“The Talk”.
To repeat history is a human truth. This truth is not comfortable or easy to understand. I certainly do not understand why, and we may never understand. The only thing more uncomfortable than truth is sex. Well, at least if you are a teenage girl. Time tells us that this discomfort runs deep. After all, how could we have not evolved past this discomfort? As far as I know, young people have been having sex since forever, as portrayed in art and litrerature. Sexual education in school today is reflected in teachings that go centuries back - to understand sex-ed today, we must do our best to understand what it has been. It's time to talk about The Talk.
Throughout history, doctors, philosophers, and educators have been spearheading the push for sex education, even in the 17th century, but the responsibility of sharing that kind of knowledge was up to mothers. Depending on the social status and religious beliefs of a given family, the exposure to sex-ed would have varied, and access to this information was available only to the very privileged. Some wrote manuals to do with health and sex like the evasive writer under the name “Aristotle, the famous Philosopher”. His works, like those of others, were banned because they were deemed as pornographic. Charles Knowlton, an American doctor, was distributing a manual he had written to his patients that contained help with contraception and conception. He and others such as Annie Besant, a British activist, were prosecuted for distributing this “pornography”. Still, manuals of this kind would still be sold under the counter or hidden in “marriage manuals”.
Things changed drastically during the First World War. Young boys were being separated from the control of their families, and there was a rise of what was then referred to as venereal diseases (VDs), what we now label STIs. In an attempt to stop losing soldiers, the military began showing films such as “Whatsoever a man soweth” to promote abstinence and eugenics as a form of “social purity” or the “safeguarding of the Anglo-Saxon race and the British Empire”. During the Second World War, publications utilized a new form of “porn as propaganda” to encourage enlistment. To those already enlisted, posters utilized the fear of VDs to invoke abstinence like: “She may look clean-but”. US government official Elliot Ness even declared VDs as “military saboteur number one” during efforts to cut off prostitution and lower rates in soldiers.
The standardization of sexual education in schools during post-war years was framed around abstinence and family values in an attempt to shield students from sexual “delinquency.” Sexual health in formal settings was hidden under many names: “family life” or “home economics”.
During the 60s and early 70s much changed. In 1968 divorce was legalized in Canada, in ‘69, so was birth control. With change immediately followed fear, and the curriculum adapted to what some described as a shame based approach. In a 1969 Candian broadcast, teachers who chose to teach sex education were decribed as “enlightened and fearless”. According to this broadcast students fill in the gaps “from each other on the street, and it is freely available to them on the newsstands”. The curriculum taught in schools is formed by the local school boards, but is shaped by the concern or “hostility” of parents. The consensus from parents was that sex education should be, “a curriculum as carefully planed as the maths course”.
There was relative calm in later years, but in 1981 the AIDS epidemic swept the world. Homosexuals were criminilized and correlated with predators, another rising fear at the time. Some schools taught prevention of these infections, but most stuck to abstinence as the root of the solution.
Even today, sex in school curriculums is a delicate thing; something that nobody wants to be held responsible for – something that is impossible to teach correctly without lighting a few fires. Understandable. Nobody wants to be burned. However, the stakes are higher now. We have the internet, and with that, unfiltered access to the world's information. We eat the forbidden fruit and many of us realize just how naked we truly are. How little we know. We are exposed to both the good and evil of this knowledge: facts and helpful information about sex but also its harmful and unrealistic depictions. Around us the curriculum changes to programs written before same-sex couples could marry, and are rewritten to please people who the curriclum doesn’t affect.
It seems that sex education has always been fear-based, adapting to new fears and new things we must protect our youth from, be it: disease, assault, predators, or pregnancy. The gaps in sex education from hundreds of years ago remain, as do the stigmas. What changes are the lengths young people must go to fill the gaps. So, when push comes to shove, the truth of history repeating itself lies in the question: What authorities deserve control over our access to knowledge? In the hands of our governments sex education is weaponpinized and used as political prop. In the hands of our school boards it distributed like a privilege. Sex education is not something to fear. So why do we? Is it because it is a political hot potato or a taboo topic, or are we scared of the power youth would have if the control fell into our hands? I think we are scared that if we rock the boat, the sheer might of our power would be revealed. When ice cold truth crashes over the sides, even the slightest amount, we are reminded of the fragility of the structures on which we stand. Sex education today is built on a foundation of injustice. We can't expect to crumble such a foundation overnight but if our feedback is heard and listened to, that would be a start.
Sources:
Dec 7-9, 2021 » The History of Sex Education
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/body-mind/health/health-studies/brief-history-sex-education
https://www.newsweek.com/brief-history-sex-ed-america-81001
http://www.sexualhistorytour.com/early-sex-manuals-an-overview/
https://www.mimimatthews.com/2015/11/01/19th-century-marriage-manuals-advice-for-young-wives/
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/pornographic-17th-century-sex-manual-7307757
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/conduct-book-for-women
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/01/unmentionable-review-victorian-sex-manual-revisited
https://theweek.com/articles/457268/advice-wedding-night-from-100-years-ago
https://thefulcrum.ca/features/a-brief-history-of-pornography-until-1910/
https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1940&context=cmh
https://activehistory.ca/2016/02/a-century-long-debate-over-sexual-education-in-ontario/