Jessica Biel’s New Sex-ed Venture Helps Women Understand their Bodies
You might be surprised to hear that actress Jessica Biel (you might know her as that girl from that CW classic “7th Heaven”…or as Justin Timberlake’s wife) has spent a chunk of time with WomanCare Global, an organization dedicated to providing women around the world with family planning and reproductive health care.
As a recent family-planner herself – Biel gave birth to her and Timberlake’s first child half a year ago – she’s teamed with WomanCare Global CEO Saundra Pelletier to produce a series of sex-ed videos aimed at women and girls who don’t have access to this kind of education. (They come out on the 28th…stay tuned!)
This might be amazing – comprehensive sexuality education is key for developing strong, confident and self-aware individuals, yet it’s incredibly rare to find schools (or parents) providing accurate information. So if the impressive sex-ed talents of Laci Green, Sex Nerd Sandra and Dan Savage haven’t been enough to get the sex-positive conversation going, Biel (with the help of WomanCare Global) might become a pivotal piece of the puzzle. That is, if her side of the conversation extends beyond pregnancy and periods.
Biel recently told Glamour Magazine that the sex-ed idea came to her while she and Timberlake first started trying to have a baby.
“Now what happens?” she recalled. “I’ve been on the Pill for so long; how hard will it be to get pregnant?”
Biel even found herself confused about her own fertility.
“Suddenly I realized I really didn’t know what’s going on inside my own body,” she said. “It was shocking.”
While some in the sex education world question Biel’s qualifications, other applaud her use of her celebrity status to promote important information in a way that’s accessible to the Internet-enabled public. (Communities with slow dial-up or no electricity are SOL, it seems.)
According to WomanCare Global’s official announcement, no question is off-limits and Biel is prepared to discuss anything from puberty to conception. And while those topics are poignant, we wonder what’ll happen when someone asks about sexual pleasure – the kind that doesn’t involve baby-making.