Teaching Sexuality 

When I was a child my parents kept the subject of sex locked in a very small box in the basement, way up on the top shelf in a darkened back room.

Every once in a while, for reasons unpredictable and mysterious, one of them would take the box down and offer a nugget, or more likely a sliver, of information. Then, right back would go the box, its all powerful content safely away from me, and me safely away from it. Were I bravely to ask a follow-up question, I’d be admonished, “You’re not old enough to know that yet.” No one ever said when yet might come, so I eventually stopped asking.

Meanwhile, the rest of my life and learning proceeded in a smooth, natural spiral. I learned lots of things about lots of topics, freely asking questions about them all whenever and wherever I wanted. Adults gave me direct, helpful answers. They made connections between what we might be talking about now and another topic, or maybe two or three, we’d spoken about earlier. They brought things up later that referred back to what I’d learned before.

Without my realizing it, they weren’t simply giving me information, as I might have thought at the time, but teaching me how to think about information—how to categorize, compare, contrast, apply, analyze, synthesize, discover meaning, make connections, and contextualize. In the process, I was also learning how to understand myself by learning how to think logically and critically about the world around me.

I especially enjoy teaching human sexuality in the springtime. It’s when I teach a lot of sixth graders. Once over their initial embarrassment they’re just so fresh and “out there” with their questions and ideas.

It’s also a time when I remind myself that the more things change about sexuality in our culture the more they stay exactly the same. Fast forward forty-five years from the time I was eleven or twelve years old, and it’s clear that children growing up in American culture are still learning about sex and sexuality in the same unsophisticated, incidental, and disconnected ways.

Consider what my sixth graders have to say the first day of class when I ask them to come up with a definition of the word “sex.” Here’s a compilation from a typical class:

Sex is reproduction.
Sex is when the sperm meets the egg.
Sex is when the dick goes in the donut.
Sex is making a baby.
Sex is when a man sticks his thing in a girl’s hole.
Sex is about love.
Sex is intercourse.
People do it for money.
Sometimes it’s rape.

At first glance the students’ responses seem predictable and logical. A deeper look, however, reveals an inaccurate equivalency in their minds between sex and reproduction, sex and vaginal intercourse, sex and heterosexuality, and sex and love (although they can’t explain, really, what a penis and vagina touching has to do with “love”; they’re also aware some people “do it” for money, and that others are forced, both additional sources of confusion). Sex to them is about particular body parts rubbing, eggs and sperm joining, and things men or boys do to women or girls. (Often they’re not entirely happy with the verb “sticks” when they say it but can’t think of how else to explain it.)

The conversation makes many of them very uncomfortable, and there’s a good bit of laughing, silliness, and joke making. When asked why that’s so, some will say, “Because sex is funny!”

Where to begin! In the United States, sex education is the ultimate remedial discipline. I will try my best to help them unlearn and relearn—and to sort, categorize, and contextualize—but very likely what they’ve learned first and before will stubbornly endure.

Imagine how differently our class might proceed if students came in already understanding the following facts and concepts:

Sexual behavior, or sex, is a special way that people bring their bodies close together. It gives people’s bodies very warm and pleasurable feelings and causes them to feel very close to one another.

Sexual intercourse is a kind of sexual behavior, or a kind of sex, but not the only kind. It is a very powerful kind of sex because it can lead to making a baby. Sexual intercourse is something that two people choose to do together, not something one person does to another.

Sexual intercourse and making a baby are not the same things. Sexual intercourse can lead to making a baby, but not always. Most of the time people choose to have sexual intercourse because they enjoy the feelings of pleasure and closeness they experience, not because they want to have a baby.

People can have sex with people of their same gender or the other gender.

Sometimes you may see people laugh or make jokes about sex or about their own or other people’s sexual parts. That’s because they feel embarrassed, not because sex is funny. Sex can be fun, but it can also be very powerful so in this family we try hard to look and sound respectful when we talk about this subject. People can talk about sex without feeling embarrassed, and even if they are embarrassed, they can control how they express those feelings.

Sexual behavior can be misused. For example, sometimes people try to force other people to have sex. That is always wrong. Sometimes people let other people use their bodies for sex as a way to make money, but sex is supposed to be about caring for and about the other person.

My eleven- and twelve-year-old students reflect, not only what they’ve learned (and not learned) from parents or other immediate adults in their lives, but also how they’ve learned it. Somewhere along the line a majority of my students have heard “the talk.” Most often, as the responses in my class make clear, they’ve been offered little more than the literal basics, with little attempt to make meaning or context.

Sadly, many parents think that once they’re explained that “that goes in there” and how it leads to baby-making and that it all has something vaguely to do with love and marriage, they’ve adequately communicated what sex is. Their children eventually will know there’s way more to it, and they’ll do their best, by trial and error, to fill in the blanks through advertisements, TV, movies, music, friends, older siblings, the Internet, pornography, and more. Ultimately, most will be left with a hodgepodge of nuggets and slivers but no coherent context to provide real understanding or meaning.

So focused—actually obsessed—are we culturally with the genital aspect of sexuality, most adults I work with (the majority exceedingly well educated in all other respects) are virtually incapable of articulating beyond the most basic and discrete nuggets or slivers of information about sexuality to their children. As a result, what’s missing still in our communication with young people of all ages about sexuality is the same as generations ago: nuance, elaboration, exploration, easy give and take, and ongoing meaning and context-making—all essential to learning how to make sense of and manage this complex, amazing, and vital aspect of our humanity.

