(7) Prologue - Mrs. Boland, the Sexual Revolution, and Me

"I was in Mrs. Boland’s living room on that beautiful fall day because I wanted to understand the fight over sex education and why it seems to be taking up a larger and larger part of American political life. What I already knew was that sex education, like abortion twenty years ago, was driving ordinary people into a level of political activism that was completely unprecedented for most of them." [mijn nadruk] (9)

"I want to show you that fights about sex are also fights about gender, about power and trust and hierarchy, about human nature, and, not surprisingly, about what sex really is and what it means in human life. Even more deeply, fights about sex are fights about how we are to weigh our obligations to ourselves and others, issues that themselves are tied to our notions of what it means to be a man or a woman."(12)

"As a sociologist who has spent many years thinking about sex and society, I want to explore what has changed in our lives when it comes to sex, marriage, and gender over the last half-century. But that part of the story is necessarily somewhat abstract, dealing with statistics and large-scale social change. So I also want to make the story more intimate and real by showing how these big changes are playing out in the lives of individuals, people whose stories may not be as dramatic as Mrs. Boland’s but who are grappling in different ways with sex and how to deal with it."(18)

"I should probably say at the outset that I’m not at all sure what the right answers are about what will best promote human happiness and fulfillment when it comes to sex, either for a society or for individuals. The more I talk to people about what they think, the more I come to see the world through their eyes. And the more I’ve explored the issues around sex and gender, the more I’ve come to see how complex these issues really are."(18)

[Gaan we weer vermijden standpunten in te nemen om aardig gevonden te worden? Het is allemaal echt niet zo ingewikkeld, hoor. Sommige mensen hebben gelijk, andere ongelijk.]

(18) Chapter one - Sex and Politics in American Life

"Still, sex is something pretty special for her [Jenny Letterman - GdG]. As a Christian, she believes it’s a gift of the Creator, to be treated with respect, and she’s not at all sure she wants her son thinking about it just yet. He’s pretty young for his age, and eight-year-old boys can treat anything as smutty. Sex is a delicate and complex matter, and while she has complete confidence in the school and Ms. Vasquez, she thinks it would be too much like signing a blank check to turn over something as special as sex to them."(19)

[Seks is iets van de schepper, iets waarvoor we daarom respect moeten hebben, seks is delicaat en complex, is iets speciaals. Zo typisch. We moeten respect hebben voor mensen, niet voor seks en al helemaal niet om die reden. Seks als complex en speciaal neerzetten is onzinnig en alleen maar bedoeld om daarna te zeggen dat seks alleen in het huwelijk mag plaatvinden voor de voortplanting en zeker niet voor de lol.]

"How did sex education, which has been surprisingly common for the better part of a century and which has enjoyed very high levels of public support for most of that time, come to be so controversial? What is it about sex education that makes people so passionate about it? And what is it that translates that passion into politics at the national level?" [mijn nadruk] (25)

"Not surprisingly, perhaps, it seemed to me that almost everyone I interviewed in Billingsley was an active member of a church, although I did not know this when I chose it."(27)

"As many people I interviewed will tell you, opposition to sex education is primarily (and sometimes, to hear them talk about it, exclusively) religious in nature. And not just any religion, but the kind of religion that predominates in Billingsley — evangelical, and particularly fundamentalist, Protestantism.
But as is so often the case, looking at the role of religion in people’s views about sex education in this town made it clear that real life is much more complicated than the stereotypes suggest. It is absolutely the case that religion does play a role in the opposition to sex education, but not in the clean, unambiguous way that most people imagine. For example, religion also plays a role, albeit a more limited one, in mobilizing support for sex education." [mijn nadruk] (28-29)

[Ja, leuk hoor, maar religie is dus voornamelijk en in grote lijnen de reden van verzet tegen seksuele voorlichting.]

"At least part of the reason sex education is in the limelight these days is that almost everyone agrees American teenagers don’t handle their sexuality very well. (...) Although the sexual activities of American teens are not so different from those of teens in the rest of the advanced industrial world, the consequences most surely are. Teen birth, abortion, and venereal disease rates are among the highest in the industrialized world. More worrisome, about 20 percent of all AIDS cases in the United States are diagnosed among people in their twenties ... (...) This litany, by the way, overlooks the fact that American adults don’t handle their sexuality very well either, compared to citizens of other countries. (...) Over the past three decades, a consensus about how to approach these problems slowly emerged among opinion leaders, experts, and the general public, and sex education was at the heart of this consensus." [mijn nadruk] (33)

[Ja en hoe zou dat komen? Omdat niemand er open over is, omdat alles in het geheim moet gebeuren.]

"But as Jenny intuited that day in the Stop & Shop—and this is where the conflict arises—the kind of sex education that people were turning to in the 1970s and 1980s presumes that marriage is optional and happens later in an individual’s sexual career and perhaps not at all. In short, it is based on a set of sexual values that grew out of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, values that many people have become increasingly bold in challenging." [mijn nadruk] (35)

"During the course of my twenty-year exploration of conflicts over sex education, American teenagers actually got better at handling their sexuality, and both kinds of sex education took the credit. Teenage birth, abortion, and pregnancy rates all dropped, because of two things that happened simultaneously. First, teenagers became more likely to abstain from having sex than they had in the past. My calculations suggest that the probability that a female between fifteen and nineteen would be sexually active and not married went from approximately 29 percent in 1995 to 25 percent in 2002. In other words, almost half a million teens who would have been sexually active a few years ago now aren’t. The other good news is that teens who are sexually active are far more likely than before to use contraception the first time they have sex." [mijn nadruk] (39)

[Wablief? Dus het is goed nieuws als jongeren minder seks hebben? De auteur verraadt zichzelf lelijk, hier. Dan vind je dus blijkbaar dat jongeren niet aan seks moeten doen? En moeten we echt nog praten over dat seks alleen in het huwelijk thuishoort zoals die christelijke Jenny vindt? Zoals hierna gebeurt? Wat me trouwens opvalt is dat seks hier steeds gelijk lijkt te staan aan neuken. Je zou ook kunnen vinden: voor het huwelijk mag je jezelf en anderen op allerlei manieren (laten) bevredigen, zolang je maar niet neukt. Bijvoorbeeld. Ook horen voorbehoedmiddelen overal vrij verkrijgbaar te zijn.]

