriendthetherapistpod. Subscribe to my Substack for more musings: https://yourfriendthetherapist.substack.com/

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