Undressing the Ideology Behind My Sexual Autobiography Assignment

In a required course for my Marriage and Family Therapy program, I was instructed to write a “comprehensive sexual autobiography.” The assignment: detail my earliest sexual memories, masturbation history, past and present sexual experiences, and future fantasies— with a plan to act on them. I was told to upload it to a third-party platform for grading. No confidentiality guarantee. No opt-out.

When I asked for an alternative, the department chair said no. She explained the course was designed to “inoculate” us into sexual content and that my discomfort was a clinical liability I would “assuredly transmit to clients.” In other words, my boundary wasn’t respected. It was pathologized.

Later, I was shown a video tour of a BDSM sex dungeon in class. A woman was gagged, flogged, and wrapped in plastic. No warning. No clinical relevance. When the lights came up, the professor smiled and asked if we wanted to try it. I walked out.

This wasn’t an outlier. It was the result of a deeper belief system driving therapy education: critical theory.

Human relationships are viewed primarily through power dynamics, particularly race, gender, and sexuality. Within this framework, traditional values like monogamy, modesty, privacy, even objectivity, are seen as tools of oppression. The role of the therapist is no longer to witness and support, but to deconstruct. Our job, increasingly, is to help clients “unlearn” norms shaped by whiteness, cisheteronormativity, or patriarchy.

So it’s not just that my request for privacy was denied. It’s that privacy itself is viewed with suspicion—an artifact of oppressive structures. The same logic is used to justify race-based self-flagellation in the classroom, mandatory pronoun rituals, and the uncritical affirmation of gender transitions in children. All of it stems from a belief that neutrality is harm, and dissent is pathology.

But when clients sense they must conform to the therapist’s worldview to receive care, we’ve lost the foundation of therapy altogether.

This isn’t liberation. It’s ideological control masquerading as compassion. And it has no place in the healing professions.