Sex Education: A Brief History
Modern sex education in the US is a product of the US military and with it, the moral values of US imperial forces. At the end of the first world war, the federal Public Health Service (PHS) launched “A People’s War” due to the prevalence of venereal infections in army recruits. The PHS used pamphlets, exhibits, and films to emphasize abstinence as the best sex education and protection from venereal diseases. Within these public messages were the long-held sexist and racist beliefs that women, immigrants, and Black people were vectors of disease and were responsible for spreading venereal diseases through their assumed promiscuity.
During World War II the US armed forces united with the PHS and the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) to encourage the “testing and treatment for venereal disease, suppressing prostitution and promoting sex education.” This is another example of the intertwined history of anti-sex work attitudes being coupled with the promotion of abstinence-based, morally conservative sex education. Sex education’s roots in “moral education” suggest that the connection between “suppressing prostitution” and promoting sex education is an anti-sex work bias that seeks to uphold sexist, racist, and heteronormative ideologies of gender, sex, and relationships.
During the second world war, soldiers – in addition to being preached abstinence – were given condoms. However, in schools, the focus remained on abstinence rather than condoms because of the misguided assumptions that students would practice whatever they were taught. The expectation that children are receptacles for knowledge, rather than empowered co-creators of the knowledge they consume, is common in western pedagogy practiced in US classrooms. This stance revokes young people’s autonomy by rejecting the possibility that youth can make informed decisions about their actions and their bodies. While children do need some level of guidance, care, and protection from violence, risk is often misjudged as actual danger, so the figure of the innocent child is “protected” from knowledge deemed risky because of fears that children are incapable of handling the task of safely consuming and processing this gatekept information. Rather than approaching sex education as a lifelong learning process in which skills are acquired in accessible, age-appropriate portions over time, sexual topics were, and often still are, kept secret until young people are interpreted as mature enough to learn without imitation.
This assumption that youth will unquestionably repeat whatever they are taught about sex, is influential on sex education today as evidenced by the recent trend of legislation such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and other copycat bills and book bans that forbid the discussion of LGBTQ+ identity in schools. In the last year, we have seen calls for book burnings of “sexual” books and books allegedly about critical race theory. “Concerned parents” have swarmed school board meetings and have flooded schools’ and legislators’ mailboxes with outraged messages over “pornography” being distributed to their children without their consent. “But when conservatives say ‘pornography,’ they really just mean any display of queer desire or joy — just like when they say, ‘ban critical race theory,’ they mean ‘ban discussion of racism that disrupts white comfort’ (Riedel, 2022). Parents, School Districts, and Lawmakers fear that by learning about queer and trans* identities students will become queer themselves, similar to the fear that teaching kids about what condoms are would encourage them to have sex and put what they have learned about condoms to use.
Such assumptions presume that sexual knowledge has a direct correlation to sexual behavior, and it bases this assumption in social constructions of childhood that equate it with innocence. Oftentimes policies that are pitched as ways of protecting youth aren’t really about protecting youth, but rather about larger ideologies – ideologies that position sexuality as a threat to national security, for instance. Such discourses ultimately preclude the development of sex education that could provide people with tools to navigate intimate experiences as they arise in their lives.
Since the 1960s, the fight for what sexual knowledge should be taught in schools has captivated communities all over the country. Sociologist and sex education scholar Janice Irvine describes this fight as a series of emotional and political battles that illustrate “What types of sexualities are valuable and therefore teachable and what forms of sexuality are so devalued we cannot speak about them” (Irvine et al., 2016). The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) was formed in 1964, prioritizing “values-neutral ‘comprehensive’ sex education that encouraged students to decide for themselves when to engage in sex, whether to seek an abortion and how to obtain easy access to contraception” (Huber and Firman, 2014; Kett, 2002). SIECUS (1969) argued that abstinence before marriage is a part of an old morality that was widely challenged by the new morality that would guide sex education. This educational philosophy was banned from appearing in the classroom by the California legislature in 1969 for being too radical.
In the 1980s, abstinence education programs became federally funded for the first time, though this was met with strong opposition by pro-sex organizations. Abstinence education continued to receive support and funding in the 90s and early 2000s but again was opposed by alternative so-called comprehensive sex education programs that taught contraceptive-centered education framed as “abstinence-plus” (Huber and Firman, 2014; Landry, 1999). A major shift in the sex education debate occurred during the election of Barack Obama in 2008. In President Obama’s 2010 budget proposal to Congress, “he called for the elimination of all funds previously devoted to abstinence education. In its place, he proposed a new ‘pregnancy prevention program’ that would create a dedicated funding stream for ‘comprehensive’ programs supported by pro-sex organizations (White House, 2009)” (Huber and Firman, 2014), a victory for SIECUS and the push for comprehensive SRE.
Since 1991, SIECUS has continued to develop its influential Guidelines for Comprehensive Education, a curricular framework for K-12 students that offers what SIECUS self-describes as comprehensive sex education that meets children where they are at in terms of maturity, physical, and emotional development. Today SIECUS advocates for a comprehensive Sexuality and Relationship Education (SRE) framework to be taught to ensure students are receiving a sex education that is medically accurate, body-positive, consent-focused, diverse, trauma-informed, and culturally responsive. With that said, SIECUS’s curriculum is not perfect: so-called comprehensive sex ed is often critiqued for not properly addressing this history of medical racism and eugenics associated with sexual knowledge. Additionally, sex education typically centers on able-bodied, heterosexual, and cis-gender couples, a trend that is echoed on TikTok as well. SIECUS also leaves out discussions of pleasure, fantasy, and pornography, which -- as I will argue later -- are integral to actually comprehensive sex ed, as modeled by the sex worker-led, sex education non-profit The Porn Conversation. SIECUS’s SRE is imperfect, but it is the closest existing framework to the desired feminist comprehensive sex education of the future. SIECUS’s prominence and recognition as a leader in sex and sexuality education positions the organization as an authority on what has been determined as medically accurate and age-appropriate sex education for youth in the United States. It is also referenced by sex educator content creators on TikTok such as Katie Haan (@itskatiehaan) and Danielle Bezalel (@sexedwithdb) as a resource of information for their pop-sex-ed content (Haan, n.d.; Bezalel, n.d.). Rather than as the end-all-be-all of “comprehensive” sex education, here I position SIECUS’s framework as one of the many competing discourses in current sex education that has been involved in the national sex education conversation for nearly 60 years.
