The Expurgation of Pleasure
In 1989, reviewing the definitions of healthy teenage sexuality that she had collected from hundreds of professionals over the years, the veteran progressive sex educator Peggy Brick noticed “a profound gap in adult thinking about adolescent sexuality. Several concepts central to human sexuality [were] missing,” she said, “notably pleasure, sexual satisfaction and gratification, and orgasm. Even adults who discount the usefulness of ‘just say no’ are unlikely to advocate good sex for teens.”1 In 1994, SIECUS reported that fewer than one in ten courses mentioned anything about sexual behavior, and only 12 percent of sex ed curricula “supp[lied] any positive information about sexuality” at all.2
Around the same time as Brick’s lamenting the arid state of sex educators’ thinking, sociologist Michelle Fine was observing it in practice in city high schools. Struck, too, by what wasn’t there, Fine wrote an article in the Harvard Educational Review called “Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Female Sexual Desire.” The piece showed how the official line of sex ed was that girls want love but they’d rather not have sex, and that they consent to sex only as a ruse to attain love. Because this quest was presumed to put girls at risk of exploitation by callow boys or caddish men, classroom conversation concerned itself exclusively with female victimization, sexual violence, and personal morality. On the rare occasion female desire did come up, it was only a “whisper” emerging from girls as “an interruption of the ongoing [official] conversation.”3
Curiously, while most curricula overlook desire or pleasure as a reason to have sex, and while the physical signs of desire are rarely addressed, all classes supply students with a repertoire of “refusal skills” and “delaying tactics” to combat the urge, along with plenty of time to rehearse them in structured role playing. (These tactics don’t inspire much confidence in this skeptical observer. ETR’s “Reducing the Risk,” for example, suggests chewing a cough drop to prevent deep kissing and, to cool down a heated moment, leaping up to exclaim, “Wow, look at the time!”)5 Desire, when acknowledged, is as often as not someone else’s or that of the crowd, which seeks not pleasure, but conformity. “Peer pressure” is uniformly high on the list of reasons to have sex.
I attended meetings in the late 1990s of a New York City Board of Education committee packed with conservatives by Republican mayor Rudolph Giuliani and charged with revising sex-ed curriculum authored by the previous, Democratic administration. A large part of one session was devoted to striking out the words vaginal, anal, and oral wherever they appeared modifying intercourse in the text. Said one board member, who identified himself as a father, “We don’t have to give children any more ideas than they already have.”
For educators with a conservative agenda, teaching that sex means heterosexual intercourse is part of the point. For straight unmarried boys and girls, according to them, anything more than holding hands is treacherous and sinful; homosexuality is beyond consideration. (Even for married folk, sex beyond intercourse can be dicey. In their megaseller The Act of Marriage, fundamentalist Christian marriage counsellors Tim and Beverly LaHaye caution that a vibrator “creates erotic sensation that no human on earth can equal,” putting a woman who gets used to one at risk of finding her “major motivation to marry . . . destroyed.” They also warn that the jury is still out on the potential dangers of oral sex.)6
For the comprehensives … the censorship of classroom conversation is not deliberate in this way. It represents for some instructors a resigned surrender to pressure from opposition (the banishment of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, for suggesting that masturbation might be discussed in the classroom, stands as a sort of cautionary parable.) For others, the shrinking repertoire of topics they are willing to discuss signals a gradual, not-so-conscious absorption of the values behind the conservative pressure. In either case, though, abstinence-plusers haven’t given in all the way. They don’t foment fear of all sex or try to persuade kids that sex is a privilege of married couples … In abstinence-plus programs, abstinence means refraining from risky behavior, which is to say from intercourse.
The week after that revealing review, Rappaport gave her sixth-grade girls an assignment: “Go home and find your clitorises.” The teacher, who was then the mother of two teenage boys, chuckled recalling her students’ shocked faces and also understood the hazards of what she’d done: “If I were in a public school, they’d have fired me.”
In the end, while the abstinence-plus teachers do not impose the Right’s embargo on talking about sex outside heterosexual monogamous marriage, their focus on intercourse as the verboten act, coupled with the bowdlerization of nonpenetrative sexual experiences, has an ironic and ultimately harmful effect. Much as they try to deemphasize intercourse, it comes to take up a whole new picture … “To kid, ‘to have sex’ means ‘to have intercourse,’” Rappaport reflected, echoing what many other teachers have told me. “So when we say ‘Don’t have intercourse’ and leave out the rest, it’s as if the rest doesn’t exist. What they get is ‘Don’t have sex.’”