"Grudgingly conceding that most schools have to teach something about sex in this era of AIDS and out-of-wedlock babies, Jenny and people like her have increasingly become proponents of “abstinence-only” sex education, in contrast to Melanie’s kind of sex education, which is now being called “comprehensive.”As a result, abstinence education is an increasingly large part of what “sex education” has come to mean.
In 1999, almost one of every four secondary school teachers of sex education reported that they taught “abstinence” education, and 40 percent of all teachers (including those teaching “comprehensive” sex education) thought that abstaining from sexual activity was the most important message they were trying to convey.
Although there is almost as wide a variety of abstinence-only sex education programs as there is of the comprehensive kind, in general abstinence education teaches that marriage is the only acceptable place for sex, that contraception can and often does fail, and that abortions can and do leave lasting emotional effects on people. It also teaches the kinds of values that Jenny would second in a heartbeat: that the best kind of sex comes when you are emotionally, spiritually, and physically in tune with your partner and that this kind of union can happen only when people have committed themselves in a marriage.
To its opponents, this kind of teaching is “fear-based” and inflates the rates of contraceptive failure and the psychological after-effects of abortion while overstating the effectiveness of abstinence education, all in the service of promoting the ideal of no sex before marriage. For the moment, it is important to realize that as far as the people most involved in the debate are concerned, the values are more important than the facts." [mijn nadruk] (46-47)

"While Melanie thinks that our sexual problems as a society are the result of young people not having enough information about sex, Jenny thinks it’s just the opposite — our sexual problems are due to too much information. In fact, Jenny’s slogan, and the slogan of all the parents in Shady Grove who join her in opposing sex education, is exactly that: Melanie’s curriculum is “too much, too soon.”"(49)

[OMG en die mensen mogen allemaal stemmen ...]

(51) Chapter two - The Birth of Sex Education

"So Melanie and Jenny are fighting about sex because they care passionately about all the things that sex is connected to and is a symbol of — marriage and families; relationships between men and women and between parents and children; and the life of the family and the life of the market.
Which brings us to sex education and its history. Sex education was invented in the midst of the first sexual revolution, in the Progressive era, between 1880 and 1920. It was conceived, so to speak, in 1913 in a luxurious red dining room in a mansion on New York’s Fifth Avenue owned by one Grace Hoadley Dodge." [mijn nadruk] (53)

[De seksuele voorlichting in de VS dan wel. Het hele boek gaat alleen maar over de VS.]

Noot 2:

"The meeting resulted in the creation of the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), the culmination of many years of attempts to reform American sexual behavior. Two groups of reformers, the anti-prostitution, or “purity,” wing and the anti–venereal disease, or “sanitarian,” wing, had long included some measure of education about sex in their programs, but it was only with the creation of ASHA that education moved front and center." [mijn nadruk] (53)

[Een initiatief van rijke nette mensen, nou dan weet je het wel.]

"But the Progressives with a capital P were convinced that teaching people about sex was the surest and best way to make American society better in regard to a wide range of problems. Crucially, for them, “sex” meant all the ambiguities that a later wave of feminism would try to dissolve—what we call “sexuality” and what we call “gender” were inextricably intertwined for these men and women. They believed that solving the baffling problems of a newly industrializing society could be accomplished only by solving the dilemmas confronting men and women both in and out of the bedroom. A key part of their remarkable confidence in the face of this daunting task was their passionate conviction that they could bring together the historically “male” values of the professions with the historically “female” ones of morality and the family. For the women in particular — people like Grace Dodge, Anna Garlin Spencer, and Martha Falconer, members in good standing of “social housekeeping” — American life could be improved only when women brought their skills as mothers and homemakers to the wider canvas of society as a whole." [mijn nadruk] (57)

De angst voor SOA's vanwege prostitutie was groot.

"When the social hygienists resolved to begin educating the American public about sex, they confronted a social order that called prostitution a “necessary evil” and took for granted the doctrine of “physical necessity” — the idea that if men could not have regular sex, their health would suffer.(...) For women reformers, prostitution and the double standard on which it was based institutionalized ideas about men, women, and sexuality that had to be challenged."(61)

"So many women across the country found themselves involved in getting rid of the double standard because American society was in the midst of a genuine revolution, and unsettling changes in sexuality — and gender — surrounded them on every side. In fact, some scholars even argue that the period from roughly 1880 to 1920 saw the only real sexual revolution in American history, and that the cultural changes in sexuality during the 1960s and 1970s were mere aftershocks." [mijn nadruk] (63)

"If later and fewer marriages and smaller families were not bad enough, the divorce rate skyrocketed in the first years of the new century, and once again the trend seemed most visible among the well-to-do. The ratio of divorces to marriages went up by a third between 1880 and 1900 and almost doubled between 1910 and 1920. Although low by current standards, these increases were alarming to people who had seen divorces soar in just one generation."(69)

"Once named, however, these newly discovered adolescents gave adults plenty to worry about. Sexual revolutions are most visible in the young, so the discovery of adolescence was given a particularly sharp edge by the very different kinds of sexual behaviors emerging among young people. Working-class youth, “factory girls and boys,” with money in their pockets and new places to spend it, such as skating rinks, amusement parks, dance halls, and roadhouses, alarmed middle-class observers. Young people could mingle in these new public spaces without adult supervision, and sexual danger seemed everywhere. Such danger came in two forms, depending on whether a girl or a boy was the object of concern.
For boys, the path of sexual indulgence could lead away from the older virtues of thrift, self-discipline, and deferred gratification.(...) Worse yet, some of the young women seemed actively to enjoy the process of ruination, entering into it enthusiastically. Once ruined, their only recourse — or so it was thought — was prostitution, starting the cycle of depravity all over again." [mijn nadruk] (70-72)

"Reformers were convinced that a combination of low wages, independence from their parents, and new notions about sexuality put factory girls in danger as never before."(73)

"As the historian Beth Bailey has so convincingly shown, what was changing were conventions, assumptions about how men and women were to behave with each other, sexually and otherwise. When the early social hygienists looked around them, they saw that sex and procreation were becoming disconnected."(77)

"This presented a problem. The disconnection of sex and procreation threatened to imperil marriage. If the whole point of marriage was no longer to be fruitful and multiply, what was to keep marriages together?"(79)

