Sex Education

Pomona Is Horny But—Not Healthy

A city full of sex, but starved of intimacy, infrastructure, and honesty.

Illustration Julian Lucas ©2025

There are a lot of things Pomona has come up short on, affordable housing, street maintenance, functioning city council meetings. But sex? Not one of them.

If local birth rates are any indication, people in Pomona are still having sex frequently. And while California’s birth rate is in freefall, Pomona stubbornly remains more fertile than most. Proof that people are clearly having sex, even if the city would rather host one of its 100-plus church services or fundraise for another banquet hall than admit it.

According to LA County Public Health, Pomona’s birth rate clocks in at 15.3 per 1,000 residents, higher than the county average of 13.2. Among teens, it’s even starker: 27.6 per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19, compared to 18.9 countywide. That’s not just a statistic, it’s a mirror. A reflection of what happens when a city avoids honest conversations about sex, desire, and health.

But while Pomona might be fertile, it’s far from sexually free. Because for a city that’s clearly having a lot of sex, it’s remarkably bad at talking about it, let alone building infrastructure to support the kind that’s consensual, safe, joyful, or non-reproductive. Quantity doesn’t equal quality.

Let’s not confuse high birth rates with high standards of sexual health. While people are clearly connecting, Pomona still treats sexual wellness like it’s a hobby for coastal elites. There’s no civic blueprint for intimacy. No pleasure-positive clinics. No public campaigns around consent. No queer-affirming sex ed. And so, people navigate sexuality in silence, shame, or complete misinformation.

You can buy a pastel vibrator at Target now, but try finding a doctor who won’t flinch when you mention using it.

It’s a wellness failure. You can’t find a decent salad within city limits. And no, the ‘salad bar’ at the all-you-can-eat buffet doesn’t count unless you think pre-shredded iceberg soaked in preservatives is a vegetable. That’s what happens when a city neglects care, not just for bodies, but for connection. We don’t talk about sexual health as joy or nourishment. We talk about it, if at all, as a risk. As pathology. As something to survive.

Holt Avenue Has a History—Whether You Admit It or Not

Any honest conversation about sex in Pomona has to include Holt Avenue. Known as “The Blade,” this stretch has been an economic undercurrent for over a century. In the 1920s, when Pomona was a booming citrus and rail hub, the city was already home to brothels and independent workers.

Yet some longtime residents insist sex work “started” in the 1960s, right around the time Black families began arriving after the Watts Uprising. This wasn’t about chronology. It was about visibility, and discomfort with who gets to be seen, heard, and policed.

Sex work didn’t begin with Black and brown residents. It simply became harder to ignore. And when visibility makes people uncomfortable, history will usually get rewritten.

Pomona didn’t inherit repression, it invented its own after white flight. It just got better at outsourcing the blame.

Sex Ed in a City That Barely Teaches Civics

Only 68.5% of Pomona adults over 25 have a high school diploma, nearly 10% below the LA County average. That gap doesn’t just show up in job markets or college stats. It shows up in how we teach (or don’t teach) people about bodies, boundaries, and intimacy.

Pomona Unified’s sex ed, when it exists, still smells like 1990s abstinence pamphlets. It’s medically outdated, culturally tone-deaf, and structurally evasive. In that vacuum, porn becomes the curriculum, and it’s a bad teacher.

Most students here don’t graduate knowing how to communicate desire, negotiate boundaries, or even name their anatomy. They know how to panic. They know what shame feels like. And if they’re queer, disabled, or gender nonconforming? The system didn’t write them in.

But there’s a crack in the silence.

Earlier this year, students in the AP Econ & Government class at Pomona High wrote op-eds as part of a civic engagement project. Many praised The Pomonan—yes, this one, for giving them access to honest, nuanced conversations about sex, power, and autonomy. Journalism filled the void the school system wouldn’t touch.

When the city fails to educate, the streets, the screens, or the substack step in. This time, it wasn’t Pornhub. It was The Pomonan.

Touch Starvation in a City Full of Desire

Pomona knows how to reproduce. But do we know how to connect?

In a city with over 100 churches, is anyone even allowed to try?

Touch starvation is real. Ask the elderly. Ask single mothers. Ask queer teens dating in secret, afraid of expulsion. Ask men numbed by loneliness, or women who haven’t been looked at tenderly in years. We are a city of bodies craving contact—but trained to fear it, or legislate it out of existence.

A City Obsessed with Desire—And Even More Obsessed with Controlling It

Here’s where it gets unmistakably Pomona: while bodies collide in private, the city itself has morphed into a sanctified landscape. Over 100 churches and counting. Strip malls, old garages, and warehouse corners now bear pulpits.

Faith is fine. But Pomona hasn’t just embraced religion—it’s outsourced civic life to it. Arts programs, housing initiatives, even food distribution, many now run through church infrastructure. That shift is not neutral.

