According to Shulevitz, Luker doesn't believe that the intense arguments over sex ed in schools are silly. Neither does Shulevitz, who shrewdly observes, "We can’t agree about sex education because we can’t agree about sex, and the way in which we disagree about sex has everything to do with how we’re breaking apart as a nation."
(Don't believe it? Check out Tom Edsall's Atlantic Monthly essay from a few years back about how you can reliably predict which party an American voter is going to choose based on how he feels about the sexual revolution).
I think Shulevitz is onto something here, with her more precise terminology:
Luker identifies Americans’ competing visions of sexuality as “liberal” and “conservative,” but even she acknowledges that those terms are too flabby to nail down our real differences. More muscular terms, it seems to me, would be “naturalist” and “sacralist.” Naturalists, whom Luker calls sexual liberals, hold that sex is natural and unmysterious, a healthy, pleasurable, quasi-recreational activity. Sacralists, whom Luker calls sexual conservatives, consider sex sacred but dangerous, transformative when contained by marriage but destructive outside it. Sex education, to the naturalist, involves nothing more than helping young people manage the risks of having sex by giving them the facts. It’s information, not values. To the sacralist, conventional sex education is chock-full of values, but all the wrong ones. It’s an indoctrination in secularism, teaching kids to be irresponsible and draining sex of its mystery and power. “Sexuality isn’t peanuts and popcorn, although there are those who made it be that,” says one minister Luker talked to. “Thinking of sex that way, it’s such a diminution of what is actual and real.”
I think "naturalist" and "sacralist" are much better terms to use in discussing attitudes toward sex and sexuality, because they shear the political baggage from our conversation. (Even though it's true that political conservatives tend to be much more sacralist, and liberals much more naturalist, it's not inevitable that one's politics will dictate the way one sees sexuality, especially when it comes to teaching sexual right and wrong to one's children). This jumped out to me because the worldview I hold and advocate in "Crunchy Cons" is sacralist about most everything. And it is a metaphysical view because I truly believe it's the most true to human nature, and indeed to the structure of the universe. As Shulevitz pointed out, both sides find it hard to agree on sex ed because we can't agree on what human beings are.
By the way, Ross Douthat read the same review, and he says that one thing the Luker bottom line definitely suggests is the "intellectual bankruptcy" of the view that the way to make abortion more rare is to do extensive sexual education in the schools. The right may not want to hear that abstinence education isn't all that effective, but I know from experience that the left doesn't want to hear that conventional sex ed isn't that effective.
Remember when Bill Clinton in 1995 nominated Dr. Henry Foster, a Nashville physician, to replace Dr. Joycelyn Elders as US Surgeon General? In her remarks announcing the move, HHS Secretary Donna Shalala said:
This is a man who brought community members together to create the successful "I Have a Future" program at Meharry School of Medicine. This community-based program takes at- risk youths living in public housing and teaches them to say "no" to sex and pregnancy and "yes" to job skills and self- reliance. And, it works. ... The President wants to repeat this success story on a national scale.
Well, the Washington Times sent me to Nashville to see if "I Have a Future" worked. It did not. In fact, if memory serves, the data showed that the kids who were involved with the program -- which involved full-on sex education, and the distribution of contraception -- had a slightly higher pregnancy rate than the kids who had no involvement with it at all. When I began asking standard questions about how the data showed "I Have a Future" was not only no help to the teenagers, it put them at a slight disadvantage, I was shown the door in Nashville.
