Reviews

The Disastrous State of Sexuality Education

Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States, by Janice Irvine (U. of Cal. Press, 2002)

In January 2003, Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times: "Over the last few years conservative groups in President Bush's support base have declared war on condoms, in a campaign that is downright weird -- but that, if successful, could lead to millions of deaths from AIDS around the world."1

Actually, the American war on condoms, and more broadly, on safer sex and pregnancy prevention, goes back to at least the 1960s -- though it achieved its greatest success in 1996 when Congress conditioned funding for sex-ed on an "abstinence-only" curriculum. Under this federal policy, students must be taught that any sex outside marriage poses grave physical and psychological risks. Condoms and other safer sex techniques cannot be mentioned, except to emphasize their deficiencies.

Janice Irvine's Talk About Sex surveys the disastrous state of sexuality education in the U.S. and traces how we got there. The first half of the book is a useful history of American sex-ed: the founding of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS) by Mary Calderone and others; the ideological battles of the 1960s when sex education was vilified as atheistic propaganda and a "communist plot"; and the hijacking of sex-ed in the 1980s by religious-right groups that received government funding to produce such biased, medically inaccurate materials as Sex Respect and distribute them to classrooms. She gives resonance to the story by describing the success that those opposed to anything approaching comprehensive sex-ed have had in demonizing it through inaccurate but sensational "depravity narratives" -- invented tales of perverse classroom doings "to scare parents and discredit sex educators."2

Much of this history has been told before; what distinguishes Talk About Sex is its second half, in which Irvine offers insights and social analysis. She explores how sex-ed opponents have played on "long-standing fears that sex talk triggers sex," and how, more broadly, they have been able to employ "discursive strategies" that resonate culturally and socially. For example, "the widespread circulation of political arguments that collapse speech and conduct" is a familiar feature of modern politics, and can be seen in rhetoric on subjects ranging from Internet regulation to blaming the media for social ills. Similarly, Irvine identifies "our culture's master narrative of child molesting" as a "powerful rhetoric of fear" that feeds irrationality, denial, and disastrous public policy around sexuality and youth.3

With increasing federal dollars going to "abstinence-unless-married" sexuality education, the present prospects for a sane and balanced public policy on adolescent sexual health are pretty bleak. But Irvine also notes encouraging developments. In Merrimack, New Hampshire, for example, the local school board in 1995 passed a policy entitled "Prohibition of Alternate Lifestyle Instruction," which banned any teaching or counseling that had "the effect of encouraging or supporting homosexuality as a positive lifestyle alternative." The policy cast such a broad chill over the classroom that teachers deleted poems by Walt Whitman and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night from the curriculum, along with AIDS prevention material. A First Amendment lawsuit was filed; protesting teachers were quoted in the international press; and students vowed to wear black armbands and pink buttons until the policy was repealed. Gay rights became for the first time a major political issue in Merrimack.

In the end, as Irvine recounts, "the anger that conservatives mobilized was directed back toward themselves."4 Conservative Christians lost their majority on the school board at the next election, and the new board repealed the policy.

Irvine concludes that the battle for comprehensive sexuality education will only be won when "the culture of stigma" that still surrounds sex in the U.S. is defeated. Conservatives, she says,

have drawn on the tenacious power of sexual shame and fear to galvanize residents to oppose comprehensive programs. ... Parents or school board members who have stood up to conservative sex education opposition report that they have been made to feel "dirty." ... These strategies can only succeed in the type of sexual culture which conservatives have worked to hold in place, wherein sex is largely shameful and stigmatizinig rhetoric is acceptable. ... Only a successful challenge to this culture of stigma could meaningfully shift the dynamics of the sex education debates.5

Equally important, says Irvine, the lingering Romantic-era image of the innocent child is a "highly exploitable icon" that "demands that we ignore the complexities of real children while policing their exposure to sexual knowledge in ways that are impossible, even undesirable, in contemporary culture." In these circumstances, sex-ed "can only be, at best, an uncomfortable prospect," with sex educators appearing "unsavory if not outright dangerous." Hence, the culture wars over sex education "cannot readily abate until this construct of childhood has been reinvented."6

Times Columnist Kristof, though asserting his support for abstinence education, also pointed out that "young people have been busily fornicating ever since sex was invented, in 1963 (as the poet Philip Larkin calculated)," and that "disparaging condoms is far more likely to discourage their use than to discourage sex. The upshot will be more gonorrhea and AIDS among young Americans."7

As Irvine shows, this is the unfortunate outcome of a misguided public policy that demonizes sexuality and shortchanges the free-expression rights of youth.

Marjorie Heins
April 4, 2003

NOTES

1. Nicolas Kristof, "The Secret War on Condoms," New York Times, Jan. 10, 2003, p. A23.

2. Irvine, Talk About Sex, p. 73.

3. Irvine, pp. 132, 134.

4. Irvine, p. 163.

5. Irvine, p. 195.

6. Irvine, pp. 197-98.

7. Kristof, "The Secret War on Condoms."