[Crossposted at CultureKitchen.]
Amanda touches on some very nice points in this post:
Mystification, as anyone who’s tried to figure out how to stick it in without using your hands knows, is highly overrated. So yes, I favor frankness and education.
I remember driving several hours with a colleague to do a training in Morriss, Minnesota. On the way, we came across a Focus on the Family broadcast, and couldn’t help but listen (we were on our way to perform an anti-homophobia training for a sexual assault crisis program). One of the topics that came up was sex education. The woman who was describing the “objectionable” sex ed program talked about how it had the gall to teach children the terms for their “private parts,” words like “penis” and “vagina.” She got all weepy as she described how this was destroying their “natural innocence” even as she talked about how kids “natural curiosity” would lead them to try sexual things. So, are they sexually curious or naturally innocent? Or, are those two things not as separate as our radio Helen Lovejoy would have us believe?
About the only thing I remember from my own high school sex education was that our teacher said homosexuality was wrong. Other than that, it was plumbing. It only took a couple days out of our regular health class. Honestly, it was pathetic. I had better sex ed in the fifth grade in Ames, Iowa.
To a degree, I understand the fear-based approach to sex education. It’s at the heart of most of what passes for sex ed today. Indeed, the abstinence-only crew has created an industry out of fear-based sex miseducation (pdf document). What I don’t understand, though, is the desire for ignorance.
My MA thesis was a study of the Minnesota Family Council’s newspaper over a decade, focusing specifically on how they talked about sex education. There was a consistent theme, less information is better. In the early period (mid- through late-80s) the primary message was that the schools should not teach sex education. The AIDS crisis (and 90% public support of sex education, including condoms for disease and pregnancy prevention) didn’t make that a terribly sellable position. The shift to abstinence-only occurred in the late-80s/early 90s. The Right was able to co-opt legitimate fears about sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies into a message of “Don’t talk about it or they’ll do it.” Information somehow becomes license.
Whoopi Goldberg had a great response to this in her late 1980s one-woman “Fontaine goes straight” (Or something to that effect). Discussing the AIDS booklet that C. Everett Koop wanted to send out, but that Jesse Helms objected to because it “told special people how to have special sex” and not get AIDS. Helms, like so many on the Right, was running around saying, “If you tell people about this, they’ll do it.” Whoopi’s response: “What I wanna know is who is Jesse Helms fucking and what’s his name? Because I know he’s read it!” (I’ve got the party favors ready for when Jesse Helms finally enters Hell.)
“Sex is dirty; save it for someone you love.” I can’t remember where I first heard this, but it sums up the Right’s approach to sexuality quite well. It’s also not such a great message. It’s not that I have anything against “dirty” sex, but to say that sex is dirty? Well that’s going to far. But I can’t help but think that dirt (as well as “sin”) is central to this. The radio program I mentioned is exemplary of this–we can’t talk about body parts with their technical names, it somehow destroys innocence. I can’t help but think that it’s the specification of which body parts that’s supposedly doing this destruction. “Propriety” doesn’t allow us to use words like “penis” and “vagina.” We should probably avoid “clitoris” altogether since it’s not really central to the baby-making aspects of sex, and pleasure–particularly women’s pleasure–is to be feared and controlled. Better to live in ignorance than risk a loss of control.
Maybe that’s why sex is so fear-inducing; it involves loss of control. It’s not only that the ability to control others’ sex is lost, but our own ability to control ourselves can be thrown away during moments of great sex. Even if it’s something as small as having our face contort in any number of ways–many of which are quite unflattering–during sex, we lose some of our ability to determine what our body is doing. The inability to orgasm on command–or to not orgasm on command–is representative of more than just momentary discomfort, we really cannot control everything that’s going on. That loss can be discomforting.
I wonder if that’s part of what this mystification thing is all about. Sex is something over which we can never exert complete control; indeed, it sometimes seems to control us. Rather than allowing themselves to go along with that loss of control, sex must be controlled more rigidly, including information about it. We have to keep people away from it by keeping them ignorant and frightened. I think…
This is a mindset I can’t get into. Sex is a complex thing, and I can’t help but think it’s a pretty good idea to know something about it before you start having it. I’m reminded of a scene in the “Proper Condom Use” episode of South Park. Mr. Mackey is teaching the boys about sexual intercourse: “The man takes his penis and…now where did I put that thing?” Their fear of losing control would consign us all to a world of “where does this go?” (If we could send them all off with Towelie and a bag of Cheetos, and get them as far away from policy as possible, then South Park Republicans might actually be tolerable.)
