Sexuality Education

A Resource Book

Carol Cassell, Pamela M. Wilson, Carol Cassell, Pamela M. Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351705066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1989.This book describes a variety of ways to plan and implement sexuality education and provides in-depth information on resources available. Each contributor describes one aspect of the practice of sexuality education: its goals, theory, planning and development, implementation, evaluation, teacher-training, or the role of community agencies. Articles in each section offer practical and useful guidelines for conducting sexuality education and also serve as a sound introduction to the subject. Annotated bibliographies appear at the end of each section.

Part I Sexuality Education in the Family

OVERVIEW: FAMILY EDUCATION FOR SEXUALITY

Mary Steichen Calderone

A family is two or more persons, at least one of whom qualifies as a legally responsible adult, who share one domicile in order to care for and about each other. If the family unit comes to include one or more under-age children, then the family’s primary task is clear: the nature and quality of the adult guidance, supportive care, and love bestowed on the child(ren) as they mature should be geared to enhancing potentialities of all family members, in the direction of maturation, competence, self-esteem, sense of responsibility, and capacity to give and to receive love.

What relation does the above bear to education for sexuality—that is, to education for becoming and living as a sexual person? If the overall educational process is to be designed to contribute toward a solid infrastructure within each person for successful social living, then integrated with this should be careful designs for development of components for successful sexual living as well—in other words, of a benignly oriented sociosexual ambience to grow up in. To engineer so major a paradigm shift, several facts should be recognized and accepted. In order to be integrated as armatures for all family-oriented programs: the normal human baby is born equipped with three major endowments that have been functioning along with the other human body-mind systems since their formation early in gestation and that authenticate its humanness. The three are the baby’s body, mind and sexuality. Need for understanding, acceptance, and development of that third endowment has met with the same fanatic hysteria and uninstructed opposition as once assailed a quite different paradigm shift—one that would “see” the sun not as the 24-hour commuter circling the earth once a year but as the stable, immovable center of our universe.

Body. No other living being normally and inevitably persists in standing erect throughout all but the first year of its life span, thus neatly freeing both hands for the development of all their varied skills—including expressions of tenderness and love. Tilling the fields, training a dog, riding a racehorse, dancing, skating, holding a book, sewing, cooking, typing, computing, designing, and/or constructing buildings or performing surgery—all are uniquely human body/mind skills that require training and mastery.

Mind. The most accomplished great ape or dolphin cannot approach even the simplest human being in gene-wired capacity for learning, language, memory, association, reasoning, writing, inventing, creating, imagining, choosing, deciding, postponing, loving … a child goes to school, then to university and to professional school, to learn how to use its mind on behalf of itself and others. Studies show that a supportive home and vigorous, pleasurable preschool learning experience serve to undergird successful achievement of life’s skills (Hechinger, 1984). Dreaming, imagining, inventing, reasoning—all such functions take part in how we plan and carry out, sometimes over long lifetimes, the most intricate and subtle projects.

Sexuality. Other mammals are born hard-wired to mate in direct species-specific response to a wide variety of gene programs and of environment-specific signals related to season, climate, and its annual changes, length of day, state of nutrition, and myriads of other factors. Other mammals do not have the mental resources and proclivities that we enjoy—flexibility of choices, mental reasoning power, learning and/or relearning in adult and even in aging adult life. As a result of these species-specific differences, human beings can watch how the animal world does or does not resolve problems caused by fast or slow changes; in animals for which environmental changes have occurred, it may be difficult for humans to detect the way they adapt or, more often, fail to adapt to the changes. Species-specific mating styles vary greatly: some choose a carefully looked-over and suitably behaving mate for life (swans). Others mate at random: the grey whales are recently reported to go into a kind of mating frenzy, with mating contacts one after the other with constantly changing partners in a kind of promiscuous gene-mixing celebration. Both extremes are also seen today among humans, with one great difference: at any time we can elect to change our mating behaviors, a realization many are learning how to act upon in these sobering days of AIDS.

Care of the young among animals is another broad area with many variables hard-wired into the species-specific patterns, from being left exclusively to the female with the male never aware of his offspring to the Australian male emu that mates with a series of females, watches as each lays—and leaves—an egg almost directly in front of him, nudges it into the hole he has scooped out in the sun-warmed sand, broods the clutch until all chicks have pipped in the same 24-hour day, then herds them over to the calmly waiting hens each of which accepts a chick she will feed and bring to maturity while he simply returns to his ordinary male life. In the nonhuman mammalian world, no matter what changes in behavior might be indicated by altered circumstances, obedience to the genes is dictated with little variation.

By contrast, over the span of history humans have come to determine their pre- and post-mating behaviors within a wide variety of the socially accepted patterns of monogamy, polygamy, and occasionally polyandry as modified by ceremonial living patterns (often called superstitions by other religious beliefs and observances). And although the original purpose for mating in many primitive societies may have been to have children as resources for one’s old age, in the more educated and developed Western societies such aspects as providing legal sanction (for the male at least) to enjoyment of sex for pleasure as well as for order and peace within the social structure have combined to lead to acceptance of such diverse patterns as conventional permanent coupling, legalization of divorce, and serial monogamy.

