New from Allure: Allure Perspectives

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

I'm Carolyn. I'm a wife, a mother, a grandmother. I have a beautiful life. When I was diagnosed, I was concerned. But then I realized, though my circumstances may have changed, I haven't. And the things that matter to me haven't changed either. We believe in my medical team. I also believe in Cascali.

SPEAKER_2 (0:19)

Carolyn is a real patient compensated for her time. Visit cascali.com. That's kisqali.com to learn more. And ask your doctor if Cascali Ribocyclobe is right for you.

Jessica Cruel (0:33)

It's Jessica Cruel, Editor-in-Chief of Allure and host of the Perspectives podcast, here to introduce our next guest, Ericka Hart. I really love this conversation. Ericka is a sex educator and a breast cancer survivor who was diagnosed at 28 She went viral in 2016 for attending a music festival, Topless. Back then, her mastectomy scars were on display and it started an important conversation about representation that we continue today. And y'all, we get into all of it. The lack of breast cancer survivors in rom-coms and porn, how kink became a way to reclaim control post cancer treatment, the experience of getting pregnant and raising a child in a queer relationship. One thing that was really poignant was how Ericka's opinion toward her body and who was allowed to see it has changed postpartum.

Also, we did get a little bit into her nipple envy.

Ericka is warm, funny, and incredibly insightful. I could keep going, but I'll let you hear it for yourself. This is Perspectives.

Thank you, Ericka, for being here with us today. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to talk to you because we're going to talk a little bit about sex. Yay.

Ericka Hart (1:48)

Let's talk about sex, baby. Let's talk about you and me.

Jessica Cruel (1:54)

So I want to start with, when did you become a sex educator and what was your fundamental sex education and what did that look like? That's a wonderful question. So I did abstinence-only education in middle school. I had a beautiful dark-skinned black femme as a health teacher and she had long, gorgeous nails. And I always remember that because it was like the burgundy nail that I feel like looks good on every black woman. But she used to click her nails on the board when she would make a point. And we also all thought that she had a vibrator in her desk because we knew that she would eventually be talking to us about sex. So as middle schoolers do, we make up these things and we thought, oh, if we kick her desk as we walk in, the desk will vibrate and that confirms she has a vibe.

Ridiculous, okay? But you're getting abstinence only. But we're all talking about sex. I grew up in the suburbs. There's woods that surrounded my middle school. Everybody was hooking up in those woods. For us, it was the car behind the CBS.

I have the car at the church too, my shade. There was one unfortunate time at the movies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_2 (3:09)

All in the movies.

Jessica Cruel (3:11)

But she literally stood in front of us and said, you have to wait to talk about sex when you're married.

SPEAKER_2 (3:16)

Wow.

Jessica Cruel (3:17)

I was that one Sagittarius student in class who rose my hand and said, I don't understand. Why can't we talk about it now? Without outing my fellow classmates of, hey, we're already doing this, but why? She just would not answer.

I think from that point, I really wanted to understand why we weren't getting this question answered. There are many questions, and I took to the Internet, AOL dial-up, and I started googling my friend's questions, and the answers were what the answers were, and then from there, it kind of devolved into, Ericka is the person that I could come to to talk about sex, and even if I'm not really cool with Ericka, I know that I could come to her and she won't make me feel any type of way. I remember in high school, one of my best friends said, you're like Dr. Ruth. Oh, wow. And I was like, I don't know who that is. I had no idea who that was. I didn't know that sex educator was even a career. I literally was just, I want to help people. So once I saw there was a thing that you could become, I said, okay, let me look more into this. So I would say, probably in college, I was clear that this is what I wanted to do, but still no path of how do you become that. And then I was a Peace Corps volunteer. I worked in Ethiopia, I was an HIV AIDS volunteer. They also told me there, you can't talk about sex. So I just constantly being up against this idea that, hey, I want to do this thing, and people telling me that I can't, right? And finding ways to do it anyway, because I knew that it was necessary to talk about it. It's so interesting because I had over sex education because both of my parents are OBGYNs. Oh, that is amazing. So all the sex books, all the anatomy, I very much so understood. However, I was in the South, in the Bible Belt. So it was like, you know how it works. You understand how it works. However, don't go doing that. Or at very least, like, don't get pregnant.