When the only institutions growing are ones that frame desire as sin, repression becomes policy.

Pomona doesn’t regulate sex because it’s dangerous. It regulates sex because it doesn’t trust people to want without guilt.

So What Now?

We don’t need to moralize. We need to mobilize.

Comprehensive, pleasure-centered sex ed, rooted in real bodies, real joy, and real consent.

Free, shame-free health services, especially for Black, brown, queer, low-income, and undocumented communities.

Decriminalization and dignity for sex workers because survival isn’t immoral, and labor is labor.

Public space and language for intimacy, touch, and care.

Because Pomona doesn’t have a sex problem.

It has a denial problem. A repression problem. A problem with pleasure that no sermon can fix.

So yes, Pomona is horny.
But horny isn’t the crisis.
Pretending purity will protect us? Now that’s delusional.

Julian Lucas, is a photographer, a purveyor of books, and writer, but mostly a photographer. Don’t ever ask him to take photos of weddings or quinceaneras, or any other events because he will charge you a ton of money you couldn’t even make payments on.

WHY DO WE NEED A BOOK ABOUT THE CLITORIS?

Courtesy of Sarah Chadwick

Courtesy of Sarah Chadwick

Text By Sarah Chadwick
Black & White Photography Julian Lucas

Today most sex that occurs is for pleasure rather than reproduction otherwise why would two thirds of American women between the ages of 15 – 49 be using contraception? (Source: National Survey of Family Growth) If the objective is pleasure, and not a baby, then male pleasure is no more necessary in sexual encounters than female pleasure, yet the orgasm gap is as real as the pay gap. It is not happening for heterosexual women in casual hook ups, many women still fake it sometimes and even a third of women in long term relationships are not having them. 

I have a trompe d’oeil rug painted onto my back deck. The red and orange design incorporates a clitoris motif, although most people don’t realise that this is what they are looking at. Earlier this summer I overheard my twenty-one-year-old daughter explaining the design to a group of male friends. It was 3am in the morning and they were the other side of a bottle of vodka. She explained that the clitoris was not purely an external part of the female anatomy, but was like an iceberg, with the bulbs nestling either side of the vagina and cura stretching into the internal pelvic area. “In most women, the bulbs aren’t close enough to the vaginal walls for penetration to be orgasmic” she said. I admired her clarity given the vodka and her audience. How many women have you ever heard explain how sex works so effectively? But instead of hearing the proverbial penny drop with her listeners, I heard a chorus of protest, “But not with my dick.”

 “You’re not listening” she persisted. But the guys couldn’t get beyond the model of female sexual pleasure that they had imbibed through school sex-ed, the media and probably porn. Needless to say, none of the candidates got through the onsite small group interview that night. With a recruiter’s clarity she dismissed them to me the following morning as “not teachable.” 

They need to meet the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who reported in 1953 that the vagina has very few nerve endings - which is lucky when you think about it as otherwise birth would be nigh impossible and Tampax would be the brand name of a sex toy. And this is why we need this book. Contrary to expectation and much that we have been told over the centuries, the clitoris is central to female pleasure and in 2021 it’s time for it to come out of the closet and be celebrated.

Courtesy of Sarah Chadwick

Courtesy of Sarah Chadwick

The first anatomist to identify the complete structure was Georg Kobelt in 1844. Yes, 1844. Why did it take so long in the history of mankind for the female anatomy to be fully explored? But why, when we knew about it so long ago, is it not more widely known? We can draw a heart, and lungs and a liver, and yes, as many school textbooks testify with their marginalia, even school kids can draw the male member. But how many people can draw a clit?    

For millenia, scientists thought women were inside-out versions of men, and male anxiety about female sexuality generated ludicrous ideas and perpetuated inaccurate information. Even when it was fully understood, the establishment went into overdrive to hide it, with punitive censorship laws banning the distribution of such material to anyone who was not a medic or a judge on the grounds it would “corrupt” the morals of the people. Famously it was left out of the gold standard medical textbook, “Gray’s Anatomy” in 1948 and it didn’t feature in the 8thgrade sex-ed booklet that my son bought home from school. We are beyond the days, surely, of the Victorian men who were so consumed with worry that if it was widely known that their penises were not central to female pleasure then women would suffer “marital aversion”?  

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The Sweetness of Venus. A History of the Clitoris by Sarah Chadwick isavailable in book shops now. It is a funCancelny, informed book that takes you on a journey through the history of anatomy, religion, philosophy, psychology and evolutionary theory to answer the question, how come we are still so anxious about the clit. It challenges Western culture’s definition of female sexuality, will have you laughing out loud, shouting “Clitoris!” with abandon and championing sex equality and pleasure for all. 

This feature first appeared http://www.fetelifestylemag.com, February 2021
Sarah also runs the Instagram account @its.personalgirls