Where there has been demand for recognition that human females as well as males may seek sex for pleasure and sex for procreation, many different ways have co-existed to facilitate such choices. As a result, along with such other factors as lowered death rates, diminished need for manual labor, and the hardening realities of overpopulation and diminishing resources, this has brought to a head the essentiality of worldwide sophisticated, safe methods of contraception.

In many of the more developed societies the fiction has been maintained that children can only grow up “innocent” as long as they remain “ignorant” of the facts of sex, reproduction, sexual pleasure, and other such dangerous subjects until the time that their parents have deemed them ready for such “dangerous” (because suggestive) knowledge, i.e., until they are ready to marry. Characteristically, such westernized societies in ostrich-like fashion convinced themselves that children would “wait to be told” about sex before trying it out on their own! This foolishly discounted the myriads of media messages of all kinds that do every day reach even pre-kindergartners, proclaiming that sex is the norm and is great to enjoy right now! Even if they were allowed to watch only “Sesame Street,” they were sure on Saturday mornings to get the message from the commercials interspersing the comics or from the mail-order lingerie catalogs that invade middle-class homes.

So our kids, at ever younger ages, quite naturally began to do as they saw the adults did rather than as they said; the teen pregnancies began to climb even as their ages began to lower to include an occasional prepubertal pregnancy. The adult world too late began to realize that things were getting out of hand. Threats were heard from the unread and unscientifically informed, blaming what was happening on “all that sex education they teach in the schools,” deliberately ignoring that at most only about 10% of school programs include anything at all on sex-related topics. Thus did poorly educated prejudice join with rank ignorance to stifle all information about the truths of human sexuality, and the combination of negative forces led straight to increased premature motherhood among unprepared young girls who were childishly naive about the realities of procreation. The birthrate soared as did the toll of premature births and deaths, and ever-growing neglect and deprivation plagued the children that children were being forced to bear. For society to emerge from such tragic human havoc requires that public health methodology identify, accelerate, and implement new, effective ways to educate for positive sexual health in parents and children alike (Calderone, 1982). Time is of the essence, for the next generations of sexually violent criminals are already in the ranks.

Reproductivity vs. sexuality. These are two areas of intensive human living that, despite the fact that they involve two distinct body/mind systems, are always lumped together as if they were one. This is despite the long-known simple fact that they function at different periods in the life span with entirely different end-purposes. Their differences in structures and natures serve to characterize them as male or female. For instance, it is unlikely for the male to function normally in reproduction if he does not co-experience sexual desire, while the human female can reproduce many times over without pleasure or even with displeasure. In contrast are the permanent linkages such as the cardio-respiratory systems that are identical in structure and function in both sexes, so that the deterioration of only one can cause its owner’s life to crash.

In the late 1970s, it was observed (Calderone, 1983) during amniocenteses that as early as the 17th week of gestation, fetal penises could be seen in erection with a regular periodicity of about 90 minutes. This would be about nine weeks following the beginning of elaboration of testosterone by the embryo’s own pre-gonadal cells—the main factor operative in male gender differentiation and functioning—but that does not alone serve to differentiate the sexual from the reproductive systems or male from female sexual functioning. There are striking differences and similarities. Females are normally reproductive from puberty to approaching 50; sexually they have been observed to begin periodic vaginal lubrication from birth (Langfeldt, 1980), to be able to produce signs of sexual arousal, and even what appears to be orgasm by simple thigh pressure in the first weeks or months of life (Kinsey, 1953), and to continue these responses well into old age. The potent male can remain reproductive for his entire life span from puberty on, provided his sexual drive also remains lifelong, or it may wane with erectile difficulties as the years advance. In any case it has become vital to recognize any clear distinctions between male and female generative and/or sexual functions:

Male. Reproductive/sexual/urinary systems: testes, vas deferens, urethra, prostate, epididymis, seminal vesicles, penis, olfactory and visual systems, skin, breasts, brain, sexual memory and association pathways. Hormone: testosterone (testicles).

Female. Reproductive system: ovaries, tubes, uterus, vagina (as two-way conduit). Hormones: estrogen (ovaries), progesterone, pituitrin.

Sexual response system: clitoris, labia, vagina, G-spot, peri-vaginal and peri-rectal tissues and muscles, anus, skin, breasts, mouth, olfactory and visual systems, brain, sexual memory and association pathways. Hormones: adrenal testosterone; estrogen to maintain vaginal integrity.

From the moment of birth, baby boys continue the 90-minute schedule of penile erections begun so early in fetal life. Professionals and parents alike need to open their minds to the bald scientific proof of sexual functioning as demonstrated prenatally in humans that will continue normally throughout the life span. Disarmed by the new sexual paradigm provided by science, parents and other caretakers can open their minds to a great truth—the functioning of the dual systems as God- and nature-given: sexual beginnings in utero and the advent of puberty signalizing the advent of reproductivity. In this way parents can come to perceive the twelve pre-pubertal years as nature’s way of protecting the development, from birth to puberty, of the capacity for reproduction in safe manner and can teach their children how to become reasonably capable of judging under what circumstances and after what age elective parenthood mig...