By LAURIE ABRAHAM
As part of my research for my cover article in this Sunday’s magazine on sex-positive sex education, I read academic Kristin Luker’s excellent 2006 book, “When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex — and Sex Education — Since the Sixties.” Near the end of the book, in the chapter “Politics of Sex,” she addresses the issue of sex education and pleasure in a way that really resonated with my own reporting. She tells how she visited sex-education classes in Sweden — considered a kind of nirvana for people who are comprehensive sex-ed advocates — and reported on an instructor’s response to the question “What is an orgasm, and why do people talk about it so much?”
“Orgasm is the moment of highest pleasure during sex,” the Swedish teacher replied, “and that’s why people talk about it so much.”
In contrast, when Luker heard that same question posed in an American school, the teacher reviewed the phases of sexual excitement. “As the instructor covered the excitement phase, the plateau phase and the resolution phase, pretty much in those terms,” Luker wrote, “I realized that this particular sex educator had done the remarkable: he had made sex boring.”
She went on to say that the Swedish teacher’s answer was a eureka moment for her: Luker had “never heard any American participants in the sex-ed debates, whether teachers, students or parents, mention either sexual desire or sexual pleasure, except in the most circumspect of terms.”
She went on to say that the Swedish teacher’s answer was a eureka moment for her: Luker had “never heard any American participants in the sex-ed debates, whether teachers, students or parents, mention either sexual desire or sexual pleasure, except in the most circumspect of terms.”
There was one almost comic example of that reticence that I didn’t include in the article. A facilitator for the Unitarian Church’s sex-ed curriculum, which is considered the gold standard of comprehensive sex education, told me that photographs of couples engaged in sexual activity that had been used in the seventh-grade and eighth-grade classes in the 1970s and ’80s had been replaced with less-controversial drawings. The newer drawings, she quickly added, were still quite detailed.
“So they still look like they’re enjoying it,” I replied, thinking I was merely recapitulating her point.
“I wouldn’t say ‘like they’re enjoying it,’ ” she corrected. “I’d say, judging from the expressions on their faces, it looks like they’re caring for each other.”
The tone of the class I followed couldn’t have been more different in the willingness of the teacher, Al Vernacchio, to consider sex in all its different guises, everything from as a way to experience a jolt of pleasure to an expression of deep commitment to another person. In a few cases, Vernacchio was so frank about the reality of sex that a weird cognitive dissonance would wash over me. I can’t believe he’s saying this, I can’t believe he’s saying this, I’d think. Yet when I stepped out of Vernacchio’s classroom into the broader world, I rarely thought twice about the graphic sexual imagery and descriptions surrounding me (except maybe when my 7-year-old regaled me with Ke$ha’s notorious, and I have to say, catchy “Tic Toc,” featuring a girl protagonist who brushes her teeth “with a bottle of jack,” allows boys to “touch her junk” and so on). School classrooms have become one of the few places where wide-ranging sex talk is taboo.
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