Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality

Chapter 4: Natural and Ideological: Depicting Bodies in Sex Education

98 4 Natural and Ideological Depicting Bodies in Sex Education Ischeduled a time to talk with Lee Ann Finch after hearing her make the case in Southern County school board meetings and newspaper editorials for abstinence-only education. I met the white, upper-middle class, and middle-aged Finch in her office, and she explained that if Southern County had to offer school-based sex education at all—and Finch preferred that they did not—that instruction should support young people in their efforts to resist the lure of immediate physical gratification. Finch believed that school-based instruction should emphasize the risks of sexual behavior and the benefits of sexual abstinence. Though Finch recognized that schools could not present a Christian message on the value of chaste bodies and thoughts, she also believed they could and should emphasize that only abstinence from all sexual expression outside of heterosexual marriage would keep them safe from physical, emotional, and moral harm. At the close of our interview, Finch invited me to attend an upcoming Christian youth group meeting where she would be speaking. Finch promised an opportunity for me to see Christian-based abstinence-only education . I would never witness this sort of instruction, she said ruefully, in most Southern County schools. There, students learned “anything goes.” I seized the chance to observe the abstinence-only instruction that conservative Christians provided their children at home. I had seen Finch and her conservative allies—also predominantly white, middle-class, and middleaged —act strategically in Southern County school board meetings, where they offered arguments about health, well-being, and morality that they bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb Chap-04.qxd 4/14/08 9:28 PM Page 98 NATURAL AND IDEOLOGICAL 99 hoped would be convincing to a secular audience. In interviews with me, Finch and other conservatives elaborated their ideas about sex education, but the instruction they described was always located in public schools. Most abstinence-only advocates found public schools disappointingly secular , anti-family, and amoral, and most had withdrawn their children from Southern County public schools in favor of local Christian private schools. At this youth group meeting, Finch would teach as she wanted young people to learn, free of the strictures of public education and debate. The night of the youth group, Finch and I drove in her car to a private home in a wealthy subdivision on the outskirts of Southern County. I realized as we pulled into the driveway that I had visited the home before, having interviewed Eleanor Taylor, another abstinence-only advocate, a few weeks earlier about her participation in Southern County’s sex education debate. Taylor’s children attended private Christian schools and received their sex education in church youth groups like the one Taylor would lead tonight at this coeducational meeting. After Finch parked her car on the wooded lot, we walked inside to find Taylor, her husband, their two sons, and ten other white teenaged girls and boys chatting, laughing, and eating snacks in the Taylors’ family room. No one paid much attention to me as I settled in a chair toward the back of the room. The teens found seats on the couch and floor, while the Taylors and Finch stood near the entrance to the kitchen. The youth ministers , a white woman and man in their twenties, opened the meeting with song and prayer and then introduced Lee Ann Finch, the evening’s guest speaker. Finch moved to the front of the family room and began her presentation . She explained to the teenagers that she, their parents, and God expected them to abstain from sexual activity until they were married. Premarital sex would not only put them at physical risk of disease and pregnancy but would also compromise the Christian unions that they would establish with their “future mates.” Finch held up what looked to be a shoebox wrapped in elaborate foil paper and gold ribbons. As she considered the bodily implications of sexual activity before marriage, Finch tore the paper: “You could kiss your boyfriend in the backseat of a car,” she said, tearing the paper once. “You could do some heavy petting,” she continued , again tearing the wrapping. “You could have sex before you get married,” she said, ripping the paper one last time. The wrapping was ruined. The girls and boys laughed quietly and nervously. Chap-04.qxd 4/14/08 9:28 PM Page 99 Finch...