“When adults deny the full range of human sexual expression and regard only intercourse as ‘sex,’ students are denied an important educational opportunity,” wrote the sex educator Mary Krueger in 1993. “Many young people believe there is no acceptable form of sexual behavior other than intercourse. Operating under that assumption, students may put themselves at risk from unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases by engaging in intercourse when less risky sexual behavior would have been equally fulfilling.”8 In Fatal Advice, the author and AIDS activist Cindy Patton agreed strenuously. The dissemination of important information crucial to containing the AIDS epidemic among young people was “made virtually impossible by the restrictions that prevented the discussion of condoms or instruction in non-intercourse forms of sex,” she wrote.9 By 2001, the omissions in abstinence-only education seem to have left a fair number of teens with the impression that anal intercourse carries no risk. The practice, at any rate, seems to be more common than in previous generations, especially in communities that attach a high value to vaginal virginity and among young urban gay men, an alarming number of whom report practicing the riskiest act, unprotected anal intercourse.10 Such “prevention” of sex prevents real prevention: of disease. As a result, young people are dying.
Research on the quality of youths’ sexual experience is virtually nonexistent. Getting funding to ask adults about their sexual attitudes or behavior is hard enough; asking minors the same questions is nigh on illegal. Congress has repeatedly blocked surveys of young people that mention oral sex.13 Imagine what it would be to apply to the National Institutes of Health to find out about sixteen-year-olds’ fantasies, their desires, their arousal or orgasm? That, in the eyes of many influential Congress members, would border on sexual abuse.
Still, there’s no reason to believe kids are different from adults in this regard. Under the best of circumstances, pleasure takes practice. And sexual ignorance, coupled with sexual guilt perpetrated by parents, clergy, teachers, and public-service announcements, contributes to crummy sex, and to all the emotional “harms” with which abstinence-only educators impugn adolescent sexual activity. Said sexologist Leonore Tiefer, “It is impossible to separate issues of coercion and consent, regret, neurosis, harm, or abuse from a culture in which there is no sex education.”
Although many “sexually active” youngsters have intercourse only intermittently, anecdotal evidence suggests that when intercourse is possible, it happens fast, and oral sex is an equally hasty affair. “We used to do all this slow kissy, touchy stuff,” a seventeen-year-old who had recently lost her virginity told me. “But now its like, the minute we start, he’s looking for that condom.” … Long Island, New York, middle school guidance counsellor Deb Rakowsky asked one ninth-grader girl what sex was to her. “It’s, like, the boy puts it in you and moves around for about three minutes,” she replied. How does it feel to you? The girl shrugged. “If that’s her idea of sex,” Rakowsky told me, “I think its pretty sad.”
Of at least one phenomenon we have plenty of evidence: kids are having sex they don’t want, and the ones who say they don’t want it tend to be girls. In the late 1980s, the prominent sex educator Marian Howard announced that the greatest wish expressed by the eight-grade girls entering her Atlanta sexuality-ed program was to learn how to say no without hurting a boy’s feelings. In the two decades that have followed, study after study has been released demonstrating that girls are having sex they don’t want, that girls who feel good about themselves don’t have sex, and that girls who have had sex don’t feel good about themselves. In the mid-1990s, it was reported that one in four teenage girls said she’d been abused or forced to have sex on a date.
Girls are indisputably the more frequent victims of sexual exploitation and violence. But gender assumptions articulated by Fine play not only into young people’s feelings about themselves and sex but also subtly into the ways these research data are obtained and interpreted. One way gender biases are smuggled into research is under cover of a study’s definitions, or lack thereof. In one of the above studies … the questionnaire the girls answered did not define “abuse” at all. The other … described abuse as “when someone in your family or someone else touches you in a sexual way in a place you did not want to be touched, or does something to you sexually which they shouldn’t have done.”
