If you know the history of the development of sex education programs then its current failures are not all that surprising. Sex education in the U.S. was born out of the social hygiene movement in the early 1900s. Sex was often chastised as immoral and deviant, and was considered a fast track to disease. Not only was public health thought to be in peril, but early sex education was also intended to preserve the institution of marriage by discouraging sex outside of it. In the last 10-20 years sex education had been increasingly identified as insufficient (and in some cases incorrect) by multiple parties, students and queer community members included, particularly within Western contexts. Sex education was failing young people by mostly focusing on disease, pregnancy, and abstinence. Pleasure, consent, queerness, and gender identity were glaringly absent. Sex education programs and curricula started to slowly but surely improve and become more inclusive and informational. But politicized and heated debates around sex, gender, and morality – largely fostered by Trumpian politics – have unfortunately started to reverse the progress that had been made. Robin Pickering, a scholar of sex education, describes how much of the controversy surrounding sex education has been discursively framed as “parental rights” in her informative piece for The Conversation. She notes that the parents who are the strongest opponents of comprehensive sex education tend to also be the ones “least likely to discuss health-promoting concepts such as consent, contraception, gender identity and healthy relationships” with their children.
It’s time parents grow up re: sex education