In many ways, sex is about a loss of control (Sexual masochists are quite explicit about this). That’s kind of cool about it. Sex is a complicated phenomenon. It is frightening. It’s calming. It’s exciting. It’s fun. It’s dangerous. It’s painful. It’s otherworldly. It’s mundane. It’s just sex.
I think for some people sex is hot BECAUSE its dirty. majeff, you are just trying to ruin it for them with your honesty!
The hysteria over the words vagina and penis reminds me of a conversation I had with my then six year old after I had our cats fixed.
Me: Kids, the cats have been to the doctor and they are not going to be feeling all that well, so please do not rough house with them.
Son 1: Why did they go to the doctor?
Me: We need to make sure they didn’t have kittens
Son 1: THEY WACKED OFF SPOTS NARDS!
Me: Good Greif! Its testicals and no one wacked anything
Son 1: Nards is the real word. And A__’s brother says they just wack them off.
Me: No its not, son, the real word is testicals. You never here the doctor say “Son I need to examine your Nards.” And A’s brother is misinformed. There was no wacking!
Son 1: (said with great condisension) Mom, A
_’s brother is 13! I can’t say testicals at school. I’m saying Nards
Son 2: (sobbing) First you loose your testinards and then you die.
Me: No ones dieing (thinking Good God)
I like that….I’ll have to look for chances to use it 🙂
he will die a long slow death from boredom.
but he might become a great opera singer.
So, I say to all you ole white christian male wingnuts….you better be real careful… cuz we’ll cut the nards off all you old tards!
That was the best laugh I’ve had today. Out of the mouth’s of babes.
Damn good post, Jeff. I think some of this fear is expressed in the Bible. What does Eve give to man? Knowledge. What’s the synonym for knowledge in the Bible? Sex. Eve gives man sex.
(I deal with this in my novel. Funny how I’ve been thinking a lot of about this stuff.)
As I ranted the other night, the fact that the right makes shit up about sex scares the bejesus out of me. Not only do they get worked up about it becuase it scares them, they use their fear to instill fear in teens by giving them wrong information, so that when teens engage in sex, they do it in potentially unsafe ways.
And yes. Sex is sex. But it’s a thousand other things. You’ve captured that beautifully.
I think the complexity of sex is something we don’t talk enough about. We either focus on the great parts (and sex can be great) or the really awful parts (and sex can be awful). I wish we could concentrate more on how it’s all mixed together. That should be part of sex ed–kids are curious, they have real questions, they get that it’s complex…talk with them about it….it seems so simple, yet it’s not (I, without kids, say to a mother). I know I’m out of the mainstream on a lot of stuff, but I don’t get why some of this isn’t self-evident; it sure is to me.
Yeah. Well, as a mother, given what I’ve witnessed this past year as eighth graders make bad choices…
This is complicated. And I’m still trying to untangle my own Gordian knot about what sex does and does not do.
Sure, she’s got a catnip problem–and i do enable her–but that’s really the only sticky issue I might have to deal with.
I’ve never understood these folks that think if we don’t tell our kids that they have reproductive organs they won’t notice. Are they in serious denial about their own childhoods? I heard a woman on NPR (in the 80’s) say “if we tell them the parts of the car, and we teach them to drive the car, and we give them the keys to the car, they are going to want to drive the car.” Someone sent in a letter the next week that said- Mrs. — better look out the window, her son just hot-wired the car and is driving away.
So much of Christianity is based on fear that it’s not surprising they try to use fear (and misinformation) as a deterrent to sexual activity.
Much of evangelical christianity centers around fear of retribution, fear of God’s wrath, fear of being left out at Rapture time. It’s like they don’t know how to motivate themselves to “be good” without that fear.
So, about sex, it’s fear of AIDS, fear of other STD’s, fear of angering parents, fear of angering God, fear of getting a reputation. All that fear leaves no room for the beauty and the humour and, yes, the joy of sex.
