Conclusion

Much has changed in American attitudes toward sexuality and the sexuality of young people since 1950, yet the “problem” of adolescent sexuality hasn’t been solved or resolved. As I have argued, problems such as this one are not really solvable, nor meant to be solved. Rather, they are designed first of all to define something as a problem. Throughout much of Western history since the Greeks, the problem of adolescent sexuality didn’t exist because adolescents didn’t exist. People in their teenage years assumed adult responsibilities and roles, including marriage and child rearing. Adolescence begins (historically) with the advent of mass secondary schooling, and perhaps the two cannot be fully separated. High schools are places designed to control, channel, discipline, and sublimate adolescent sexual desire, and to delay the onset of sexual relations until after secondary education and marriage. That hasn’t changed much since 1950, even if marriage is now understood a bit more broadly in American culture-even up to the point of legitimating and valorizing same-sex marriage. The broadening of the definition of marriage is important, as is the recognition that it is no longer possible to speak of a “normal” family as health educators did in the 1950s. But it still restricts sexuality in ways that actively deny or discourage all forms of sexuality outside marriage and family life. Probably the most significant change during this study period was the emergence of alternative discourses for thinking and talking about adolescent sexuality in popular culture and, to a lesser extent, among professional educators. Even if much of the mainstream sexuality-education discourse continues its rather narrow focus on the problem of teenage pregnancy and unwed teenage mothers, the problem of STDs including HIV/AIDS, and “life adjustment” to expected gender roles, American culture today is characterized by the existence of more counterspaces and discourses than were around in the 1950s. And as mainstream sexuality education has continued to decline, these counterspaces and discourses have grown. Together, they provide

new sets of conceptual lenses and new ways of “thinking” sexuality education associated with what I have called “cultural studies.” At least it is possible to imagine, perched at the beginning of a new century, that the education of eros, as Marcuse hoped it would, might someday help build a less repressive society; and, as Foucault hoped, a less disciplinary and normalizing society. A truly democratic sexuality education would teach young people an ethic of care of the self and others, and it would engage them in a critical, deconstructive reading of sexuality and identity in popular culture. Mainstream sexuality education continues to be most closely identified with the

field of “family-life” education, a movement that emerged in the early 1960s, although one might say it was conceived out of the “life-adjustment” movement of the 1950s and carried on its themes. More than other discourses and movements in sexuality education, family-life education has stayed focused on the “normal” heterosexual family and family life as the developmentally appropriate destination of adolescence. In 1993, the two-volume Handbook of Family Life Education ignored homosexuality and lesbian and gay youth almost entirely, and this, no doubt, had to do with a taken-for-granted opposition between “family life” and “the gay lifestyle.” Family-life educators ignored queer youth and alternatives to marriage because they presumably had little to do with family life. Coauthors of one chapter in the 1993 Handbook of Family Life Education argued that during adolescence “a small percentage” of young people might have “homosexual experiences,” but added, reassuringly, that “most Americans marry, and of those who divorce, most remarry.”1 This legitimates a focus on the “majority” of youth who are expected to be on a “normal” path of development toward heterosexual marriage. What was new in the 1993 Handbook of Family Life Education, compared to an earlier time, was the inclusion of a few critical voices, particularly influenced by early feminist theories of gender. In a chapter titled “Gender Issues: A Feminist Perspective,” Margaret Bubolz and Patrick McKenry find much that they like in the 1970s feminist notion of androgyny, which they argue could be liberating for young men as well as young women. Yet they critique the androgyny literature from a social-constructionist standpoint for naturalizing the categories of masculinity and femininity. The androgynous self is understood to be a mixture of masculine and feminine, yin and yang, but both are still understood as naturally given opposites, with fully functioning individuals able to integrate both masculine and feminine traits. Instead, they call for an understanding of gender that is social constructionistalthough their suggested remedy seems naive. They call for a form of family-life sexuality education that “degenderizes,” that is, socializes, both males and females in similar ways “so that exaggerated traditional masculine and feminine traits are no longer relevant,” so that gender is removed from any preconceived “cultural correlates.”2 This, of course, is an impossible task since gender is a cultural construct, produced by culture. What is possible, however, is to shift or change the cultural correlates. Instead, the authors argue-in a way that seems to reduce gender to anatomy-that the only natural meaning gender has is “anatomical differences and

reproductive organs.” By treating gender as sexual organs only, supposedly young people can be led to understanding that everything else we associate with gender is arbitrary. “Sexual scripting” more than sexual biology, they argue, creates the ways people think about what it means to be a man or a woman in a cultural context. This is insightful, and consistent with performance theories of gender in some ways, although, as Butler argued in Gender Trouble, to treat gender as having a natural basis in reproductive organs already straps it to a set of cultural expectations that are heteronormative and family based. The transgender movement began to change all that, but transgendered bodies are not acknowledged as a possibility yet in the 1993Handbook of Family Life Education. Nor is the possibility of same-sex marriages and families. Over a decade later, in a 2007 volume on Family Life Education: Working with