If girls are not supposed to feel desire and are charged with guarding the sexual gates, were Marian Howard’s students able to conjure any self-respecting, self-protective self-image besides saying no? What, to the Guttmacher respondents, was “something . . . they shouldn’t have done?” Nancy D. Kellogg, at the pediatrics department at the University of Texas, San Antonio, has pointed out that teenagers may use the term abuse for wanted but illegal sex, such as that between an adolescent girl and an adult man.17 Or might these girls desire to be touched by a boy but worry that if it comes to intercourse he won’t put on a condom? If he forces her anyway, it is rape. But fearing the consequences of arousal is not the same as not wanting to be touched.
In 2000, a poll of five hundred twelve- to seventeen-year-olds conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy found that nearly two-thirds of those who had “had sex” wished they had waited (the report used the unclear terms had sex and sexually active). Of the girls, 72 percent had regrets, compared with 55 percent of the boys. More than three-quarters of the respondents thought teens should not be “sexually active” until after high school.18 A spokesperson for the campaign said the poll was evidence that “many teens are taking a more cautious attitude toward having sex.”19 If a cautious attitude were all, and if caution were to translate to safer sex, that would be great. But these data reveal more than caution; the reveal shame. Teens get the message that the sex they are having is wrong, and whenever they have it, at whatever age, is too early.
The findings inspire many troubling questions. Are these expressed feelings akin to “postabortion syndrome,” a second-thought sadness brought on not necessarily by the experience itself but by the barrage of scolding messages from teachers, parents, and media? And why do girls feel them more than boys do? Again, might this be related to the still-thriving double standard? How much of that sexual regret is really about romantic disappointment? Might real pleasure, in a sex-positive atmosphere, balance or even outweigh regret over the loss of love? Even if the sex isn’t satisfying, Thompson has found, a young person may look back on the experience with happiness, pride, or secret rebellious glee. But my instinct is, bad sex is more likely to leave bad feelings.
The banishment of desire and pleasure is not exclusive to the sex education classroom, of course. As we’ve seen in the first half of Harmful to Minors, the notion that youthful sexuality is a problem pervades our thinking in all arenas. If images of desire appear in the media, critics call them brainwashing. In the family and between people of different ages, sizes, or social positions, sex is always thought of as coercion and abuse. At best, youthful sex is a regrettable mistake; at worst it is a pathology, a tragedy, or a crime. In the secular language of public health, engaging in sex is a “risk behavior,” like binge drinking and anorexia. In religion, it is temptation and a sin.
All the while, from the political right to the the left, adults call child sexuality normal. What’s abnormal, or unhealthful, is acting on it. In “responsible” circles, it is nearly verboten to suggest that youthful sex can be benign—and heretical to call it a good thing.
1 – Peggy Brick, “Toward a Positive Approach to Adolescent Sexuality,” SIECUS Report 17 (May-June 1989): 3.
2 – Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education, 1.
3 – Michelle Fine, “Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire,” Harvard Educational Review 58 (1988): 33.
5 – Richard P. Barth, Reducing the Risk: Building Skills to Prevent Pregnancy, STD, and HIV, 3d ed. (Santa Cruz, Calif.: ETR Associates, 1996), 89.
6 – Tim LaHaye and Beverly LaHaye, The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1976), 289-90.
8 – Mary M. Krueger, “Everyone Is an Exception: Assumptions to Avoid in the Sex Education Classroom,” Family Life Educator (fall 1993).
9 – Cindy Patton, Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 34.
10 – Tamar Lewin, “Survey Shows Sex Practices of Boys,” New York Times, December 19, 2000; U.S. Conference of Mayors, “Safer Sex Relapse: A Contemporary Challenge,” AIDS Information Exchange 11, no. 4 (1994): 1-8.
13 – “Research Critical to Protecting Young People from Disease Blocked by Congress,” Advocates for Youth, press release, December 19, 2000.
16 – Tamar Lewin, “Sexual Abuse Tied to 1 in 4 Girls in Teens,” New York Times, October 1, 1997.
17 – Nancy D. Kellogg, “Unwanted and Illegal Sexual Experiences in Childhood and Adolescence,” Child Abuse and Neglect 19 (1995): 1457-68.
18 – Not Just Another Thing to Do: Teens Talk about Sex, Regret, and the Influence of Their Parents (Washington, D.C.: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 2000), 6-7.
19 – “Many Teens Regret Having Sex,” National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, press release, June 30, 2000.
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