No you have it backwards. Please don’t say Christianity is based on those things. Some people have taken their fear and perverted Christianity to suit thier own fears.
of course. What I meant by saying “much of evangelical christianity” was the wave of hateful, bigoted pseudo-christians that are bound and determined to turn the country into a theocracy.
I am a Christian. But not the “right” kind according to them. Meaning that my beliefs are based in love and trust and not fear and prejudice.
“MUCH of evangelical Christianity.”
Why did you panic?
Adam and Eve were supposed to be fruitful and multiply! How else could they have fulfilled this commandment?
Lorraine, haven’t you read Paradise Lost at some point in your literary career?
um. parts of it. What passage are you thinking of?
There is a sex scene in Paradise Lost before the fall, very lovingly described.
What bugs me is on the one hand some will say that the innocence of children must be preserved, and on the other they’ll assert with great authority that “kids today are growing up too fast, and they know all about sex by the time they are 13”.
I wish. Not that they would grow up too fast, but that at least they had a basic knowledge of sex that didn’t come from peers.
What I’ve heard, talking to teens, is that some of them (even older ones) that ‘know all about sex’ still know is that you can’t get pregnant if you only do ‘it’ once. Also, if the girl stands up immediately afterwards she won’t get pregnant. Ditto if you never lie down at all during sex. Oh, and douches protect you from disease. And all sorts of silly stuff, that’s been rattling around in kids heads for ages, and still is these days, no matter how fast they’ve “grown up”.
And this is with at least minimal sex education, not the abstinence program. Sigh.
The same people who want to keep kids “innocent” are usually the ones who want kids treated as adults in our court system and are mad that the SCOTUS said we can’t execute kids. Go figure!!!
they’ll say on the one hand that the innocence of children must be preserved…while on the other hand they fight to have 14-year-olds tried as adults.
Please, we are talking about white christian kids- not other kids. It is OK to treat those other kids as adults, just not our kids.
I have this (probably half-assed) theory that the religious right’s attitudes toward sex derive from a fear by the men that women, if given a choice, would never get pregnant because they’ve looked at what women go through and they know they’d never agree to it. So all their actions revolve around making sure that women have no choice but to get pregnant.
Abstinence education — you can teach abstinence while still teaching birth control but they don’t, thereby — they hope — creating a whole generation of kids who won’t know how to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Condemnation of sex outside of marriage — people who aren’t married usually prefer not to have the female participant get pregnant.
Gays and lesbians — same sex relationships are certainly not generally conducive to women getting pregnant.
Birth control and abortion — no more need be said.
Women submitting to the husband and taking her natural role — just go read any of dominionist stuff on the proper role for women. They don’t need careers, they don’t need to be educated beyond the basics, they shouldn’t even participate in sports. Their whole lives should be centered around getting married and having babies.
I came to my belief about where this fear of sex comes from when I started wondering why mysoginy developed is so many cultures around the world with no means of communication. I think that at first women were worshipped because they gave birth and men didn’t know they had anything to do with it. Once men figured out their role, they had to “control the means of production” in order to be able to identify their offspring. I remember hearing about a study of expectant father’s major fears and second only to concerns about providing financially for the child was the fear “Is the child really mine?” In order to know who your children are, you have to control who women have sex with. Hence the beginnings of the “double standard” and everything from Old Testament rules about women and sex to foot binding in China and female circumcision in Africa and the Middle East. Where our particular brand of American discomfort with sex comes from is probably a bit more complicated in how it has developed over time, but I agree that its all based on fear.
I like your analysis about loss of control, but I’m going to have to consider it a little more deeply. My initial thought is that people’s reaction to the fear sex is illogical, because as most sensible people understand, the best way to control the fear of something is to learn as much about it as possible. To demystify it, if I may borrow your own words. The idea of controlling one’s fear of something by ignoring it and denying other people access to information seems counterproductive. However, it’s clear that some (many?) people’s reactions to sex are inherently irrational. It makes me sad and frustrated because honestly, solid & accurate information about sex leads to both healthy bodies and healthy attitudes, and it’s not a difficult thing to accomplish if we, as a culture, just stop lying to ourselves. I’m so glad that I had such a fantastic public school education with 7 solid years of mandatory health classes where they dealt with both sex ed and drug/alcohol education in such a rational and informative manner. It breaks my heart that there are so many kids today that just don’t get that kind of education and as a result are unprepared for the real world.
