Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality

Chapter 5: Embattled Knowledge: Curiosity and Understanding in Sex Education

137 5 Embattled Knowledge Curiosity and Understanding in Sex Education My interest in sex education began in the late s, when I was one of about a dozen women in a feminist theory seminar at the University of North Carolina. One afternoon, a woman told us that she had been surprised to learn the night before that her son’s eighth-grade sex education class included lessons on clitoral and vaginal orgasms. Many of us in the room expressed similar surprise and concern. We wondered aloud if eighth-graders needed such intimate information about women’s and girls’ bodies. What would they do with the information? Would they respect girls’ sexual privacy if they knew about vulvas and clitorises? Eventually, one woman interrupted and asked what we found dangerous about young people’s access to this information. What place did we think girls’ pleasure should have in young people’s sex education? When did we want young people to learn about clitorises and orgasms? I wished we had answers to her questions, but my classmates and I were stumped. The same semester that we struggled to articulate a good reason for an eighth-grade boy to know about female sexual pleasure, North Carolina’s new Teach Abstinence until Marriage legislation sparked public debates across the state about young people’s sexual well-being. The law asserted that students face risks of pregnancy, exploitation, HIV/AIDS, and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). In response to those risks, Teach Abstinence until Marriage insisted that school-based instruction provide medically accurate information and a message of sexual abstinence to help young people survive. Those advocating comprehensive sex education in bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb Chap-05.qxd 4/12/08 7:28 PM Page 137 North Carolina’s public schools argued that knowledge of sexual behaviors and risks was central to young people managing significant sexual vulnerability to disease, pregnancies, and exploitation. Those who promoted abstinence-only education focused on the imperative that youth abstain from sexual activity. Abstinence-only advocates argued that sexual knowledge provided young people with inadequate protection against harm and that comprehensive sex education itself represented a risk to young people simply by suggesting that young people could engage safely in sexual activity . Though these opponents disagreed on the best form for school-based sex education to take, they agreed that young people’s sexuality was a site of inherent risk and danger. No matter what form of instruction the opponents advocated in their county’s public schools, they believed sex education played a pivotal role in determining that danger. The difference lay in whether they thought that knowledge would worsen or ease the sexual risks in young people’s lives. The pleasures and dangers of sexual expression and knowledge lie at the heart of this chapter. Having thought for years about sex education, I find myself slightly embarrassed by my initial reaction to the prospect of students learning in a middle school sex education classroom about clitoral orgasms. I recognize the heteronormativity of the concerns we expressed in the seminar: we placed boys and girls in a seemingly inevitable and antagonistic relationship with each other, and we failed to consider that girls might also learn how they might participate in their own and others’ clitoral orgasms. I feel impatient with my worry that learning about sexual pleasure would compromise eighth graders’ sexual innocence, as if young people are not always and already navigating a sexual world rife with con- flicting and confusing sexual messages. In the ten years since that feminist theory seminar, I have come to believe that the question to ask is neither whether nor when young people should learn about sexual pleasure. Instead, I have come to ask a threefold question: first, what makes young people’s sexual knowledge—and particularly their knowledge of female bodies—so very dangerous; second, given the perception and reality of danger, how can sex education best support youth as they learn about, know, and experience the embodied pleasures of sexuality and learning; and third, how can all young people—no matter their racial or socioeconomic status—have access to liberatory sexual knowledge?1 RISKY LESSONS 138 Chap-05.qxd 4/12/08 7:28 PM Page 138 As embarrassing as my early reactions might now seem, writing Risky Lessons has also helped me appreciate that the worries we aired in that seminar are not simply silly. Instead, our concerns re...