"In the face of this shift, the social hygienists turned to education — teaching people not so much about sex as about marriage. They took for granted that their task was to educate Americans about “wholesome” sex, which for them meant wholesome sex within marriage. In fact, what they were really up to was recruiting sex to support a new model of marriage-as-intimacy, then emerging among the middle and upper classes. Along with issuing dire warnings about the dangers of sex outside marriage, social hygienists also sought to improve the quality of sex within it. Setting in motion what would eventually become a whole world of information, specialists, and organizations, they were the first to try to do something about the quality of the sex life of (properly married) Americans."(79-80)

"So when social hygienists urged the single standard, telling young men that they should treat all women as they would want their sisters to be treated, they were claiming that male sexuality, like female sexuality, could and must be controlled. In place of the imperious, hotheaded, and hard-to-control male sexuality of the previous century, the social hygienists proposed a tender, intimate, comradely, and feminized sexuality modeled on existing notions of how women experienced their own sexual drives."(85)

"Women and men, especially in the middle and upper classes, were coming to expect to be friends and partners in companionable marriages, and marriage manuals began to focus on sexual pleasure and even mutual orgasm as a central part of the marital experience."(88)

"The transformation of “sex education” into “family life education” was therefore built into the very bones of sex education and happened remarkably early in its history. Despite the fact that wary communities sometimes decided that family life education was really sex education in disguise and banned it, the sex education designed by the social hygienists to support marriage, and more broadly family life, was probably much more common and more accepted than we realize."(91)

"In the forty-five-year period between the end of World War I and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, this expansion of the role of sex education continued. Part preparation for marriage, part an attempt to discourage premarital sex, and part training for “responsible parenthood,” sex education seems to have settled into a routine encouraged by the sex educators themselves. Rather than clearly focusing on the agenda that had brought it into being — the single standard of sexual behavior and the prevention of venereal disease — sex education became increasingly all-encompassing, expanding to cover almost everything under the rubric of “personal and family living.”"(92)

(95) Chapter three - Sex Education, the Sexual Revolution, and the Sixties

"Either way, being sexual and being caught at it, which is what pregnancy meant in our day, meant that you were no longer fit to be seen in school. Well into the 1970s, even properly married schoolteachers in some communities had to step down when their pregnancies showed, lest their bulging bellies arouse speculation among innocent schoolchildren as to how those bellies got that way. Yet now in Mary Kay’s small, rural southern town, girls get pregnant all the time, mostly when they’re not married, and rather than hanging their heads in shame, they stay in class. They even go to basketball games taking their babies with them." [mijn nadruk] (97)

[Dat van die zwangere leraren is wel héél ziek ... Als je dit leest weet je dat die tieners qua seks van toeten noch blazen weten, dat ze denken dat seks = neuken, dat voorbehoedmiddelen blijkbaar moeilijk te krijgen zijn, dat abortus in zo'n kwaad daglicht is gesteld dat iedereen maar kinderen ter wereld brengt. Nou, laat dat inderdaad maar eens zien, zou ik zeggen.]

"Interviewing across the country, sitting on front porches, in crowded coffee shops, and in quiet living rooms, as well as in the offices of principals, sex educators, and clergy, I’ve become convinced that a sexual revolution really did take place (in de 60er jaren - GdG), and that it’s one of the great unacknowledged forces shaping much of contemporary social and political life. Just as the turn of the twentieth century saw profound changes in how Americans thought about sex and family, the 1960s were a time of remarkably unsettling change. Just as people in the early years of the century watched hemlines rise, people in the sixties and seventies had much the same shock, watching dresses move from the mid-calf shirtwaists of the early 1960s (think Donna Reed or Beaver Cleaver’s mother) to dresses so short that women had to learn a whole new way of bending over to pick something up. On the cultural front, not just dresses but other clothing and hairstyles, tastes in music, and the way people conducted themselves sexually and reproductively all changed.
At a deeper level, the sexual revolution held within it another kind of revolution, one in which men and women began to relate to each other in new ways, and parents and children fought about whether and how much youngsters would take part in this change. Sex, gender, marriage, and authority were all enmeshed in the sixties, and the sexual revolution represented them all." [mijn nadruk] (101)

"So the sexual revolution took place in an atmosphere in which many young people were both critical of established authority and suspicious of the motives of people who wanted to enforce traditional values. Young people were confident their values were authentic and noble ones while their elders were guilty of hypocrisy on a society-wide scale. And a remarkable number of their elders seemed to agree. Both the sexual revolution, and the gender revolution of which it was part, challenged everything that an older generation had taken for granted about men and women, gender and sex."(102)

"Although a few upper-income women had diaphragms, most other Americans were relying on pretty much the same kinds of contraception people had used a century earlier. Even more telling, although subsequent studies established that in 1971 32 percent of women were sexually active before marriage, no one knew at the time, because national studies asking unmarried women about their sexual practices were unthinkable. (...) The social hygienists’ stance toward masturbation — that it did not cause either insanity or hair on the hands but was nonetheless a potentially harmful habit that could become addictive — was the conventional wisdom. Homosexuality was so distant from public acknowledgment that the idea that it was a “lifestyle” would have been unimaginable." [mijn nadruk] (104)

[Een volk, opgegroeid in onwetendheid over seks.]

"By 1975, just a few years later, that world had disappeared almost completely. Contraception was legal for the unwed and for teenagers, and contraceptives were sold over the counter; ads for them competed for attention in the mass-circulation women’s magazines you could buy at the checkout counter in any grocery store. Abortion was legal, and there was a new constitutional theory of privacy. Men and women lived openly together without being married, and out-of-wedlock birthrates began a steady rise."(106)

"Between 1964 and 1975, sex became possible for millions of women in the way it always had been possible for men, as something you did when you wanted to, because you wanted to, for its own sake. With legal, readily available, federally subsidized, and highly effective contraception, and with abortion available as a backup if pregnancy occurred anyway, sex for pure pleasure rather than sex necessarily tied to an ongoing and committed relationship became an option for women. And they didn’t have to be ashamed of it."(110)

"Public opinion polls show quite convincingly that between 1967 and 1973, a set of rules about proper sexual conduct that would have seemed both comforting and familiar to the social hygienists was radically overturned. These polls show that whatever people might have done in their private lives, in the early 1960s they pretty much agreed about what people should do. Moral people, and specifically moral women, did not have sex before marriage, did not have sex with anyone other than their legal spouses, and did not have sex for the fun of it." [mijn nadruk] (116)

