OFFICIAL DEFINITION
Sex education provides people with the guidance needed to make healthy decisions about sex.
RAZER DEFINITION
Formal sex ed is a product of the 20th century. Its Western origins are usually traced to two sources. First, there were military sex-ed programs begun in World War I. These were founded to lessen rates of what was then called “venereal disease” and taught chiefly to white personnel. Second, there were programs of eugenics “education” between the wars. These were founded to increase rates of what was then called “racial hygiene” and taught chiefly to white wives.
Since these beginnings, formal programs of formal sex ed have provided some people with some of the guidance needed to make some healthy decisions about sex. However, the use of sex ed to communicate agenda unrelated to the promotion of mental or physical health continues.
WHY IT MATTERS
Notwithstanding its reputation as an act to which persons are naturally drawn, sex can turn out to be an unnaturally messy business. Pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), injured sex organs and climax may all be as natural as molasses, but, even these “natural” effects can prove surprising, especially to our libidinous youngsters.
When our hale youth are compelled to learn these lessons accurately, they tend to take their time before applying them. These lessons have also been found to encourage and facilitate conversations between them and their parents, reduce the rate of STIs and play a role in identifying and even diminishing sexual abuse.
In short, when sex ed does only its core and claimed work of providing people with the guidance needed to make healthy decisions about sex, people tend to make healthy decisions about sex.
WHO CARES?
Australian Parliament has long been chockers with folks who care so deeply, they are prepared, per the late senator Brian Harradine, to do political deals to prevent access to sex-ed and contraceptive information. The senator’s legacy of genuine concern continues with his former employee, Melinda Tankard Reist, whose website holds that sex is far too intimate to be spoken about in “mechanical” terms with teens. It continues more cynically with opponents of the Safe Schools program — not, in fact, a program of sex education.
The people to whom true sex education would mean the most are often the people upon whom the effects of an ideological and inauthentic sex-ed have been imposed. This includes Indigenous populations whose fertility has been controlled by the settler class, disabled persons, people with non-normative sexualities overlooked in sex-ed, and migrant populations, most lately in Sweden where they are offered guidelines about sex, Swedish style.
RELEVANT FACTS
- Inaccuracies are common in English-language sex ed online materials aimed at teens.
- Accurate sex-ed has not been found to charge anyone’s libido.
- Influential Australian sex educator Marion Piddington opposed “mixed race” reproduction and pockets in the clothing of male children. She helped found the Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales, which later became Family Planning.
THE LAST WORD
When the End of All History is finally attained, and persons live in flourishing peace with their spirit-essence, we will all enjoy congress without guilt and sexual relations without mess, unwanted infections and/or children. There will be no need at this time for embarrassed Phys Ed teachers to tell snotty teenagers unpleasant stories about dental dams.
Regrettably, sex remains a sticky mess and so a one-size-its-most institutional approach is still needed.
There are sex-ed pedagogies that do a decent job of guiding teachers. It is possible to teach biologically accurate lessons that do not challenge the ethics of the student. It is, perhaps, quite important to teach students to think about sexual practice in terms of their own ethical guidelines.
It is certainly most effective, in terms of public health outcomes, to encourage a community control approach, as was seen in the HIV/AIDS education of the 1990s prepared by and for gay male communities.
READING
Michel Foucault, J (1976). The History of Sexuality
ABC Radio (2010) Bullets for condoms: sex education in Australia (Text and audio)
John D. Lamond (1978) The ABCs of Love & Sex (Censored Trailer) (Video NOT SAFE FOR WORK)
Jonathan Zimmerman (2015) Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education
Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000) Talkin’ up to the white woman: indigenous women and feminism
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela (2015) Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture
From experience, if you teach something in schools you put the students off it for life. As depicted in Monty Python’s ‘the Meaning of Life.’
https://youtu.be/ejaWq2TXRXE
Helen, I confess I’m enjoying this information-focused series quite a lot, look forward to it in my Sunday reading,and then have to squirm in my chair for it to reappear on Monday before I can comment.
I’m finding it hard to argue that the issues you raise aren’t worth thinking about, or that your take isn’t informative and useful: it seems that we only differ when you seek to persuade readers (as you don’t in this series) that ‘The answer is Marxism’. 🙂
But quibble I shall if quibble I can, and I wanted to poke you on this. You wrote: It is possible to teach biologically accurate lessons that do not challenge the ethics of the student.
Given that the ideal targets for sex education are prepubescents, it made me ponder three questions: 1) when does a student have her own ethics as opposed to mere placeholders of rote custom; 2) can it be guaranteed that accurate information will never challenge the ethical frame of its audience; and 3) is it even desirable to avoid challenging ethical frameworks?
My tentative answers are: 1) prepubescents don’t have ethics so much as a soup of inherited and poorly-owned customs, rules, responsibilities and anxieties they’re trying to sort out but haven’t fully understood and ordered yet — and this is reflected to some extent in legal notions like the age of adult consent; 2) no — ethical frames built on falsehoods will likely be challenged by factual corrections, so it may not be possible to teach science while preserving sacred beliefs that are nevertheless false; and 3) hell no — we should be teaching young citizens to challenge their own ethical frameworks constantly, and schools too intimidated to do this are failing society intergenerationally.
I reckon we agree strongly on 3, so I’m wondering why you wrote that sentence in the first place or at least what you meant by it. I’m also wondering what you think about 1) and 2).
As a parent of a teenage autistic son; the task of trying to find out what the special school has taught him about sex has proven difficult.
Under my questioning, they dived for some manual and said it must have happened in some course or other and did a lot of huffing and puffing, surprisingly coy and defensive.
When sex acts of all kinds are easily viewed all over the internet, the coyness is a real surprise. The women who run these schools are amazingly uptight in talking about what liberated ladies of a generation ago were shouting out in the streets. It must be the new puritanism of the ladies who now run our lives.
So the school has done a bunk; now the NDIS is paying for a ‘sex-positive’ therapist to put my son on the right path. I would hate to see what a ‘sex-negative’ therapist would do.
All I want is for him to wank like a ‘normal’ teenager; something it is difficult for a parent to demonstrate to an autistic teen without breaking some law or other.
That 2nd attempt at a work-safe pic reminded me of the old Afghan folk song, “Zahk meh Dil” which has the lament “the boy across the river/has a bum like a peach/but alas I cannot swim”.
Disappointing you never quoted sex educator legends as Annie Sprinkle or Betty Dodson. Great article though! 🙂