Tales from the Dark Side

I’ve been spending the last hour or so contemplating on what sort of sex educator Yoda would’ve been.  Would Yoda advocate abstinence-only?  Abstinence-plus?  “Comprehensive” sex ed?  I’m thinking about memorable Star Wars movies quotes, and I come to different conclusions:

“Do or do not.  There is no try.”  Hmm…okay, almost sounds like the motto of “chastity pledges.”  You either stay a (born-again) virgin or you don’t.  There is no try.  Stiff upper lip, keep your zipper up, feel the Force, and you’re a “good” teen.  Succumb to the temptations of the dark side, and you’ve crossed the threshold.

But wait: “Fear is the path of the dark side.  Fear leads to anger.  Anger leads to hate.  Hate leads to suffering.”

Yoda, the sympathetic Jedi sex master, understands the sort of fear mongering and smear campaigns that, as Judith Levine constantly attests throughout her book Harmful To Minors, is problematically dividing families, fueling the dark side (of ignorance and sex negativity) by shutting off open communication as well as young folks’ agency in favor of moralistic and disease-oriented models, loaded yet vague buzz words and legal criteria like “age-appropriateness,” and incriminating labels such as “pedophile” and “children-who-molest.”  Fear is therefore a poor sex education strategy.  Yoda is pro-CSE.  Criminalize abstinence-only!  Gotcha.

“Once you start down the dark path, forever it will dominate your destiny.”  Ohhhh...teen pregnancy, STIs and STDs, HIV and AIDS, single mothers on welfare, statutory rape and sexual coercion…they’re the “dark path,” right, Yoda?  Indeed.  “Powerful you have become [through self-empowerment and claims of sexual choice and reproductive rights], the dark side I sense in you.”  Yet again, Yoda, I have seen the light of the Force.  Abstinence-plus.  Cover all bases without being seduced into extremes while prioritizing modest moralisms and family values.

“Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained...My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained…must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away…to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh…a [sex] Jedi craves not these things. You are reckless.”

Wait.  Hold up.  Reckless?  So…be more conservative—I mean, responsible in my approach?  Abstinence-only?

“Happens to every guy sometimes this does.”  Wait, what does?  What do you mean?

“Mine, or I will help you not!”  Okay!  Shit!  I’m so confused.

“Good relations with Wookies, I have.”  Okay…so, youthful sexual experimentation with small green men hundreds of years older than them is good?  “Size matters not.  Look at me.  Judge me by size, do you?”  Wait, Yoda, that’s not what I meant, buddy.  I just need some answers.  I don’t understand.  I don’t know what to think about sex education anymore.  I can’t believe it.

“That is why you fail.”

I’ve been thinking more and more about the rhetorical strategies applied by both "left" and "right" and everything in between regarding sex education, and how, after a while, some of the arguments start to sound the same.  Abstinence in the name of preserving the sanctity of children, families, and the moral fabric of society.  Comprehensive sex ed in the name of preserving the sexual health of children and preventing them from premature adult dangers that strain the moral fabric of society. “Children having children” discourses from CSE and abstinence proponents (as Jessica Fields sharply discusses in her book Risky Lessons).  Both political spheres (since we as a country typically and apparently can only have two that are relevant enough to address) problematize child and adolescent sexual exploration and agency via scare tactics, scientific studies, and sex negativity.  Neither side is “comprehensive.”  Neither “side” is sex education, really; they really should call it sex prevention.

I’m reminded of an article I read a few weeks back, dated September 23rd of this year.  Check it out: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090923/hl_time/08599192002400

I think the opening paragraph sums up the tone, approach, and framework that all parties—journalist, UNESCO, and U.S. conservatives are working with:

“Any attempt to decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies and slow the spread of sexually transmitted diseases like HIV around the world has to be a good thing, right? That's what the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) thought. But now it finds itself under fire from American conservatives for proposing a new set of guidelines on sex education in schools as a means of helping young people avoid potentially dangerous sexual activity.”

The basic underlying message is clear, and Levine addresses this in her aforementioned book, as well as how both left and right utilize similar rhetorical and discursive strategies to propagate very different intentions yet intervening aims and somewhat different end results.

My allegiance is, when given a choice, with “comprehensive” sex education, just to be clear.  It’s obvious that there are flaws and misconceptions with the approach, but it’s better than the failing alternative (hey!  Sounds like politics and the sort of negotiations I make when I vote!)

I’ve been very interested in the sorts of rhetorical ploys, politicizations, and mobilization strategies by the right, especially the Religious Right.  Effective, they play upon our socially-ingrained fears.  They’re losing ground again, but as Levine stated as of 2002, they had all but won the [sex education] war.  “Oh, great warrior.  Wars make not one great.”  Hello again, Yoda.  So what does make one strategy great: strategically tapping into the cultural climates, fears, and discourses of the times in order to propagate more sex-positive, pleasure and agency-reifying messages supplemented with factual information?  Or working against them by creating new (rather than reshaping old) discourses and methods?  I don’t have any answers, I’m simply musing.

“The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see the future is.”

Well, problematic connotations of “dark” as perilous destruction aside, that’s an assessment I feel either “side” could relate to.