The Facts
This chapter is encouragement to others to do the sex education that parents and schools will not do, so it’s pretty uplifting to me. The time we live in now is probably even more sexually restrictive to youth (and who can talk to them about sex) than things were when she published this book twenty four years ago, but it’s still encouraging to read.
Though I haven’t included it here, it also covers a few web sites that were used for this purpose. Two that still exist are Go Ask Alice and Sex, Etc. More that I haven’t included is the role of the arts in understanding and expressing sexuality, and how, for that reason, the Right often censors art. The suggestion is that more enticing literature, involving sexual expression (though the focus is not erotica), should be taught in schools.
Now, as the twenty-first century dawns, as AIDS still threatens and kids need information the most, the tide has turned toward telling them less. A strategy of censorship has arrived disguised as counsel to parents to speak more, to embrace their role as children’s primary sexual teachers. Here is a “family value” the mainstream sex-ed establishment can get behind, something no one, least of all their conservative antagonists, can disagree with. But a seemingly harmless, parent-friendly idea is likely to have a less child-friendly effect. I can’t help suspecting that the adversaries of school-based sexuality education have been gleefully aware of what would happen if the task of sexual enlightenment were relegated entirely to families: almost nobody would do it.
Polls bear out that suspicion. Parents talk the talk: most agree that sex ed is their job. But when it comes to talking the sex talk, few can bring themselves to do it. Among the 1,001 parents surveyed in 1998 by the National Communication Association, sex was the subject they felt the “least comfortable talking about” with their children. Kids reveal similar discomfort and often evaluate their parents’ efforts less generously than their moms and dads might hope. “The pattern that stands out first is the difference in parental and teen perceptions” of at-home sex talks, wrote the sociologist Janet Kahn in 1994. When she interviewed both generations of the same families, the kids consistently remembered talking about fewer topics than their parents did.2 The 1998 National Longitudal Study of Adolescent Health found that more than half of teens believed their parents understood them pretty well. The bad news is almost half thought Mom and Dad got it only somewhat or hardly at all. The same survey discovered that nearly 85 percent of mothers disapproved of their teens having sexual intercourse and had communicated this value to their sons and daughters.3 Under the circumstances, not every mom makes the perfectly askable confidante for a sexually active young person.
Children absorb from their families attitudes toward love, the body, authority and equality; they are trained in tolerance and kindness or their opposite at home. A few live in families comfortable enough to discuss the nitty-gritty details of sex. But the vast majority learn these from the wider world. In Uganda, the Denver Post reported, an ambitious national AIDS-education campaign asked rural villagers to overcome their modesty and “talk straight” to their kids. Skeptical about this expectation, the report pointed out that “mothers across the globe . . . find it difficult to talk to their children about sex.” But the Africans, she reported, already had a custom that circumvented parental embarrassment. A Zimbabwean mother explained: “The aunties talk to the children.”
While teens tell people carrying clipboards that they wish their parents would discuss sexuality more, I believe that given the choice, they’d rather talk to the aunties. Chalk it up to the incest taboo: children don’t want to know about their parents’ sex lives and, from the moment they might conceivably have a sex life, they usually don’t want Mom and Dad to know about theirs. This is why “sex instruction” was invented a hundred years ago. Sex-ed teachers are the aunties, professionalized.
Will the real sex educators please stand up? Mom and Dad aren’t talking, and as we saw in chapter 5, the federally funded aunties aren’t talking, except to read from their two-second script, “Just say no. Get married.” Where is a youngster to turn? The bookstores and libraries hold pitifully few sex and relationship advice books that are comprehensive, sex-positive, and fun to read, even though the market is crying out for more … Some teen girls’ magazines offer straightforward contraceptive and sexual health information, but their messages of autonomy and body acceptance are marred by self-esteem-busting photos of skinny models, features about dieting, and a general editorial bent toward boy-craziness … For boys—who, publishing wisdom holds, do not read about relationships or themselves—there’s almost nothing on the newsstands.
Luckily, just as the sources of information about sex dried up in the earthbound institutions of the public school and publishing house, they started proliferating in cyberspace, where kids are wont to read anyway. The cheap and wide-open World Wide Web began to offer bounty of witty, hip, pleasure-positive, credible, comforting, user-friendly sites on sexuality for kids and by kids, as well as those not specifically targeted to youngsters but useful to anyone engaging in sex or contemplating it.
“Boy, I go on the Web and I’m seeing stuff that makes me feel Amish!” exclaimed a member of a group of not exactly prudish propagandists called the Safer Sex Sluts. But in his job as a freelance sex educator, this man, Rob Yeager, encourages kids to search out all the sexual information they can find.
Although adults have posted Danger signs all along the byways of cyberspace, the online world is actually one of the safest sexual zones. If a young person is inclined to try her typing fingers at cyber sex, she can experiment with sexual poses and fantasies without worrying about pregnancy, STDs, or even, for the most part, emotional involvement. If the action gets too hot, she can politely absent herself or delete an overanxious suitor.
At best, a kid in need can find a community of kindred souls struggling with a marginalized sexual identity, with violence or date rape, hostile parents or depression—and then bookmark it for later.
Many adults would argue that there’s too much sexually explicit material on the Web, in the form of pornography. Doubtless, there’s lots. Will it hurt kids who look at it? I asked the constitutional lawyer and writer Marjory Heins, who has probably reviewed the literature on this subject more thoroughly than anyone else in the United States. Her response (replete with lawyerly and scholarly qualifiers): “As far as I’m aware, there’s very little psychological research on the effects of viewing pornography on children at all. And to the extent one can even talk about scientific proof in social science research, it’s my opinion that it has not been proved that there are widespread or predictable adverse psychological effects on kids from exposure to pornography.” My own reviews of the literature, scant as it is, come to the same conclusion. Pornography doesn’t hurt the viewer, and, especially for a young person trying to figure out his or her sexual orientation, it can help in exploring fantasies and confirming that other people share the same tastes.
Government and privately funded efforts to provide Internet access to schools and libraries in poor neighborhoods may do little for sex education anyhow. For, under community and political pressure, many of those institutions have installed filtering software, and Congress has required it on every publicly owned computer accessed by minors. Such filters … block the very information that might forestall a pregnancy or HIV infection or help a kid extricate herself from an abusive relationship. To get the facts, kids need freedom.
2 – Janet R. Kahn, “Speaking across Cultures within Your Own Family,” Sexual Cultures and the Construction of Adolescent Identities, ed. Irvine, 287.
3 – Brent C. Miller, Family Matters: A Research Synthesis of Family Influences on Adolescent Pregnancy (Washington, D.C.: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 1998), 6-12.
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