"The sheer size of the shift in opinion and the very short time in which it took place make it clear that the sixties were indeed a watershed. When the sexual revolution was over, sex was in the public eye, motherhood was a voluntary choice for women, and marriage was no longer the only acceptable and legitimate place to have sex or babies."(117)

"But this picture of unfettered choices had a dark edge, as interviews for this book have made clear. When marriage and parenthood became choices for women, they also became choices for men." [mijn nadruk] (121)

"But revolutions have winners and losers, and in this case the losers were women who looked forward to marriage and family as the most enticing and life-affirming future. Now they were confronted by men who could have sex with many different women and who did not have to commit themselves to a relationship in order to have it. When and if a pregnancy occurred, rather than doing “the right thing,” as his father or grandfather might have done, today’s young man did not necessarily feel that he had to endorse what was now seen as the woman’s choice about pregnancy and parenthood."(125)

"As it happens, sex education, which came into being as a way of managing the first sexual revolution, was now called on to manage the second sexual revolution, which separated sex from marriage. Sex education was increasingly remade, and increasingly it was remade into exactly what the founders had dismissed as “emergency” sex education ..."(126)

"The task of sex education became one of reducing the risks of sexuality outside marriage among young people, and several things were thought to be critical for this, as the Illinois statement suggests. On the one hand, information was key: young people could not manage risks without being aware of both what the risks were and what means were available to reduce them. On the other hand, young people needed motivation to manage such risks, and this resulted in an emphasis on being in a “caring” relationship. (...) Increasingly, in everything from crime to nuclear energy, the task of a more complex and heterogeneous society was not to preach a single moral vision but to provide information to morally diverse actors who would “clarify” their own values and act prudently."(132)

"In the course of trying to convince young people that the best kind of sex was intimate, committed, and mutually caring, sex that took the other person into account, sex educators had effectively conceded that marriage was just one of several sexual options. In so doing, they planted the seeds of what would eventually become a harvest of controversy." [mijn nadruk] (133)

(133) Chapter four - Sexual Liberals and Sexual Conservatives

"Almost all the people I spoke with used some formulation of the conservative-liberal or right-left dichotomy to talk about where they and others stood when it came to sexuality and education about it. People clearly knew that common beliefs held them together with others on this same side of the issue, and they also understood that this was true of those on the other side. Moreover, they were unanimous in believing that people who supported comprehensive sex education were liberal or on the left and those who opposed such sex education and/or who preferred abstinence-only sex education were conservative or on the right."(135)

[Dat ligt nogal voor de hand, toch? Ze heeft de neiging voortdurend te zeggen dat het allemaal complexer is dan we denken en dat er allerlei nuances zijn, etc., etc. Natuurlijk zijn er individuele nuances, maar de grote lijnen zijn nogal simpel, vind ik. ]

"While pundits debate about what “right” and left” mean in a post–cold war era, the people I talked to had no doubts. In particular, the rise of “social conservatism” has signaled a whole new dimension within conservatism. To be fair, conservatism since the 1950s has always included a turn toward religion, a fascination with natural law, and a deep respect for tradition and hierarchy. But my hunch, based on the people I’ve talked to, is that for modern social conservatives, the term “social” has come to be exactly what it was in 1913 — a euphemism for sex." [mijn nadruk] (138)

[Ook dat ligt voor de hand. ]

"Here’s what I’ve come to understand: for conservatives, sex is sacred, while for liberals, it’s natural, and sacred sex demands formal structures, namely marriage, to protect it, while natural sex does not."(148)

[En dat is dan ook meteen de oplossing van het 'probleem'. Aangezien god niet bestaat, religie onzin is, en "heilig' dus ook, vervalt die opvatting. De opvatting die overblijft: seks is natuurlijk. Klaar. En zullen we ook eens het idee 'huwelijk' ter discussie stellen waarin conservatieven zo geloven? Daarover wordt verderop wel het een en ander gezegd. Weer voor de hand liggende standpunten, vind ik.]

"The talk about marriage flows over a difference between the two sides that is never forthrightly confronted, and that is the role of sexual pleasure in human life. Like the early social hygienists, the sexual conservatives are terribly worried about the dangers of letting pleasure loose. I must have heard such people tell me a hundred times the theme that sex education teaches “If it feels good, do it.” They are convinced that sexual pleasure is all well and good, but only in marriage. Not only do they believe that marriage is the one place that sexual pleasure can become something beyond mere physical pleasure, they devoutly agree with Sandy Ames that “you just don’t go around having that kind of time with just anybody.”" [mijn nadruk] (160)

[Zouden conservatieven wel weten wat seksueel plezier is? ]

"Over and over again, people told me that three things sparked the sex education conflict in their communities, and each of them, I’ve come to believe, stands in for a debate about the competing roles of pleasure and duty in American society. First, of course, is the role of marriage itself, or conversely, the belief that young people can have sex as long as it is both careful and caring. Then, as Bruce Dean, the sex education teacher in Shady Grove, told me, “There’s also the section on homosexuality, and a section on masturbation. And that always throws a red flag up too, especially for the parents.”" [mijn nadruk] (163)

"That is precisely the heart of what sexual liberals believe. Because sexual liberals are pluralists when it comes to sex, marriage, and family, they believe that there are many possible ways to have a meaningful sexual relationship and many acceptable ways to bear and raise children. Sexual liberals may well have a preference for heterosexuality and marriage, especially when children are involved, but this is only a preference, not a line dividing the acceptable from the unacceptable, the moral from the immoral."(166)

Conservatieven en liberalen denken heel verschillend over homoseksualiteit en masturbatie.

