The great sex ed divide?

When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex--and Sex Education--Since the Sixties Kristin Luker (W. W. Norton, 2007, 384pp) 978-0393329964, $15.95

I ONCE WORKED FOR A NATIONAL nonprofit where I helped develop a community-based model to build common ground around teen pregnancy prevention. In that role, I spent many months on the road, in local communities, doing meetings that ran the gamut from dinner at the home of a very conservative Christian family to coffee with local Planned Parenthood staff. That task certainly helped round out my understanding of the depth and sincerity with which many people--of differing opinions on teens and sex--can approach the same issue and arrive at polar-opposite answers.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The recent book by University of California, Berkeley sociologist Kristin Luker, When Sex Goes to School, brings the kind of learning I was fortunate enough to get to a larger audience. To be sure, there are many actors, advocates and critics in the national struggle over sexuality education in America. Few, though, have actually explored the foundations and meanings of America's struggle over sex education--and sex--as painstakingly as Luker does in this book. Luker combines two decades of field work undertaken in four communities to assess the competing views over sex education and, in the process, seeks to elucidate the underlying motivations of the parties involved. Bringing some semblance of order to the diversity of voices, Luker describes the "warring views" of "sexual conservatives" and "sexual liberals."

"I've become convinced that there is a chasm, wide and getting wider, between the sexual right and the left," writes Luker. This dualism and chasm define the book's framing of the debate over sex education.

Luker first steps back to view the long trajectory of sex education in America in order to try and determine how we arrived at the present state of play. There is a great deal to recommend in Luker's rich historical narrative, which, thankfully, does not presume that sex, nor the American obsession with it, began in the 1960s. She argues that the first sexual revolution in America was brought about by the social hygiene movement, during the Progressive Era, which spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The social hygienists wrapped an early incarnation of feminism into a national obsession with declining marriage and birth rates to arrive at what amounted to marriage education and preparation. It was startlingly positive about sex and pleasure, as well as contraception for the purposes of spacing and timing childbearing, but only within the context of marriage. Importantly, the social hygienists advanced the notion that sex was as natural and pleasurable for women as it was for men. As Luker describes it, the resulting new approach to sex in marriage was educational, framed around the realization that "young people have not been adequately prepared for married life or for the selection of a mate." It is indeed difficult to read this history of a century ago and not call on the French dictum, "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."

With sex loosened from the moorings of procreation, albeit still bound up within the framework of heterosexual marriage, Luker concludes that by the 1960s, sex education was "expansive, diffuse and unusually uncontroversial." Then, of course, the next sexual revolution happened, and all was undone. Luker does an admirable job of covering this well-traversed ground. She sees this second revolution as epochal:

   The American Revolution, the French, and the Russian, we're all
   taught in school, reshaped history so much that we can draw a clear
   line between the world before and what it was like after. The
   revolution at the heart of this book ... will in the end be as
   historic as any of these other revolutions.

The present warps our perception of our place in history and therefore leads the political scientist in me to question the strength of the comparison. Still, there is no doubt that the American view of sex has been substantively and forever altered by the social movements of the 1960s.

But the question remains whether Luker is correct that this revolution created so much culture shock that it has divided us into sexual liberals and sexual conservatives. Luker draws extensively on interviews to describe the chasm and what is meant by the terms sexual conservative and sexual liberal. Speaking about experiencing sexual pleasure, a sexual conservative is quoted as saying, "You just don't go around having that kind of time with just anybody." A sexual liberal finds this way of thinking "baffling" and asks, "Why not have that kind of time with just anybody?" Sexual conservatives are aligned to the thinking of Edmund Burke, and require structure and order from society in order to tame human impulses. Sexual liberals are "heirs of the Enlightenment" and believe that "the individual needs to be protected from society" and ought to be left to make decisions on his own. Sexual conservatives put a premium on "obedience" and sexual liberals on "discernment."

This structure is among the weakest points of Luker's analysis. The dualism creates two tidy boxes into which she pours the entirety of the debate. At times, the oversimplification and sloppy generalizations about each group are distracting or simply wrong. Luker writes, for example, that "sexual liberals now reluctantly concede that abstinence is the best choice for teenagers, something that was not part of their thinking two decades ago." Nonsense. And to be fair to the conservatives, equally silly is the contention that "conservatives do not imagine long years of education" because women will not need it. In fact, Luker later writes that almost all the individuals in her research had college degrees, with educational attainment relatively equal among sexual liberals and conservatives.

The dualism breaks clown further when Luker concedes that her study "probably precluded contact with what we might think of as a 'sexual middle'" and that "sexual radicals ... don't show up" either. It leaves one wondering: If there are "sexual radicals" to the left of "sexual liberals," then who is to the right of "sexual conservatives"?

What Luker fails to recognize, and what every major public opinion poll shows, is that her "sexual liberals" are the mainstream--the real duality is "sexual conservatives" against the bulk of society, which is exactly how this has played out politically. As a wise professor of mine at Notre Dame once said, "We are all children of the Enlightenment." In that sense, Luker's notion that each side holds equal weight in the debate--and occupies equal space on either side of the chasm--simply doesn't hold. To be fair, this is a treatment of sex education by a sociologist, and therefore lacks a political framing that, in my opinion, would be essential to an accurate, more rounded picture.

Still, for those interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the debate over sex education in America, and for a rare treatment of its history, Luker's book is highly recommended. Its straightforward presentation of ordinary voices is refreshing and helps to frame the key issues behind the chaos that is sex education in America. Even though the sides may not carry equal weight, the chaos created by their clashing with one another has created gridlock and a well-funded abstinence-until-marriage industry. Only a deeper understanding of the debate can lead us to, well, enlightenment.

BILL SMITH is vice-president for public policy at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, leading public policy and advocacy efforts in sexual and reproductive health at the international, federal, state and local levels.