Great diary! It’s a complicated subject and the fear and control aspect seems like a major aspect to me. I also think there is a fear of loss of parental control as children grow up, and becoming sexually active is a sign of that in this society. Lovers can be great co-conspirators too-someone who loves you and can help you stand up to the parents. Also, maybe, somewhere in there is the fact that children growing up means parents growing old, keep the kids childlike and gain eternal youth? Okay, I’m reaching.
Or maybe rigidly enforced sexual repression makes for the kind of personality that votes Republican. Just kidding there, kind of.
I’ve never quite understood why schools started teaching sex education. Isn’t this something kids should be learning from their parents?
Ok, so that was a rhetorical question.
Although I don’t know the precise history, I feel I can make a safe assumption that sex education is taught in schools as a health issue. So, as such, the concentration in sex education classes should be on preventing disease and other threats to health. And while abstinence can certainly be mentioned as the only sure-fire way to avoid sexually-transmitted disease, it would be irresponsible to limit the discussion to abstinence, when there is plenty of statistical proof that teenagers are, in fact, having sex and spreading STDs. Let it become a public health issue.
The law requires parents to vaccinate children against certain diseases to prevent their spread among the population – for purposes of avoiding a public health crisis. So, following the same logic, one could argue that it is necessary, in public schools, to address the public health issue of educating students about effective methods of preventing sexually-transmitted disease. Especially since there is no vaccine against many STDs and no cure for some.
This argument would be even stronger if we had a national health care system, because the fact is that preventing STDs is far cheaper than treating them, and it would be an issue of the better use of public funds. But even without a national health care system, it seems to me that the interests of public health represent a strong enough argument for addressing the issue of effective disease prevention through education.
If religious parents want to teach their children that abstinence is the only proper solution, fine. Let them teach this to their children, in the privacy of their own homes, in the context of religious morality. If they don’t like the fact that their children are being taught sex education in a public school, fine. Let them pay to send their children to a private religious school. And let them assume financial responsibility for whatever health care issues their children face.
I’ll repeat what I’ve said before on other health-related issues: let’s use the power of the insurance companies to rally for our side for once. Let’s get them to lobby for legislation calling sex education a public health issue in the interest of saving them money when it comes to paying claims for diseases that could have been prevented. If corporations are the only voices being heeded, then let’s give them a reason to start talking.
I don’t know when sex began being taught in the schools, but it was before the 1950’s, and it was a darn good thing because the children of parents that never had that talk with their children were dumber than fence posts and perfect prey to sexual predators and their own sexual explorations. Girls got pregnant that had no idea how it happened. It was common belief among girls then that getting married is what made you pregnant. Kissing might make you pregnant and even stranger and more bizarre things than you can imagine.
There are still parents today that never have that talk with their children. They need reliable information from somewhere.
I am a progressive parent who is extremely open with my kids and still, still bringing up the subject of sex is met with a level of mortification worthy of an academy award! My favorite tactics over the years has been to isolate one of my kids in the car while I am driving him/her someplace or another and then bring up the subject. It is so fun to see his eyes widen, his ears turn red, and his right hand clutch the car door handle, as if ready to leap out at the next intersection.
Luckily my brother in law is a nationally renowned sex educator and author, and has scared them shitless on any number of occasions with a well-placed lecture or graphic pictures of STD’s.
I’m sure they know the mechanics of sex, but I always feel compelled to impart some of my hard-won wisdom (yeah, right) about respect, responsibility, relationships, etc.
That’s a great image of your son!
My mother recently decided to talk to me about sex. Now, I’m 26 years old and my mother and I have probably had…I don’t know…2 conversations about sex in my whole life. When I needed to know something, she gave me a book. When I asked a question, she got really uncomfortable and gave me the shortest possible answer. It was all about euphemism and innuendo, or avoiding the subject wherever possible.
As a result, I do not talk about sex casually. I probably never will. I have no problem talking about it in certain situations, if you get my drift, but not in everyday conversation, and certainly not with my mother.