"The belief that masturbation can be damaging was alluded to by many of the sexual conservatives I interviewed, in words that could have come straight from a social hygiene textbook of 1910."(176)

"Conservatives, because of their conviction that heterosexual marriage is the only legitimate place for sex, find both masturbation and homosexuality threatening to marriage."(179)

(182) Chapter five - Becoming a Sexual Liberal or a Sexual Conservative

"Given that many of the people I spoke to came of sexual age before the sexual revolution had fully taken place, what kinds of forces sorted them into the two camps of sexual liberals and sexual conservatives? Why do some people turn out like Jenny Letterman, a devout Christian and equally devout Republican, whose values about sexuality would have been mainstream in 1952? And what about her counterpart Melanie Stevens, a Jewish environmentalist to the left of the Democratic Party whose values about sex and gender show the clear influences of the women’s movement?
Almost all of us, whether we know it or not, have some kind of theory about how these two women ended up not only on two different sides of the sex education controversy in Shady Grove but in two very different places in life. With only the description I just provided and the knowledge that Jenny holds conservative sexual values, we wouldn’t be entirely surprised to discover that she goes to church at least once a week, that she’s a full-time mother and homemaker, that she has five children and is pro-life on the abortion issue. Likewise, our not-very-carefully-examined notions of how the world works lead us to predict that Melanie works full-time in a professional job, or perhaps in the not-for-profit world, that she has one or perhaps two children, and that she is pretty actively pro-choice. (For the record: at the time of this study, Melanie was getting ready to go back to work part-time as a social worker and had one child, Devora.)" [mijn nadruk] (182-183)

[Ik denk dat mensen meestal heel aardig die verzamelingen van waarden en normen weten in te schatten bij andere mensen, al kan het zijn samen met stereotypen, vooroordelen, etc. Wat valt er nou meer over te vertellen dan: culturele en sociale achtergronden, socialisatie, bla bla bla? Maar de auteur vindt weer een reden om allerlei nuances te beschrijven die er helemaal niet toe doen:]

"If pressed, most would guess that sexual liberals are secular folk, that they are politically liberal, and that they are middle- and upper-middle-class. Likewise, the common assumption, particularly in the media, is that opponents of sex education are all conservative Christians, a category that is often associated with having less education and being of a more modest social background. In fact, reality is much more interesting." [mijn nadruk] (190)

"This is a theme that comes up over and over again — the role of information in human life, and why the lack of it is either a good and protective thing or a bad thing that confuses and blights young minds. And information, in turn, is the key to understanding why people are sexual liberals or sexual conservatives. Information plays such very different roles in the lives of people on the two sides of this conflict because they look at the world through very different lenses. For sexual conservatives, morality is a clear code of rules that is true across time and across distance; what was moral two millennia ago is still moral today. For liberals, in contrast, morality is based on a set of principles that must be adapted to the changing contours of modern life." [mijn nadruk] (208)

"For the conservatives, sex outside marriage is wrong because the Bible says it is. They are bewildered when others simply categorize them as “Christian.” From their point of view, many, if not most, Christian denominations historically have frowned on premarital sex (and gay sex and sex outside marriage), and so have traditional Jews and Muslims (although Muslim beliefs were rarely invoked in my conversations with people). So their conviction that sex before marriage is inherently wrong is not a religious position, they say, but rather part of our common moral heritage, our “Judeo-Christian tradition,” a phrase that was used with some regularity."(210)

[Ja, maar onterecht. En bijna alsof het universeel is en dat is zeker onterecht.]

"Wuthnow identifies several cultural forces that contribute to the phenomenon, but the result is clear: education becomes the single strongest factor differentiating religious liberals from religious conservatives." [mijn nadruk] (213)

"In a way this is the great mystery that has intrigued and baffled me for most of my professional career. How is it that some people who came of age in and after the sixties, when confronted with the loss of certainties that those years brought, rejoiced, while others recoiled? How is that some people look back on the sexual revolution with the delight and fondness that Elaine Devoto experienced, while others, like Steven Kingsley, rue the day that they started that walk on the wild side?" [mijn nadruk] (220)

(230) Chapter six - Boundaries, Life, and the Whole Darn Thing

"I’ve been calling people sexual conservatives and sexual liberals so far because of their relationship to significant social changes in sex, family, and gender over the past thirty years. The conservatives want the status quo ante, and the liberals accept the present and hope to make possible a better future. The fact that the conservatives look back to a sunny (and often idealized) past, one that conveniently airbrushes out of the picture many social problems (like racial segregation) and the liberals look forward to a sunny (and often idealized) future, conveniently skipping over how hard it is to change human behavior, suggests that the underlying differences between the two groups are deep. One group looks fondly back to a better past, imagining that the trajectory of history is a bleak one. The other looks forward expectantly, convinced that despite the evident problems we face, tomorrow will be different, and better.
I’m unsure whether these are psychological differences or sociological ones, or a mixture of both. (Like many parents, as I’ve watched my children grow, I’ve come to respect the role of inborn temperament in shaping the way people view the world, and some political scientists now agree about this." [mijn nadruk] (231)

[Ah, daar komen de aangeboren zaken weer om de hoek kijken. Aangeboren temperament dat vormt hoe mensen der wereld zien, wat zeg je dan eigenlijk?]

"What is it that keeps us on the side of morality when we know perfectly well that our desires can drive us to behaviors that we are abashed about, if not downright ashamed of? It is on these basic questions about human nature that the sexual conservatives and sexual liberals disagree.
Sexual conservatives, for example, believe that humans are fundamentally capable of the worst, and that it is only the combined power of an internal morality and external constraints that keeps most of us on the straight-and-narrow most of the time.(...) This is the essence of the sexual conservatives’ position. It’s not that they necessarily want to live in a police state or even in a theocracy, but like Edmund Burke, that first great conservative, they think a well-ordered society is a necessary precondition for the workings — and the maintenance in good stead — of individual conscience."(235)

[Negatief mensbeeld in combinatie met heteronome opvattingen die mensen in toom moeten houden. Maar dan wel heteronome opvattingen die seksvijandig, kindvijandig, vrouwvijandig, mensvijandig zijn, het gaat samen met typische waarden en normen.]

"If sexual conservatives are the heirs of Edmund Burke, then the sexual liberals are the heirs of the Enlightenment. They invert the equation that the sexual conservatives hold, that society needs to be protected from the individual and that only a strong, morally coherent society can inculcate the values that will prevent the Hobbesian war of the each against the all. Rather, sexual liberals believe that the individual needs to be protected from society. True to their heritage, they recall case after case when “society” has turned a blind eye to, and often actively supported, the diminution of individual rights in the service of social order. Thus, while conservatives often look back with fondness and regret to the 1950s, before all of the “rights revolutions” — the sexual, civil, and women’s rights movements — took place, liberals see that era as the quintessence of the Bad Old Days. For them, the 1950s were a period in which individuals were mistreated, shunned, and sometimes even hurt or killed because their ideas were “wrong” in the eyes of a larger collectivity. Whether it was an African American who wanted to vote, a woman who wanted to be a doctor, or a homosexual who wanted to be open about his or her desires, individuals suffered enormously, they think, and suffered needlessly." [mijn nadruk] (240)

[De uitdrukking 'the individual needs to be protected from society' is veel te breed en abstract. Het gaat om bescherming tegen instanties die macht kunnen uitoefenen, regels kunnen stellen en afdwingen, etc. op een manier die niet voldoen aan bepaalde waarden en normen. Het gaat niet om de overheid in het algemeen, maar om wat die overheid doet.]