When I try and understand my parents’ fears about sexual learning, I remember that they were born at a time (1908 and 1916) when adults truly believed that knowledge about sex was potentially, even inherently, dangerous: too much, too soon, they thought, could definitely lead to (often unspecified) disastrous consequences. Moreover, it was assumed, “knowing” about sex would lead directly to “having sex.” The most logical and effective way to protect children, then, was through total ignorance (often framed as “innocence”) while they were young, and then tight control over the quantity of sexual knowledge provided later on. Under no circumstances should one mention the word “pleasure” for that was the most dangerous secret of all.

Parents and school administrators today don’t think exactly as my parents did in the 1950s (although occasionally, I do hear from parents who want to make sure I definitely won’t mention the “p” word). Most of them certainly don’t believe there’s a one-to-one correlation between “knowing” and “doing.” In fact they claim to find that ludicrous and simplistic notion laughable. However, if you listen deeply to their concerns and anxieties about teaching children about sex, especially younger children, you will hear a distinct iteration of this misguided belief system, tweaked just slightly enough to allow for a more modern, more sex-positive view: Sexual knowledge is fine, but only so long as it’s given in just the right way, at just the right time, in just the right quantity, and by just the right person. It’s no wonder that open-ended discussion, elaboration, and exploration aren’t in the vocabulary, or even in the imagination, of many families and schools around the topic of sexuality.

As you might know or be able to guess, research has demonstrated for decades that it’s the kids in the know, rather than the ones in the dark, who make better decisions and who even delay the initiation of first sexual experiences beyond their peers. Critical thinking, common sense should tell us, has the effect of slowing people down, not speeding them up. Still, we cling compulsively and irrationally to an anxiety and control-based “educational” model.

It’s also been clear for decades, both from studies of normal cognitive development and from the anecdotal experiences of parents, teachers, and caretakers, that many children as young as five and six spontaneously ask intelligent questions about how human life begins and are able, easily, to process information about sexual intercourse and its role in reproduction. If only the immediate, caring adults in children’s lives could give themselves permission, at that very age, to set in motion a learning spiral around sexuality in which they place trust in knowledge and critical thinking, not evasion and control. After all, new approaches to child rearing and education become implemented all the time as our knowledge grows about children and their needs and capacities. It’s essential to ask and keep asking: Why not here?

In today’s market driven, sex saturated society, to do otherwise is to virtually guarantee that the primary content and context for sexual learning will be provided for our children by the default option of popular culture. That so many adults blindly maintain an illusion of control over children’s sexual learning—even while staring into the ugly face of this ubiquitous media onslaught—is the clearest testament of all to their ineptness and resistance to change. The effects of this tragic and ironic state of affairs—for example, the precocious sexual behaviors, attitudes, language, and dress seen among younger and younger children—are deeply worrisome.

Schools have traditionally fared no better. Comprehensive human sexuality education is a non-entity in America’s public schools. Even where sexual education is taught, it tends to be understood in the narrowest of terms, quite literally based around the topic of sex itself, with little or no attention to or acknowledgment of the depth and breath of this most fundamental aspect of the human experience. In reality, human sexuality is perhaps the most complex and most broadly interdisciplinary subject in the world. Its connections to issues of gender, family life, health, law, medicine, science, politics, literature, the arts, ethics, history, psychology, sociology, business, media, economics, anthropology, and practically every other major area of study are legion. Truly comprehensive sexuality education would go way beyond matters of personal sexual health, let alone beyond the narrow treatment afforded even that subject in schools today.

The fact that sexuality education has remained so narrow in focus is in large measure due to its status as a political and religious football in the “culture wars.” Since the 1950s, opponents have waged battles around this and related topics in communities across the country, using fear mongering, disinformation, polarization and other forms of bullying to cow teachers, administrators, and school boards. Their success has in large measure been due to the fact that an undereducated and mis-educated general public, already unsure and anxious about sex education, was ripe and vulnerable to these tactics.

With the adoption of federal “abstinence-only” legislation in 1996, a fear and control based approach has in effect become codified as national policy. With its singular emphasis on the promotion of abstinence from sexual activity until marriage, the goal of educating young people about sexuality, and certainly the goal of fostering critical thinking, is in all practicality rendered moot. In districts that receive these federal dollars, teachers are obliged to deliver programs that intentionally deny every student, including those already engaging in risk behaviors, potentially life saving or life altering information. Moreover, educators are prohibited from devising the kinds of broad based human sexuality curricula that speak to the complexities this topic deserves.

Real and meaningful change will occur only when we decide to grow up as a culture about issues of sexuality and sexual learning and begin to think and to act like the knowledgeable and responsible adults our children need us to be. The process requires risking “out of the box” thinking—about our assumptions and decisions, about what drives our misplaced anxieties, and about how to set aside our own adult needs long enough to clearly see the real needs of the young people we nurture. Otherwise, we continue to beget ignorance and vulnerability for more generations yet to come.

Deborah Roffman is a nationally certified sexuality and family life educator who has taught human sexuality education in grades 4-12 in Baltimore area independent schools for more than thirty years. She has offered trainings for parents and faculty at nearly two hundred schools and districts across the United States and is author of two books, including Sex and Sensibility: The Thinking Parent’s Guide to Talking Sense about Sex. Her website address is www.sexandsensibility.net.