Well, lo and behold, my mother had some sort of conversion experience at a conference where people were being really open about sex as a blessing and sex as God’s gift to us, etc, etc. She comes home and decides to bring it up with me over dinner. I choke on my salad and we have the following exchange:
I still haven’t recovered. I hope I will be able to talk with my kids about sex, but something tells me it ain’t gonna happen.
It is always shocking to hear our parents talk about sex. You think I would realize this since the one time my mother mentioned it I almost threw up. I still remember her exact words: “oh, you kids (meaning the younger generation) think you invented sex!”….Ewww. Just the thought that we didn’t invent sex meant that she had it; probably with my dad.
Did you ever see the SNL parody of the Roomba, that robotic vacuum…called the “Woomba”? It’s for women on those “not so fresh days”. Anyway, during it they use several euphimisms, including “your lady business” and “cooter.” I made the mistake of telling someone about it in front of my 20 yo daughter and when I said the word “cooter” she said “Mom, I don’t want to hear you say that word ever again.” And she actually shuddered.
Exactly! I felt…queasy. 🙂
The worst part is, my mother is an Episcopal priest (I put together a blog for her) and she decided to preach a whole sermon about sex the next Sunday. So she’s up there talking all about her conference and the joy of sex and I’m sitting in the back just cringing.
It was awful.
I’m in the middle of grilling chicken, but I read a little bit of the blog and she seems really neat.
I’ve been thinking about going to an Episcopal church after being “away” from the Catholic church for two decades and knowing that I would find it too restrictive these days. Since I’ve been in the South I’ve been to some non-denominational churches and they really skeeved me out. Hand waving, on the verge of speaking in tongues….yuck.
Just the fact that there are women clergy like your Mom makes me like it already.
There are lots of reformed Catholics in the Episcopal church. My mother always referred to it as ‘Catholicism without the guilt’. We’re certainly a minority around here, too – it’s all evangelical mega churches, which yeeeaaa!
The church is going thru a tough time at the moment – you’ve probably heard about it. The thing that really pisses me off is it isn’t an organic movement. If there were tons of people in the Episcopal church clamoring for conservative policies, etc, that would be one thing, but it’s basically just a handful of the creepy people we’re already fighting coming in to stir up trouble.
In other words, for me, this time it’s personal.
And your mother sounds delightful too — wish we could lure her up to NoCal, as our parish is in the midst of a rector search…
hard core to the belief that my parents have only had sex twice–once for me, once for my sister. Now, this hasn’t been an easy belief to hold–especially when they openly mention sex–but I will hold to it until the end of my days.
If you want to be really horrified, imagine having your mother ask YOU about sex. When I was 16, my mother started dating again (four years after my father had died and 25 years after her last date) and she had lots of questions about ‘making out’ (like when, where, and how far to go) that made me want to run away from home.
While I’m clinging to the belief they’ve done it twice, I think my mother is clinging to the idea I’ve never done it…This is, after all, the woman who said to me–when I was 34!–“Please don’t ever try marijuana.” At least I hadn’t smoked any that day…
Barbara Kingsolver has a great essay in the book Small Wonders where she talks about the difficulties of writing sex scenes in her novels, at least in part because she is worried about how her mother will react to the fact that she can write sex scenes (even though Kingsolver is married and has children).
Sometimes I think I have stepped of my native planet and into a parallel world that looks like and in a lot of ways seems like it is the planet I was on. . .but oh, wow, it just isn’t.
For god’s sake, I was raised in the 1940’s by parents that called everything by its proper name, even body parts. Parents that never used that adorable “baby talk” but real grown up words all the time about everything. So my brothers and I had a wonderful thing as we grew up: truthful information and a vocabulary. I remember my 7 year old little brother saying one day, “Something happened at school today that was so humorous.” Not funny, not silly, not a hoot, but humorous.
We knew the names for our body parts, and we didn’t pee or poop, we urinated or had a bowel movement.
We knew the mechanics and textbook descriptions of sexual intercourse. We knew why it was better to wait until we grew up and could make informed decisions about such things. We also were taught that sex was something that two loving people shared with each other, and that was why it was best to wait until we were older.
