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Calderone would be “cast into the Depths of Hell,” the writer added, where she would have molten steel poured into her “from two directions” and would be fed a diet of “Puss, Excretions, Roaches, Maggots, and Spiders.” “God Said, about Seducers of Children: You will Wish You Had Never Been Born,” an anonymous correspondent Calderone wrote in 1969.
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Worst of all, they charged, Calderone aimed to implant sexual ideas in otherwise innocent youth. To these critics, she symbolized the same permissive morality she indicted. That unleashed a massive backlash among conservatives, who made Calderone into Public Enemy No. But she also favored open and frank lessons about formerly taboo topics such as masturbation, abortion and contraception, which slowly entered sex education curricula during these same years. “Let me assure you that I stand squarely for monogamy,” she wrote in 1968, “for the committed relationship in marriage that is life-long.” She denounced casual sex between men and women and gay relations of every sort. So she founded the Sex Education and Information Council of the United States, which remains the leading American organization for the subject.Ĭalderone was no radical flamethrower she sought to tame the sexual revolution, not to embrace it. A former executive at Planned Parenthood, where she sought to expand birth control services, Calderone came to believe that the real problem lay in Americans’ sexual reticence and ignorance: If we couldn’t talk and learn about sex, she argued, we would never reduce unwanted pregnancies and venereal diseases. The key figure in the sex education movement of the time was physician Mary Steichen Calderone, daughter of the avant-garde photographer Edward Steichen. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s transformed the vocabulary of sex education but reinforced its larger goal of continence within marriage.
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Under the logic of the Cold War, the free world required a strong America a strong America required resilient families and resilient families required sex education. Finally, by shoring up the family unit, sex education would provide a bulwark against the greatest enemy of all: global communism. That would also help counter lurid sexual images in comic books, which critics blamed for spikes in juvenile delinquency. By providing frank and clinical descriptions of human reproduction, educators said, schools would guide sex into its proper channel: heterosexual marriage. Sex education became slightly more explicit after World War II, when it acquired a new label: family life education. “There is, on the one hand, the chaste, automatic philandering of the rose and the honeybee, and there is, on the other hand, the appalling pathological fate of sinful Homo sapiens.” Mencken wrote in 1925, satirizing textbooks used to teach sex education. “First they describe romantically the mating of the calla lilies and the June bugs, then they plunge furiously into their revolting treatises kissing games, necking, and the dance,” H. They focused heavily on plant and animal reproduction, lest students become too interested in the human kind. So schools introduced lessons about sex, all designed to warn against it.
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In his 2007 book, The Heart of Whiteness, Julian Carter, an associate professor at the California College of the Arts, explains that the possibility of middle-class white men contracting VD from sex workers and infecting their wives triggered eugenic fears of “race suicide”: If white women became infertile because of disease, the argument went, non-whites would overwhelm the nation. Sex education in the United States has been a contentious issue since its beginning in the early 20th century, when burgeoning cities witnessed large venereal disease outbreaks. The more diverse - and the less devout - we become, the less likely we are to agree about the fraught subject of sex in school. And the laws have also drawn multicultural support, which contrasts to the heavily white demographic of the Moral Majority.Īs the nation and world have globalized, so have our cultural conflicts. Advocates of the measures mostly avoid religious rhetoric, invoking parental rights rather than Scripture.
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The most obvious new target is gender identity, which has surpassed sexual orientation as the core concern. But as the larger politics of our culture wars have shifted, so has the focus of opposition to sex education.