[Zo langzamerhand vraag ik me ook af of de auteur tijdens haar interviews ooit in twijfel heeft getrokken wat mensen daarin allemaal beweren. Ze beweren namelijk van alles, maar zijn die beweringen ook waar? En het zijn ook nog eens beweringen over zaken in het verleden.]

"Because sexual conservatives think that humans are weak vessels, they are great believers in boundaries and hierarchies. I use the latter word with some trepidation, because part of what the rights revolutions of the sixties did — and part of what makes sexual conservatives so unhappy with those revolutions — is to taint the notion of hierarchy, making it synonymous with the naked use of power, and unjust power at that." [mijn nadruk] (243)

"Three sets of boundaries and their associated hierarchies came up over and over again in my interviews with sexual conservatives. First, as just noted, people in positions of authority deserve respect from others by virtue of their station in life. Second, older people deserve respect, even from other adults, because they are assumed to have accrued wisdom and experience. Third, children owe respect and deference to adults, especially their parents, because of their station in life as dependents. (...) In addition to these three sets of boundaries, a fourth one was mentioned repeatedly: the boundary between men and women. Although this boundary separates two categories, it is not entirely clear to me that it indicates a hierarchy, though it used to do exactly that." [mijn nadruk] (244)

"This sense of boundaries and how sex transgresses them was particularly visible in two realms. First, as these quotations suggest, is the realm of daily life with children. The word “innocence” came up often in the interviews, with sexual conservatives arguing that children have a natural innocence that must be protected as long as possible." [mijn nadruk] (252)

[Ook zo bekend: kinderen moeten beschermd worden, want die zijn onschuldig - ingevuld als seksloos.]

"In this context, one of the most interesting things was how upsetting some sexual conservatives found discussion of a topic that was the staple of 1950s sex education: menstruation."(253)

[Typisch. ]

"Many of the sexual liberals I spoke with revealed considerable passion about the pain and confusion they felt as young people because no one would share information about sexuality with them honestly or forthrightly. Society, in its hypocritical way, they said, sacrificed their ability to come to know and appreciate themselves (including their sexual selves) in order to enforce a spurious morality that was already on its way out."(257)

"As this view suggests, sex education brings into play, for liberals, two other deeply held sets of values. First, to be good decision-makers, people must be educated, and education implies information. Thus, while conservative parents resent information because it transcends the boundaries between the inside world of the family and the outside world, liberal parents value it because they believe that more information, especially the kind of accurate information that they imagine will be taught in a sex education class, enables the kinds of decision-making that will permit their children to become competent adults." [mijn nadruk] (258)

"In much the same way, sexual liberals expect that if their children are given education and information, they will grow up to be morally good adults. (...) As far as they are concerned, people don’t really need to be constrained by a watchful society but, on the contrary, need to be educated to be true to themselves, not true to the often arbitrary rules of society."(260)

[Typisch dat die conservatieven ook een ouderwets klassikaal onderwijs met autoriteit voor de klas willen. Geen 'open classrooms' zoals dat daar heet of 'outcome-based education' of andere experimentele vormen van onderwijs.]

"Just as the larger issue of boundaries offends sexual liberals, who see arbitrary divisions rather than neatly arrayed categories, all of the educational issues engage them on the other side, for much the same reasons that sexual conservatives reject them. It’s not that they think that anything goes. In fact, they would be the first to tell you that kids need guidelines. But for sexual liberals, guidelines are principles, not rules. True to their Enlightenment heritage, they see budding citizens rather than budding truants when they contemplate schoolchildren. And children are best served, they think, by firm but fair guidelines, guidelines that children must eventually come to question as part of their intellectual, moral, and social maturation."(269)

"As we’ve seen, on many grounds, not just sex, sexual conservatives and sexual liberals are deeply at odds when it comes to values. Perhaps not surprisingly, at the core of those values are two very different views of morality, which reinforce their different views of sex." [mijn nadruk] (280)

(280) Chapter seven - Morality and Sex

[Nou, het is wel duidelijk dat we nu een verhaal krijgen over een bijbelse / religieuze moraal en een meer humanistische moraal. En dat is inderdaad zo.]

"One way of thinking about these two models is that one puts a premium on obedience and one puts a premium on discernment."(287)

"The key difference is that for conservatives, the way to deal with temptation and sin is to avoid them, and the further one can keep away from them, the better. For liberals, however, the best way of dealing with hormones (and impulsive behavior generally) is to get children into the habit of making thoughtful decisions."(292)

"As must be clear, a concatenation of values and life experiences and choices means that sexually conservative men and women are likely also to be conservative about gender; that is, they believe that men and women are fundamentally different rather than similar. As a result, conservative families are much more likely to have a stay-at-home mother; sexually liberal mothers more often than not work outside the home.
So the fight about sex education is not only about sex but about education, about the value and place of information, about how men and women are to comport themselves, about the role of sexuality in human life, and about whether the world is or should be a place of firm lines and boundaries, or of interconnections and informed decisions.
To make things worse, most of these values are implicit, tacit, and only barely visible to the people fighting over them. With all of these compelling differences — differences that people care passionately about — it’s not surprising that the conflict over sex education shows no signs of being resolved anytime soon." [mijn nadruk] (318)

[Dat zou een mooie slotalinea van het boek kunnen zijn. Maar nee, er komen nóg twee hoofdstukken.]

(319) Chapter eight - The Politics of Sex

Ze bezoekt een school in Zweden met seksuele voorlichting voor 14-jarigen.

"Sweden is the gold standard of what most American sex educators imagine an ideal comprehensive sex education program looks like. It begins in kindergarten and continues cumulatively throughout a student’s entire school career. It is detailed, open, and by American standards remarkably frank (I am about to discover just how frank it is.) (...) In this, Swedish sex education is exemplary, and far ahead of most American schools."(319)

Op de vraag wat een orgasme is:

"In contrast, the Swedish teacher said that “orgasm is the moment of highest pleasure during sex, and that’s why people talk about it.” I realized at that moment that I had never heard any American participants in the sex ed debates, whether teachers, students, or parents, mention either sexual desire or sexual pleasure, except in the most circumspect of terms. But this was just the beginning of the surprises in store." [mijn nadruk] (321)

[Wat betekent dat het in de VS niet mag bestaan. De meesten daar willen niets liever dan dat scholieren geen seks hebben en er niks van weten.]

"Official sex education in France is much closer to what American sexual conservatives would favor, almost 180 degrees away from the comprehensive, frank, and open Swedish sex education."(326)

"My sense of being on an entirely different wavelength continued as I probed the origins and social meaning of sex education in France. I asked several people, for example (before their astonished stares began to make me falter), what the Catholic Church thought about the creation of sex education courses in the public schools. Eyebrows were raised in that particularly Gallic fashion. Why, my informants wanted to know, would the Catholic Church have anything whatsoever to say about sex education in French public schools? Perhaps I was unaware of la loi de Jules Ferry, which these French bureaucrats invoked as Americans might invoke motherhood and apple pie. La loi de Jules Ferry, it turns out, is the legislation that mandates that publicly supported schools be secular, and hence to the French, the idea that the Catholic Church might have any say at all on sex education was quite literally unimaginable." [mijn nadruk] (328)

[Dat is dan in ieder geval iets. ]

"All the things Americans worry about — unintended pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, out-of-wedlock births — are comparatively rare in both Sweden and France compared to the United States, despite the very different levels of sex education offered in those countries. And sex education in both countries is by and large uncontroversial, an accepted fact of educational life."(329)

[Hoe zou het anders kunnen? ]

"But American sex educators are sadly confused. It’s not the programs that enable French and Swedish teenagers to get through their adolescence without much in the way of serious trouble, it’s the people.(...) As I noted earlier, Americans as a group, teenagers and adults alike, have a great deal of trouble dealing with sex. It’s not their age so much as their nationality that puts American teenagers at risk."(331)

[De uitleg die dan volgt waarom dat verschil er is, deugt volgens mij voor geen meter.]

"Americans have trouble with sex not because of the Puritans in our past but because we are an incredibly diverse nation, and our diversity is reflected in our attitudes toward sex. Although things are changing rapidly, most European countries are (or at least were) remarkably homogeneous."(332)

"So the United States is a country with many different religions, many different races, many different ethnic groups; income disparities are much sharper than in Europe (although almost every patriotic American denies this), and we have a political system that welcomes single-issue movements, provided they can generate a certain level of popular support. Sex, which is usually tightly controlled by cultural norms, often provides the ideal arena where contesting groups can fight out their differences in what social scientists call “symbolic politics.”"(334)

[Ik geloof er niks van. Europa is helemaal niet wat ze hier schildert. En de VS op een bepaalde manier ook niet. Het is toch duidelijk - ook in dit boek - dat die conservatieve moraal rondom seks alles te maken heeft met religie en traditioneel denken. ]

"Mobilizing to protect the tax-exempt status of Christian academies is seen by many scholars as the key factor that brought conservative Christians into organized politics. Fearing the loss of this tax exemption would make these schools financially out of reach for most Christians, supporters began to protest the IRS’s activities. Once mobilized, however, Christians became active across a range of political issues."(340)

"The result of the process was the furthering of a new kind of conservatism, one that bridged the gap between the traditional old right and the emerging New Right. Rosalind Petchesky, one of the most astute observers of the role of sexuality in modern American politics, argued as early as 1983 that issues over sexuality could well serve as the glue to bind a new generation of conservatives together, with opposition to changes in sexual and gender roles taking on the role that anti-communism had once played in binding diverse conservative constituencies together." [mijn nadruk] (347)

"This brings us back to the main point: whatever organizations people turn to, different groups in our society have emotionally powerful reasons for supporting either a “traditional” or an “equal rights” view of gender and marriage. In part this is because of where and how they grew up, and in part it’s because more and more people find the pace of rapid change in the world at large, as well as in the relations between men and women and between parents and children, unsettling."(356)

[En daarom moet het huwelijk belangrijker gemaakt worden, bla bla? ]

"No wonder people whose values and life experiences have convinced them that traditional marriage is the best and most satisfying option for women (and men) want social policies that promote what they see as a profoundly threatened institution. Whether it’s President Bush’s plan to teach poor people the benefits of marriage or policies to stigmatize sex outside marriage, people like Jenny Letterman think marriage needs all the help it can get, and I think she’s right." [mijn nadruk] (357)

[Zo, dus daar staat de auteur in de discussie. Waarschijnlijk vindt ze dan ook religie belangrijk.]

Een conclusie:

"So here I am, having spent the better part of twenty years talking to people about sex education, and here’s what I’ve learned. I think that both sides have something important to tell us about how to live in ways that do the least possible damage to ourselves and others. If this is a case of “going native,” so be it. I think that the sexual conservatives, like my sociological predecessor Emile Durkheim, understand that morality is not only personal but deeply social as well. And I think the liberals are on to something when they insist on having faith in our fellow human beings. Their belief that more information will solve major problems means that in their hearts they cherish the belief that we can decide to do good. I find their faith inspiring, as is the more obvious faith of those on the other side." [mijn nadruk] (363)

[Draaikonterige conclusie. Liberalen zien moraal uiteraard ook als sociaal. En hun geloof is van een totaal ander karakter dan het geloof van de conservatieven. ]

"Finally, and most radically, schools can do what at least one school district has already done: provide both a sexually conservative (abstinence-only) and a sexually liberal (comprehensive) curriculum, side by side, and let parents and students choose between them."(370)

[Ze weigert een standpunt in te nemen en sympathiseert dus met de conservatieven.]

"Scholarly advocates of marriage argue that marriage has many unique benefits for its participants. As someone who has been happily married for more than two decades, I couldn’t agree more. But these same advocates implicitly and sometimes explicitly argue that marriage can work its magic only when it is socially defined as the single acceptable place for sexual activity.(...)
So rather than arguing about sex, and adolescent sex at that, perhaps we would find it more profitable to talk about marriage — what we think about it, who should enter it, and when in the life cycle it should take place." [mijn nadruk] (373)

[Over de nadelen van het huwelijk zullen we maar niet hebben. Wat gaat er allemaal niet verloren? En 20 jaar getrouwd zijn zegt werkelijk helemaal niets. Dat kan ook betekenen dat je allerlei gedrag van je echtgenoot verdraagt waar je tegen in opstand zou moeten komen. Of wat ook. ]

"Which takes us back to the Swedes and the French. It seems to me—although again, I have only the data from my interviews to make this claim—that sex in those countries is relatively unproblematic for young people because both countries, despite their very different levels of sex education, have essentially been monocultures when it comes to sexual morality."(375)

"And then, as odd as it may seem, the European countries may turn to the United States, once the example of what any respectable sex educator in Europe did not want to be, as the leader. If we are all immigrants to the future, it may turn out that America, with its commitment to diversity, may be the model."(376)

[Tjonge, nog chauvinistisch ook. Ze heeft werkelijk geen idee van Europa.]

(376) Chapter nine - Sex Education in America and Whether It Works or Doesn’t — and Why That’s Not the Right Question

"Essentially, the debate about sex education right now is a debate about values, but as is often the case in America, questions about values get obscured in the public arena by questions about practicalities. The most critical one is, does sex education work? (In this context, I mean comprehensive sex education.) Does it, as its supporters claim, encourage young people to be careful in their sexuality, permitting them to explore their sexuality in ways that their grandparents and great-grandparents could never have imagined? Or does sex education have, as supporters of abstinence have claimed, a tragically perverse effect? Does the mere existence of sex education, which normalizes the idea of adolescent sexuality, encourage young people to be sexual outside marriage, leading to all the heartbreak and other consequences, from AIDS to abortion to babies born out of wedlock, that can follow in the wake of immature sex?"(377)

[Kijk naar Europa, zou ik zeggen, lees de studies, de feiten spreken voor zich. Ze heeft ze zelfs al genoemd. Weer een hoofdstuk over iets wat al lang geen vraag meer is.]

"From the vantage point of this harm-reduction model, the heyday of sex education paralleled spectacular rates of harm reduction, at least when it came to pregnancy. Between 1972 and 1990, the odds that a sexually active teenage girl would become pregnant dropped by more than 25 percent.
Abstinence-only education, however, rejects the core principle on which the harm-reduction model is based: that each individual should decide for himself or herself what is proper sexual behavior. Instead, it substitutes a single value for everyone, namely, no sex outside (heterosexual) marriage. But abstinence supporters too continue to make their case in terms of harm reduction, perhaps because the premise that all sex before marriage is morally wrong seems to smack too much of traditional religious doctrines. Accordingly, abstinence-only educators make the unimpeachable claim that virginity before marriage and monogamy afterward are the only truly effective ways to prevent unwed pregnancy (and most sexual diseases as well)."(381)

[Het idee is dus: als je geen seks hebt voor het huwelijk is er ook geen risico op schade of problemen, probleem opgelost. Want hoe veilig je ook vrijt, volgens de conservatieven is er altijd 'morele schade' als je dat voor he huwelijk doet. Hoe dom kun je zijn? Hoe negatief kun je zijn over seksualiteit? En nogmaals: waarom besteedt de auteur zoveel aandacht aan dat soort onzinnige ideeën? Waarom neemt ze geen standpunt in?]

"Abstinence advocates, for example, argue that if we could just turn all sex education classes into abstinence-only classes, abstinence would increase among teenagers and young adults, and as a result, rates of teen pregnancies, births, and abortions, not to mention sexual diseases, would plummet. Fair enough. They then typically go on make three more crucial claims: first, that comprehensive sex education has led to an increase in the number of sexually active teenagers; second, that no contraceptive or prophylactic is 100 percent effective; and finally and most centrally, that to teach young people about contraception is to undercut the effectiveness of the abstinence message.
Advocates of comprehensive sex education dispute the claim that it increases the likelihood of teen sex and are, to say the least, extremely doubtful that abstinence programs can reduce rates of sexual activity among teenagers. They point out that unless sex education is completely effective in persuading adolescents to be abstinent all of the time, there will still be large numbers of sexually active teens, and because abstinence education withholds information about pregnancy and disease prevention, these teens who do go on to have sex will be less protected than they are now, and hence pregnancy, birth, abortion, and sexually transmitted diseases are likely to increase. Standing on firm ground in terms of logic, comprehensive sex education supporters point out that few educational programs are capable of persuading people to be 100 percent effective at anything, and there is little evidence to date that abstinence-only programs will be different" [mijn nadruk] (384)

[Daar is toch al lang geen discussie meer over. Kijk naar de feiten. En niet alleen de Amerikaanse graag.]

"I am prepared to be openminded about abstinence programs. My own hunch — and it’s not very popular among those who support comprehensive sex education programs — is that abstinence programs may in fact provide valuable social support for the idea that young people (young women in particular) don’t have to be sexually active if they don’t want to be. In my interviews with both parents and the few young people who were active on the issue in their schools, I was struck by the level of peer pressure surrounding sexual activity that many reported. Most comprehensive sex education programs include units that teach students how to reject sexual advances they are not comfortable with, but the passion and fervor that abstinence advocates bring to their cause puts some real muscle into those teachings." [mijn nadruk] (402)

[Wat een slecht argument. Dus je bent voor het idee en de praktijk van de onthouding om met name jonge vrouwen te beschermen tegen de sociale druk van jonge mannen. De auteur zegt min of meer dat jonge vrouwen niet kunnen leren om nee te zeggen als jonge mannen seks willen en dat we ze daarom moeten beschermen. Ze heeft dus weinig vertrouwen in de capaciteiten van vrouwen, ziet ze teveel als slachtoffers. Stiekem zegt de auteur trouwens ook dat het vooral mannen zijn die seks willen en dat vrouwen daar niet op zitten te wachten. En eigenlijk toch ook dat jongeren eigenlijk geen seks moeten willen hebben. Combineer dat met haar eerder aangeduide sympathie voor het huwelijk en je weet dat hier eigenlijk een conservatief denkend persoon aan het woord is die vindt dat seks binnen het huwelijk thuishoort.]