In High school we had a full semester of sex education which was straight forward, truthful and dealt with a whole spectrum of things including pregnancy. We were briefly told about homosexuality, but it was clear it was not the preferred sexual expression although it was not presented as wrong so much as just that there were people “like that.”
All of this occurred in very ultra conservative Salt Lake City, Utah public schools, and my very religious-conservative family upbringing.
So what the fuck are we doing in 2005 acting like sex is a disease, a sin, a disgraceful act?
Yep, got to be a parallel world.
Another great diary, Jeff
I remember was 4th grade, when the boys got an extra recess while all the girls sat inside and watched some movie called something like “What Every Girl Should Know”, sponsored by Kotex of course, with all the information about “the amazing changes your body will be going through.”
Of course, when my “amazing changes” occurred the next year (possibly from the stress of my dad’s death), I was so panicked I tried to hide it for the first 2 months. My mom finally caught on and took me out to buy the pads, special belt to hold the pads (remember those, ladies?), etc. (I didn’t discover tampons till middle school, and that was only thanks to my friends.)
I’ve been playing around with a novel about a secession of states from the ultra-religious government-to-be, and among my “supporting documents” is a total change in the education system. In my ideal school, sex education would actually start in the earliest years, age appropriate of course. (In my novel, there’s also 100% effective birth control, which leads to some very liberal views on sex, but that’s another story…)
Yep, I remember those grade school movies, and we had a 5th grade biology teacher that dared to tell us all about reproduction in animals. . .something we had already observed by then any way. My mother was always one step or more ahead of the schools in her information giving, so it was always a “yeah, so what” reaction I had.
Your novel sounds intriguing. Let us know when it is ready to read.
Maybe I’m trying to make it too realistic — I’m trying to come up with how they can actually secede without the military coming in and taking over.
Maybe if the US military is stretched thin due to an unwinnable war in the Middle East…nah, who’d believe that would happen? 😉
Yes, it started with a girl riding home on her bike and saying “did you get them mom?”. and them mom pulled out a box of kotex and explained menstruation.
Sadly American women due to “Christianity” are given two roles when it comes to sex.
The Madonna or The Whore.
It takes a while to drop all the BS laid on us and mingle both roles into what WE want/need for ourselves.
Excellent diary MaJeff, thank you!
sticking it in without you hands was just good technique…silly me! I don’t see the difference between the words penis, finger, fist (MAJeff, don’t go there…settle down), they are just anatomy names for parts of the body. God, some people’s ignorance sometimes just astonishes me.
And BTW, Mrs. Christian-Right-Wingnut, according to your faith we lost our innocence with eating the apple, so your kids aren’t innocent to begin with! Jeebus! Be consistant!
Teaching about sex as a matter of health and about one’s body is important. It shows that this is how human beings work and no amount of glamorization or degradation of sex can stop it. It would be useful for an approach that emphasizes that one is not expected to have sex right away, but should be responsible for one’s own sexual behavior. This ought to mollify everyone.
I ever heard by the radical theocrats on this issue was on a public access TV show. The “big-haired ladies” (extremist faux Christians) were going on about how it was so terrible that girls in middle school were being told that they should not get pregnant during their teen years because having a child too young would limit their options in life, make it harder to go to college, properly care for their child(ren), etc.
And I’m staring at my TV in disbelief – telling young girls that teenage pregnancy will limit their options in life is a bad thing? WTF?
And why is that a bad thing, Mrs. Wingnut? I waited all ears to find this out.
Well, it seems that this is part of the secular humanist agenda – to tell girls that there are practical reasons why getting pregnant very young is not such a good idea. The only acceptable reason for not getting pregnant too young is that Jesus says having sex outside of marriage is wrong. Period. Full stop. End of story.
Any teacher in a public school that tells girls any other reason for not getting pregnant young is “interfering with my right as a parent to teach my children according to my religious beliefs.” So teachers MUST be SILENT on the subject of teen pregnancy, unless they are willing to say – only and no more – Jesus says it is wrong.
I guess sticking to – “do not ever have sex” – (abstinence education) would probably be OK with them, too. Then teenagers won’t ever have sex and there won’t be any teen pregnacies to discuss, right?