Families Across the Life Span by Lane Powell and Dawn Cassidy, little had changedalthough the authors go out of their way to emphasize how much has changed in family-life sexuality education since the 1950s. Back then, the sexual climate was one of “silence, embarrassment, ignorance, and fear” and unwed teenage mothers were stigmatized as “bad girls.” Now, according to the text, there is “openness about sexuality and access to good information,” although this also has had the side effect of a “rise in teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.”3 If we are more open, that openness must be accompanied by a new concern that adolescents act responsibly, so that family-life sexuality education is even more important. In effect, the more progress made in fighting the early enemies of sexuality education (silence, embarrassment, ignorance, and fear) the more sexuality education is needed to fight the new enemies (promiscuity and risky behavior). The new family-life education also gets associated with providing more sexuality education for “neglected audiences and clienteles. … Gay and lesbian couples and persons with physical disabilities are examples.”4 “Neglect” implies an inadvertent forgetting to notice or not paying sufficient attention to something, and certainly acknowledging this neglect is an important part of overcoming it. But the truth is that this neglect has been active, making invisible the sexuality of homosexuals and the disabled so as not to offend anyone, and to keep both at the margins and outside the norm. Both are constituted as abnormal groups, no longer to be neglected, but rather to receive an education targeted to their particular needs-“tailoring the message to the target audience.”5 Sex education gets represented as a product that needs to open up new niche markets if it is to succeed, in this case niche markets of abnormal Others that sex educators have traditionally neglected. As Foucault might say, no one is to be left outside the gaze of professional sex and family-life education anymore, and so this does not represent a movement beyond disciplinary and normalizing regimes in sexuality education so much as an intensification and specialization of “biopower,” attaching itself to various subpopulations of sexual Others, no longer to make them “normal,” but rather to manage their sexuality more effectively and efficiently as subpopulations on the margins. Family-life education, with its emphasis on adjusting young people to their

expected future roles in the “normal” family, initially seemed at odds with the

scientific and fact-based perspective represented by SIECUS, which emphasized adolescents as responsible decision makers once they were given the “facts.” However, as I indicated in Chapter 2, these two discourses of adolescent sexuality education began to coalesce and interweave by the late 1960s, and they have remained interwoven since. Powell and Cassidy, in their 2007 text on family-life education, argue that family-life educators share a common ground with SIECUS in advancing the idea that “[k]ids should be abstinent, but if they do have sex, they should always use condoms … [and] keep in mind that abstinence is the only means of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases that is 100 percent effective.”6 This is the new credo of liberal and progressive sexuality and health educators, finding legislative and programmatic form in “abstinence-plus” and “comprehensive” sexuality education. While the differences between abstinence-only and abstinenceplus approaches are significant, both sides in the battle find common ground in support of abstinence as the best policy. Under President Obama and with a Democratic Congress, “comprehensive” and “abstinence-plus” approaches to sexuality education have received more policy-level support, but not at the expense of abstinence-only programs. In March, 2009, Congress passed the Responsible Education About Life (REAL) act, authorizing funds to public-school programs that provided “medically accurate, age appropriate” information about contraceptives to young people, with the stipulation that the programs had to teach that abstinence is the best and only certain way to avoid the risks of pregnancy and STDs. The acronym REAL implied that it was time to “get real” about adolescent sexuality, that it existed. And the word “responsible” implied that young people had to learn how to act responsibly, not putting themselves or others at risk, nor putting an undue burden on society for their “irresponsible” sexual behavior. These two themes-“getting real” about adolescent sexuality and promoting “responsible decision making” about sexual behavior are much better ways of framing the conversation about adolescent sexuality than beginning with “just say no.” But “responsible” behavior is still defined largely in terms of delaying the onset of sexual relations and being abstinent until marriage. We need to do more than “get real” about the fact that most adolescents don’t meet that standard or ideal. We need to stop holding it as a standard, stop viewing all deviations from the standard as problems. We need to begin with the assertion that adolescents have a right to a sexuality and a sex life, and this includes LGBTQ youth who get left out of the abstinence-plus discourse much as they have from the abstinence-only discourse on the basis that they are irrelevant to the primary problem at hand: teenage pregnancies. If there is one controlling image to which the “problem” of adolescent sexuality

has been attached-from the mid-20th century until today-it is that of the unwed welfare mother; and this has been a highly racialized and classed image.7 The white middle class has rested its claims to privilege on its supposed self-discipline, on sexual responsibility rather than impulsivity. