The Education of Eros

A History of Education and the Problem of Adolescent Sexuality

Dennis L. Carlson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136495021
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education General

The Education of Eros is the first and only comprehensive history of sexuality education and the "problem" of adolescent sexuality from the mid-20th century to the beginning of the 21st. It explores how professional health educators, policy makers, and social and religious conservatives differed in their approaches, and battled over what gets taught about sexuality in schools, but all shared a common understanding of the adolescent body and adolescent desire as a problem that required a regulatory and disciplinary education. It also looks the rise of new social movements in civil society and the academy in the last half of the 20th century that began to re-frame the "problem" of adolescent sexuality in a language of rights, equity, and social justice. Situated within critical social theories of sexuality, this book offers a tool for re-framing the conversation about adolescent sexuality and reconstructing the meaning of sexuality education in a democratic society.

1

CONSTRUCTING THE “NORMAL” ADOLESCENT

The 1950s and 1960s

The U.S. entered the second half of the 20th century with a bang—the publication within several years of each other of two books by Alfred Kinsey and his associates, at the Institute for Sexual Research at Indiana University—Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published five years later.¹ These two books would herald the beginning of a new way of framing and talking about sexuality in popular culture and public debate. But nothing is ever entirely new, for the books were written, read, and talked about using the frameworks that were available at the time. Both conservatives and progressives in the field of sex education tended to take for granted a perspective on sexuality that had been influential throughout the modern era and that found expression in the psychoanalytic movement and its “founding father” Sigmund Freud. In two short books written a decade apart—Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920 and Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930—Freud sought to situate psychoanalysis within a much broader theory of cultural development.² At the same time he sought to talk to a broader public audience about the implications of psychoanalysis in social and educational reform. In both these short volumes, Freud argued that “civilization”—which he presumed had reached its most fully developed form in contemporary Western European culture—had only been possible because of a good deal of repression of sexual desire and sexual behavior. Civilization demands of people that they subordinate their immediate desires and impulses to the authority of the boss, the demands of the work routine, and to the controlling influence of reason—Freud’s “ego.” Why, Freud asks, would people agree to give up their desires, and the object of their desires, to live a highly repressive and disciplined public life and work life. Of course, at the outset Freud assumes that people have made this choice themselves, rather than having it foisted upon them through the industrialization process. His response is another variation on the theme of the social contract of Hobbes, Locke, and others. People agree to authority and disciplined labor—and thus the disciplining and repression of most sexual desire—in exchange for security, increased material wealth, and the other advantages of living in the modern, “civilized” world.

Freud identified the psychic organizing principle of the child and “primitive” peoples as the “pleasure principle,” which aims “on the one hand, at an absence of pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure.”³ Notice that pleasure is undifferentiated at some point in the young child (corresponding to the age of “savagery”), and that sexual pleasure simply is one specialized form of bodily pleasure that develops over time. This is an important point, for Freud implies that sexuality and sexual desire cannot totally be separated from other desires, and from a basic undifferentiated desire that takes on many culturally specific forms. Sex is not just sex, in other words. It is part of the life force that lies behind all creative, expressive, spontaneous play, so it cannot and should not, according to Freud, be overly repressed, for that can lead to neurosis and psychosis, both individual and collective. But it cannot be given free reign either. It must be subordinated to the “reality principle” in modern culture. For one thing, when given free reign, the pleasure principle leads toward “polymorphous perversity”—finding sexual pleasure in many different forms—which Freud believed threatened the stability of the marriage and patriarchal family. The reality principle was not, for Freud, to be associated with the abandonment of desires so much as the deferment of the fulfillment of desire. The reality principle, he wrote, does not abandon the intention of “ultimately obtaining pleasure” but rather carries out “the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary tolerance of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure.”⁴ This theme of the postponement of pleasure would, of course, become very important in sex education for adolescents, and Freud clearly is getting at the notion that while young people may have to postpone desire, at the very time when their sexual desires are at a peak, that they must be convinced it is in their long-term interests to do so, that repression and denial now will lead to more pleasure later, in the form of a more mature married life. He found himself dismayed, consequently, by claims by some that “our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.”⁵

Surely one of the reasons why Freud became so influential, even if he stayed controversial, was that much of what he had to say was consistent with the commonsense wisdom of the day. He took for granted an existing middle class, Eurocentric, and colonial narrative about the evolution of “civilization” out of “savagery.” Freud and his followers then applied this narrative to the upbringing of the modern, Western child. Cast in these terms, the child is understood to be a savage, much like the “backward” races of the world, and education is about “civilizing savages.”⁶ Education is a developmental process that moves the impulsive child toward the rational, responsible adult. In the first half of the 20th century, no one had really questioned this basic narrative—from health educators, to developmental psychologists like Granville Stanley Hall who coined the term “adolescence,” to teachers and school administrators, and even to young people and their parents. Still, this development is not about totally vanquishing and subduing the pleasure principle, and (by implication) adolescent sexual desire and behavior, but rather bringing the pleasure principle under the control of reason and long-run interests. Freud’s own psychoanalytic case studies of upper middle-class Austrians had convinced him that most of their neuroses were the result of overrepression rather than underrepression—the kind of overrepression typically associated with a moralistic attitude that sexuality was shameful, “dirty,” and immoral. He argued that sexual temptations “are merely increased by constant frustration, whereas an occasional satisfaction of them causes them to diminish, at least for the time being.”⁷ Freud could be interpreted by conservative and mainstream progressives as supporting their views. But he also clearly provided the basis for a quite radical and subversive theory of sexual repression and the sublimation of desire in modern industrial capitalism. He could be invoked to support the teaching of deferred gratification by adolescents, but also to support the teaching of a less-alienating balance between the reality and the pleasure principles. He would even be invoked by the mid-1960s to support a radical cultural politics of “desublimation” of long-repressed desire, as America began to undergo what in popular culture was called (not inaccurately I think) a “sexual revolution.” The “revolution,” however, was understood within the framework that Freud had left, as Freud was taken up by those on the political left, including most prominently Herbert Marcuse—a German cultural theorist who had emigrated to the U.S. when the Nazis came to power and became a U.S. citizen. In Germany, he had been affiliated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, which brought Marxist categories to the critique of contemporary popular culture and everyday life in advanced capitalism.

In 1955 Marcuse published Eros and Civilization, which consisted of his own reading and response to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, bringing Marxism and the psychoanalytic tradition into dialogue. While Marcuse is critical of Freud’s argument about the importance of keeping the pleasure principle under a tight disciplinary reign, his criticism is measured. He means to argue that if Freud may have been right for his day, the day is arriving when we no longer have to be so repressed, when eros, with all of its creativity and spontaneity, its joy in living, can have its day. While a great deal of repression of desire (and thus sexuality) had been necessary to build “civilization” to its current advanced state, it was wrong to suppose that the subordination of the pleasure principle to the reality principle had to continue indefinitely, or that one principle had to be set off against the other. Instead, “the very achievements of repressive civilization seem to create the preconditions for the gradual abolition of repression.”⁸ Marcuse was willing to acknowledge that some repression of eros was necessary in civilization since people had to provide for the basic necessities of life through their labor. However, advanced capitalist society was characterized by a “surplus repression,” beyond that needed to provide for the necessities of life, and beyond that required to get work done. This surplus repression is “necessitated by social domination.” In other words, there is no real, tangible need for so much repression of the pleasure principle, beyond the need to dominate people. There is no real, tangible need for the continuation of alienated labor now that machines can do much of the “dirty work” of producing commodities. People can, for the first time in their long history, begin to reap the reward of so much repression and denial. Marcuse thus links the subversive reassertion of the pleasure principle to a radical cultural politics, and he envisions a sexual revolution that is inseparable from a broader cultural revolution. The body, no longer used as an instrument of alienated labor would be resexualized and re-eroticized, and this would be accompanied by a “reactivation of all erotogenic zones” and a return to a polymorphous view of sexuality that is no longer genital centered and orgasm centered. The whole body would become “an instrument of pleasure.”⁹ This imagined society, that Marcuse argued was becoming possible, was to be characterized by “an enlargement of the meaning of sexuality itself.” Work would become creative and expressive, and thus “libidinal and erotic.”¹⁰

Marcuse’s words could have been written by Alfred Kinsey, although he probably would have used a somewhat different language. And while Marcuse would have a great impact in the academy and within a growing counterculture movement among white, middle-class youth, Kinsey received much greater attention from the popular media and generated a lively public debate—partially because he avoided lofty theoretical arguments and stuck to a scientific presentation of “the facts.” There is something very American about the idea that we should begin with the facts about sexual behavior, supposedly free of any bias, and from those facts try to shape a public response—as if the facts could ever be separated completely from bias and attitude. Surely, Kinsey had his biases, his sexual politics, but these had to do with facing facts and accepting human sexuality in a multitude of forms and expressions without moral judgment or psychological diagnosis. He maintained that society should, quite properly, “attempt to control sexual relations which are secured through the use of force or undue intimidation,” but otherwise interfere as little as possible in the affairs of individuals.¹¹ This is often labeled “libertarianism” in the U.S., and is in some ways not very consistent with progressive approaches to sexuality education, which understands the individual as produced by, and acting within, a cultural context. Neither Freud nor Marcuse would have argued that sexuality is merely an individual affair, and no one else’s business. For them, like it or not, our sexuality is produced and regulated within a cultural context, and cannot be understood apart from those broader cultural politics. Still, there was a cultural politics to the call for a return to a more natural, less-tightly regulated, sexual development and for accepting as natural a broad range of sexual behaviors. His research was untainted by any romanticization or moral judgment when it came to sexuality. Critics attacked his conclusions by calling into question the representativeness of his sample of interview subjects and his analysis of the statistical data, but his studies remain to this day the most sophisticated and complete study of sexual behavior in the U.S. These studies, framed as they were in the language of the natural sciences rather than cultural studies, were presented as studies of sexuality in the “human” male and female, as if people were the same everywhere when it came to sexuality. While there may be some truth to this, it is also a central premise of this book that sexuality is produced culturally, and Kinsey’s studies tell us something about how a sample of Americans expressed and talked about their sexual behaviors at a particular point in history.

Perhaps the most striking finding to emerge from these studies is that there is a much wider range of “normal” sexual behavior—among both men and women—than was typically acknowledged in public. This, in itself, was subversive, for it challenged the whole ideology of normality. Kinsey classified six forms of sexual response among men and women: masturbation, nocturnal orgasms and sexual dreams, heterosexual “petting,” heterosexual intercourse, homosexual relations, and bestiality. All these he treated without judgment, as forms of sexual activity that resulted (or could result) in a common physiological response: sexual “output” or orgasm. It is impossible to scientifically distinguish one orgasm from another, even male and female orgasms, since “all orgasms appear to be physiologically similar quantities, whether they are derived from masturbation, heterosexual, homosexual, or others sorts of activities.”¹² By far the most common form of sexual activity among both males and females, according to Kinsey, was masturbation, and that of every possible type of sexual activity, “masturbation … is the one in which the female most frequently reaches orgasm.”¹³ Heterosexual intercourse was thus dethroned as the most erotic or even preferred form of sexual activity. Furthermore, Kinsey noted, “we have recognized exceedingly few cases, if any outside of a few psychotics, in which either physical or mental damage has resulted from masturbatory activity.”¹⁴ In this one sentence, Kinsey effectively demolished the rationale sex educators had used for decades in arguing against masturbation as “unhealthy,” as weakening the system, and even leading to insanity. Furthermore, in recognizing the clitoris rather than the vagina as the focus of female sexual arousal, and arguing that the clitoris was most fully aroused in masturbation, Kinsey encouraged a view of women as more than passive sexual objects waiting to be used for men’s pleasure.

At the same time, Kinsey’s reduction of sexual behavior to the achievement of sexual “output” took for granted a particularly masculine construction of sexuality, with attention focused on the most efficient and effective means of achieving that end. Kinsey’s sexual champion, in this regard, was the adolescent male—both because the adolescent male’s sexual “output” was greatest, and because adolescent males appeared least inhibited sexually. He idealizes them as sexual athletes, with the “strongest” winning the race for sexual conquests over their “weak” peers. These “strong” adolescent males are clearly a version of the “alpha male,” and Kinsey reports that they have higher sex drives and mature sexually at an earlier age than “weak” boys—and they continue to outperform (at least sexually) their peers as they move into adulthood. He writes: “these early-adolescent males are more often the more alert, energetic, vivacious, spontaneous, physically active, socially extroverted, and/or aggressive individuals in the population.” In contrast, late-blooming boys are typically “slow, quiet, mild in manner, [and] without force.”¹⁵ This all reinforced a social Darwinism that presumed “strong” boys were superior and should be held up as standards of masculinity, while “weak” boys should be weeded out. The football team, and try-outs for the football team, thus became a primary mechanism for “weeding out” the “weak” boys and selecting the “strong” boys. Of course, bullying is another mechanism for sorting the weak from the strong and that is perhaps one reason why it has been such a persistent and hard-to-eradicate practice in our schools and playgrounds; and why the harassment and even rape of adolescent girls by “strong” adolescent boys continues to be sanctioned. Strong boys are just being strong boys. Kinsey never acknowledges any of this sexual and gender politics, and, as the scientist, his interest is with the “strong” boys, as specimens of heightened masculinity and sexual potency—which are presumed to be inseparable.

In separating “weak” from “strong” boys, Kinsey did break with conventional wisdom on one important point. He was not able to establish any relationship between these two types and exclusive heterosexuality and homosexuality. In fact, he found that most males and females were not exclusively either heterosexual or homosexual, thus seeming to confirm Freud’s theory of natural bisexuality—with a heterosexual preference among most people. Kinsey’s findings have often been cited to suggest that approximately ten percent of the population is exclusively homosexual or gay. But Kinsey himself avoided labeling people homosexual or heterosexual, gay or straight. Instead, his interview data led him to reject the sexual identity binary of the modern era as reflecting the reality of people’s sexual lives. He found that 46% of his male subjects had “reacted” sexually to both males and females as adults, and 37% had a least one homosexual experience. Almost 12% of males were rated as being equally heterosexual and homosexual in their experiences and responses; and about ten percent were “more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years.”¹⁶ For females, seven percent were rated equally hetero–homo in behaviors and responses, and somewhere between two and six percent were exclusively homosexual.¹⁷ It is hard to underestimate the effect of these statistics on homosexual behavior among males and females. As I noted earlier, the gay rights movement that began to coalesce in the U.S. by the late 1960s cited Kinsey to the effect that ten percent of the population was gay, and that, as a sizable minority, gay people needed to be taken into account and their struggles for equality and social justice taken seriously by the majority “straight” population. But Kinsey also revealed a great diversity of sexualities of the middle that did not fit neatly into the straight–gay identity option, and in this way he is consistent with the contemporary movement among some youth to “queer” sexual identity and thereby disrupt binary identity formation. What was clear, and could not easily be avoided, was that homosexuality was a “normal” part of many “normal” peoples’ lives, and that exclusive homosexuals also seemed well adjusted and happy.

In spite of the considerable differences between Marcuse’s radical rereading of Freud, and Kinsey’s empirical, scientific observations, they both led in the same direction, the separation of sexuality from any moral condemnation (in direct defiance of church doctrine), and the acknowledgement and even celebration of sexual diversity—including homosexuality, again in defiance of church dogma and in opposition to the rather overt homophobia and heterosexism of American culture in the 1950s. The “new” right had found itself two great Antichrists, around whose images it would begin, ever so slowly, to wage a cultural battle: Freud and Kinsey. If Freud was, ironically, a social conservative in so many ways, he also had spawned a radical democratic movement, which Marcuse moved within, that was quite subversive of conventional sexual mores and norms. Kinsey himself had developed quite a reputation for being a sexual libertine, and in the public media Freud and Kinsey were two faces of a common threat, or salvation, depending on your point of view. For conservatives, sex educators were radical progressives, out to teach sexual relativism and perversion to the nation’s youth. When Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was released, the New York Times asked the highly respected cultural anthropologist, Clyde Kluckhohn to review it. His was the voice of a fellow scientist of human behavior, and he admitted to finding it “alarming” that so many people were attacking Kinsey and the report who had not read it, or, if they had read it, lacked the background specialized knowledge that other scientists had. This cannot help, however, establ...