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Ah, yes. I remember sex ed in school. I can say, however, that if it can be taught with class, then ours was. It was the "Family Planning" part taught in Home Economics. There was some biology taught, there was a birth film to see (scared the jeepers outta me, I tell ya!), and there was something done which would have been shot out of the water today, I'm sure. A nurse was brought in to lecture and discuss birth control methods and their effectiveness and to warn against STDs. Then, ministers, priests, and rabbis were brought in to give their church's beliefs on family planning and premarital sex. The students' families were made aware of the upcoming event every year in case they opted to have their child not sit-in on it. No opted out to my recollection. No one was offended. The birth film scared me badly enough that it did set in stone for me that giving birth was not on my "to do" list for the future. I think the class overall was informative and served us well. Facts were taught and myths were dispelled. Sex happens, no matter what one's beliefs, and many of our parents were grateful that we were going to be taught correct information. We were in no way encouraged to be promiscuous by this course. If anything, it made us more likely to abstain for a few more years.>
No, I didn't take it as argumentative at all - at least, no more than I usually am. =) I just wanted to make sure that I'd been clear about my intentions in bringing up the other survey.>
Daniel, you misread my post. I assume that Luker's conclusion is correct, and that neither abstinence-only sex ed or conventional sex-ed have much success to show. I think peer pressure and family environment are far more determinative of a teenager's sexual decision-making than anything taught to them in class. I brought up the Nashville anecdote not to argue that conventional sex-ed doesn't work, but that it didn't work in this case (despite the Clinton Administration's baseless claim that it had), and to point out how unwilling its advocates were to admit the failure of their program. I would imagine that abstinence-only advocates wouldn't be all that different in this regard. The stakes seem so high for partisans on both sides because they're not just arguing about techniques, but for opposing views of human nature.>
>Franklin wrote: I also like the idea of letting sex ed be a family-driven knowledge transfer...
Pop: Junior?
Junior: Yes, Pop?
Pop: You're getting to be quite a young man now, and I'm sure you've been noticing many changes and new feelings; I think it's time we had that "family-driven knowledge transfer" your big brother and I once had...
I'm struck here as in other areas by the incommensurable frames of duelling reference not just across the loosely-arrayed "sides", but within them as well, in the choice made between (or combined in some cases) the ethical and the instrumental/utilitarian arguments. I think of parallels derived from wearied exposure to, e.g., the self-presentation among libertarians, and among private-firearms advocates. The ethical defenders of a society organized round, say, the maximum application of the market-voluntary principle and the limited state tend to rely upon natural-rights doctrine and often a neo-Thomist epistemology and ethics (both Rothbard and Rand acknowledge a debt to Aristotelian traditions), which, though more-or-less implicitly subscribing to the belief of socially beneficent *outcomes* issuing from their preferred *a priori* practice, find statistical, consequentialist studies irrelevant and misguided for purposes of "making the case" for maximal individual liberty, when justice inheres not in sociological end-states but in the respect shown toward the life and (justly-derived) property of the individual, rooted in a particular metaphysic of man's earthly life. The utilitarian case for liberty, by contrast, whose paladins include, say, the Cato Institute, REASON magazine and its former "Dynamist" editor Virginia Postrel, and, in spots, the editorialists at THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, tend to highlight, and fortify their case upon more readily such outcome-based phenomena resulting from liberty as technological innovation, rising incomes, and diversified consumer choice.
In the gun-control debate, one might frame two poles along the following rough lines: the rights-based approach as formulated most powerfully in the celebrated essay "A Nation of Cowards" by Jeff Snyder
http://www.vcdl.org/new/cowards.htm
(originally in THE PUBLIC INTEREST, Fall 1993), a pro-life/antiwar libertarian ethicist and attorney much indebted to Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Lysander Spooner, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Solzhenitsyn et al - and the influential MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME approach of John Lott, much indebted to the latest regression theorems of the statistical social scientist in highlighting, as the title of Lott's book indicates, the drop in violent crime in states whose legislators, after the mid-1980s, lowered legal obstacles in the way of the private ownership and concealed-carry permissibility of firearms. The Snyderites by contrast see rights as inherent and not malleable under statistical showmanship, and stress the cockeyed nature of using the abuse of a fundamental life-preserving liberty by a criminal minority as a pretext to strip it by law from others, and the character-deformed cowardliness of relegating - in spirit no less than in letter - the sole legitimate use of firearms to agents of the state, who become thereby a sanctified demigod class entitled to liberties denied the rest of us (and immune from prosecution, per precedent, should they fall derelict in their duty to protect their citizen charges), and the cowardly totalitarian implications of "safety by prevention"; Snyder also portrays a God-derived obligation to meet the perpetrators of mayhem upon one or one's loved ones right there, on the spot, with lethal force should that be required to preserve one's sacred life.
