The Politics of Virginity: Abstinence in Sex Education (review)

We are midway through President Obama's first term in office and abstinence-only sex education seems to have had – for the time being at least – its moment in the sex education sun. Although the abstinence approach is currently on the wane, it remains a valuable subject of study for at least two reasons. First, with the inclusion of abstinence-only sex education in the massive welfare overhaul in 1996, abstinence became the de facto national sex education policy for more than a decade. Until quite recently abstinence was the only sex education strategy with a dedicated federal funding stream. Second, as abstinence was the sex education law of the land, a full generation of America's youth have been exposed to and likely affected by this sex education strategy. Doan and Calterone Williams' The Politics of Virginity is more successful in exploring the former than the later. For a sociological audience the real strength of this contribution is in applying a political science point of view to an area also taken up by sociologists. In particular, the examination of the federal legislative process which resulted in abstinence-only sex education pairs nicely with the more cultural approach taken by sociologists such as Janice Irvine, Kristin Luker and Jessica Fields.

One of the primary objectives of the book is to explicate why abstinence-only sex education came to dominate the public instruction of sex education in the United States. To this end, the authors develop what they call the morality politics framework. This framework places abstinence education in a macro perspective alongside other morality-based policies such as restrictions on abortion and same-sex marriage. Morality policies are policies designed to influence behaviors based on specific moral codes and sets of beliefs. However, the authors argue quite persuasively that abstinence education represents what they call a "stealth morality policy." This type of legislation, mandate, or funding authorization is bundled into larger pieces of legislation to which these morality policies may or may not be directly related. To that end, early chapters in this book are devoted to uncovering the complex process by which abstinence-until-marriage education found its way into welfare reform legislation. No doubt the authors could tell a similar story about the process by which abstinence-only funding was included in 2010 health care reform despite the mounting scientific evidence discrediting abstinence and the Obama administration's lack of support. To my mind, this is the real strength of the book in that it reveals the machinations behind the Title V policy's insertion into PROWRA, which was the turning point for the ascendency of abstinence-only as the nation's primary sex education policy. As political scientists, Doan and Williams are well positioned to tell this story.

The book is less compelling when it moves on to the other aims of the study. In an attempt to document what abstinence education teaches young people, the authors present a content analysis of four abstinence curricula. While the content analysis reinforces what we already know about the highly gendered, heterosexist and fear-based approach of formal abstinence curriculum, it fails to offer anything beyond, say, the Waxman Report.¹ As a formal academic study we might expect a methodologically rigorous sampling procedure for the curricula reviewed or at least a clear and purposeful rationale for the curricula that were included in the content analysis. Yet the authors offer no convincing rationale as to why or how the four curricula were selected. They do not represent the four most popular or most widely used, those used in the regions of California in which they conducted another portion of the study, nor were they randomly selected. Essentially the content analysis of four abstinence curricula offers neither the breadth of a large well-designed quantitative analysis nor the depth of a small well-designed qualitative analysis.

The same general criticism applies to the empirical section of the book, which draws on in-depth...