Our Whole Lives (O.W.L.)

Young people need sexuality education programs that model and teach caring, compassion, respect, and justice. Such programs should be holistic, moving beyond the intellect to address the attitudes, values, and feelings that youth have about themselves and the world.

The overall goal of Our Whole Lives is to create a positive and comprehensive lifespan educational program that helps participants gain the knowledge, values, and skills to lead sexually healthy, responsible lives. More specifically, this curriculum is designed to help young adolescents

• Affirm and respect themselves as sexual persons (including their bodies, sexual orientation, feelings, etc.) and respect the sexuality of others.
• Increase comfort and skills for discussing and negotiating sexuality issues with peers, romantic partners, and people of other generations.
• Explore, develop, and articulate values, attitudes, and feelings about their own sexuality and the sexuality of others.
• Identify and live according to their values.
• Increase motivation and skills for developing a just sexual morality that rejects double standards, stereotypes, biases, exploitation, dishonesty, and harassment.
• Acquire knowledge and skills for developing and maintaining romantic or sexual relationships that are consensual, mutually pleasurable, nonexploitative, safe, and based on respect, mutual expectations, and caring.
• Increase knowledge and skills for avoiding unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
• Express and enjoy sexuality in healthy and responsible ways at each stage of their development.
• Assess the impact of messages from family, culture, religion, media, and society on sexual thoughts, feelings, values, and behaviors.

Program Values

While Our Whole Lives is designed to be relevant for young people from a wide range of family backgrounds and religious traditions, it is not value free. The program gives clear messages about key sexuality issues. These issues are organized into four broad topic areas – self-worth, sexual health, responsibility, and justice and inclusivity.

Self-Worth

• Every person is entitled to dignity and self-worth and to his or her own attitudes and beliefs about sexuality.

Sexual Health

• Knowledge about human sexuality is helpful, not harmful. Every individual has the right to accurate information about sexuality and to have her or his questions answered.
• Healthy sexual relationships are
• consensual (both people consent);
• nonexploitative (equal in terms of power, neither person pressures or forces the other into activities/behaviors);
• mutually pleasurable (both receive pleasure);
• safe(no or low risk of unintended pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and emotional pain);
• developmentally appropriate (appropriate to the age and maturity of persons involved);
• based on mutual expectations and caring; and
• respectful (including the values of honesty and keeping commitments made to others).
• Sexual intercourse is only one of the many valid ways of expressing sexual feelings with a partner. It is healthier for young adolescents to postpone sexual intercourse.

Responsibility

• We are called to enrich our lives by expressing sexuality in ways that enhance human wholeness and fulfillment and that express love, commitment, delight, and pleasure.
• All persons have the right and obligation to make responsible sexual choices.

Justice and Inclusivity

• We need to avoid double standards. People of all ages, people of different races, genders, backgrounds, income levels, physical and mental abilities, and sexual orientations must have equal value and rights.
• Sexual relationships should never be coercive or exploitative.
• Being romantically and sexually attracted to both genders (bisexual), the same gender (homosexual), or another gender (heterosexual) are all natural in the range of human sexual experience.

Our Whole Lives is offered to our eighth and ninth graders in alternate years. The program is led by trained facilitators and is sometimes offered in conjunction with youth groups from other Unitarian Universalist churches.

The next time this program will be offered is in January-April 2008. For more information, please contact Sue McCowin.