In the arena of sex education, given the centrifugal fragmentation of our latter-day "moral community" in the sphere of public "education", I suspect the hoped-for consensus or compromise in this line is, given the one-size-fits-all, all-or-nothing nature of pedagogical practice, a phantasy, and that's a good thing - since the way forward in every sphere lies in a maximizing of decentralism, secession and the burning off of rotten social structures and belief patterns, we can't bring the present system crashing to the ground fast enough, in telling the public schools what the famous Quaker said when confronted aboard ship by the pirate - "Friend, thee has no business here" - as he calmly and stoutly tossed him to the sharks.
Here are two stirring "sacralist" essays on how to Teach Your Children - and Yourself, too - Well the Facts of Life:
"In Praise of Free Love" by Sam Torode, originally from THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE in 2003 -
http://www.cruxmag.com/FreeLove.htm
"To most people today, fertility is a disaster waiting to happen. Getting pregnant is like contracting a disease thankfully, there s a pill to vaccinate against it. When accidents happen, men have it fairly easy. But it s no fun being a woman. What s desirable is to be free to be like a man, able to enjoy sex all the time without getting pregnant"...
And the essay from the regular department "Children...and Ourselves" in the July 5, 1950 number of the humanist-decentralist weekly MANAS, reaches, from the vantage of editors steeped in neo-Platonist/Socratic idealism, Indian philosophy, Gandhian/Thoreauvian/Tolstoyan self-transcendence and Theosophist discipline, insights which overlap with Christian/environmental sacralists:
http://manasjournal.org/pdf_library/VolumeIII_1950/III-27.pdf
"And not only does it [The *Kinsey Report*] fail to tell him anything important about the procreative instinct, and how its accompanying emotions may best be expressed it even forgets to mention procreation, except once, briefly, and in passing. The Kinsey Report focusses attention entirely upon the physically sexual, or sensual, proclivities of man, and leaves entirely out of account the most important thing of all, the relationship of romantic and procreative feelings to the responsibility for children.
We should ourselves put the whole matter very simply, to an adult as well as to an adolescent: maturity is a state at which we arrive by equalizing freedom and responsibility. Mature expression between the sexes cannot be achieved if entirely divorced from some sort of willingness to bring children into the world. If men and women, or boys and girls, completely divorce sex experience from the thought of potential parenthood, they are playing at something, rather than living it and will not find anything really worth their while. They may find, instead, a growing dissatisfaction with their relationships, for nature has a habit of refusing to be disparted. Whether we are talking about natural resources or the affairs of the sexes, it seems to be a fact that the person who takes, and shows no willingness to give, is robbed of much that he might otherwise achieve. The wastelands caused by human greed and immaturity are far from beautiful, and so are those relationships between the sexes existing entirely on independent desires to indulge biological whims"...>
Scott,
The Kinsey Report focusses attention entirely upon the physically sexual, or sensual, proclivities of man, and leaves entirely out of account the most important thing of all, the relationship of romantic and procreative feelings to the responsibility for children.
There is a good and valid reason for that focus. It's called the scientific method. Kinsey conducted a scientific survey, and while you can (and should) critique his methodology, you (general) have no room to critique his scope.
It's like taking my analysis of the weather, wherein I state my goal to be the marking of trends in the last 100 years, and complaining that I didn't give you tomorrow's forecast. Or, worse, claiming that I did give you tomorrow's forecast, and it turned out to be completely wrong.
Kinsey's work set the benchmarks, the points from which later work could make comparisons or refine the original analysis.>
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