[Crossposted at CultureKitchen.]
Amanda touches on some very nice points in this post:
Mystification, as anyone who’s tried to figure out how to stick it in without using your hands knows, is highly overrated. So yes, I favor frankness and education.
I remember driving several hours with a colleague to do a training in Morriss, Minnesota. On the way, we came across a Focus on the Family broadcast, and couldn’t help but listen (we were on our way to perform an anti-homophobia training for a sexual assault crisis program). One of the topics that came up was sex education. The woman who was describing the “objectionable” sex ed program talked about how it had the gall to teach children the terms for their “private parts,” words like “penis” and “vagina.” She got all weepy as she described how this was destroying their “natural innocence” even as she talked about how kids “natural curiosity” would lead them to try sexual things. So, are they sexually curious or naturally innocent? Or, are those two things not as separate as our radio Helen Lovejoy would have us believe?
About the only thing I remember from my own high school sex education was that our teacher said homosexuality was wrong. Other than that, it was plumbing. It only took a couple days out of our regular health class. Honestly, it was pathetic. I had better sex ed in the fifth grade in Ames, Iowa.
To a degree, I understand the fear-based approach to sex education. It’s at the heart of most of what passes for sex ed today. Indeed, the abstinence-only crew has created an industry out of fear-based sex miseducation (pdf document). What I don’t understand, though, is the desire for ignorance.
My MA thesis was a study of the Minnesota Family Council’s newspaper over a decade, focusing specifically on how they talked about sex education. There was a consistent theme, less information is better. In the early period (mid- through late-80s) the primary message was that the schools should not teach sex education. The AIDS crisis (and 90% public support of sex education, including condoms for disease and pregnancy prevention) didn’t make that a terribly sellable position. The shift to abstinence-only occurred in the late-80s/early 90s. The Right was able to co-opt legitimate fears about sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies into a message of “Don’t talk about it or they’ll do it.” Information somehow becomes license.
Whoopi Goldberg had a great response to this in her late 1980s one-woman “Fontaine goes straight” (Or something to that effect). Discussing the AIDS booklet that C. Everett Koop wanted to send out, but that Jesse Helms objected to because it “told special people how to have special sex” and not get AIDS. Helms, like so many on the Right, was running around saying, “If you tell people about this, they’ll do it.” Whoopi’s response: “What I wanna know is who is Jesse Helms fucking and what’s his name? Because I know he’s read it!” (I’ve got the party favors ready for when Jesse Helms finally enters Hell.)
“Sex is dirty; save it for someone you love.” I can’t remember where I first heard this, but it sums up the Right’s approach to sexuality quite well. It’s also not such a great message. It’s not that I have anything against “dirty” sex, but to say that sex is dirty? Well that’s going to far. But I can’t help but think that dirt (as well as “sin”) is central to this. The radio program I mentioned is exemplary of this–we can’t talk about body parts with their technical names, it somehow destroys innocence. I can’t help but think that it’s the specification of which body parts that’s supposedly doing this destruction. “Propriety” doesn’t allow us to use words like “penis” and “vagina.” We should probably avoid “clitoris” altogether since it’s not really central to the baby-making aspects of sex, and pleasure–particularly women’s pleasure–is to be feared and controlled. Better to live in ignorance than risk a loss of control.
Maybe that’s why sex is so fear-inducing; it involves loss of control. It’s not only that the ability to control others’ sex is lost, but our own ability to control ourselves can be thrown away during moments of great sex. Even if it’s something as small as having our face contort in any number of ways–many of which are quite unflattering–during sex, we lose some of our ability to determine what our body is doing. The inability to orgasm on command–or to not orgasm on command–is representative of more than just momentary discomfort, we really cannot control everything that’s going on. That loss can be discomforting.
I wonder if that’s part of what this mystification thing is all about. Sex is something over which we can never exert complete control; indeed, it sometimes seems to control us. Rather than allowing themselves to go along with that loss of control, sex must be controlled more rigidly, including information about it. We have to keep people away from it by keeping them ignorant and frightened. I think…
This is a mindset I can’t get into. Sex is a complex thing, and I can’t help but think it’s a pretty good idea to know something about it before you start having it. I’m reminded of a scene in the “Proper Condom Use” episode of South Park. Mr. Mackey is teaching the boys about sexual intercourse: “The man takes his penis and…now where did I put that thing?” Their fear of losing control would consign us all to a world of “where does this go?” (If we could send them all off with Towelie and a bag of Cheetos, and get them as far away from policy as possible, then South Park Republicans might actually be tolerable.)
In many ways, sex is about a loss of control (Sexual masochists are quite explicit about this). That’s kind of cool about it. Sex is a complicated phenomenon. It is frightening. It’s calming. It’s exciting. It’s fun. It’s dangerous. It’s painful. It’s otherworldly. It’s mundane. It’s just sex.