What's Your Pleasure? Leveraging Adult Toy Store Employees as Community-Based Sex Educators

Lack of access to comprehensive, sex-positive sex education is a public health concern with long-term ramifications on the sexual health and behavior of adults in the general population. The state of Kentucky has implemented new legislation that further restricts access to their limited sex education offerings in schools, particularly for minoritized groups. The proposed study is a qualitative phenomenological inquiry exploring the roles and perspectives of Adult Retail Store (ARS) employees as community-based sex-positive educators in rural and urban Kentucky. Utilizing a sex-positive feminist perspective and minority stress model, semi- structured interviews will be conducted with 30 ARS employees which will be audio recorded, transcribing, triangulated, and thematically coded to address three primary research questions. Results will inform two academic journal articles, as well as a policy white paper that will be disseminated to key stakeholders in the state. The goal of the study is to deeply understand the experiences of ARS employees and work to leverage their position to understand and fill sex education gaps in the general adult population in rural and urban Kentucky.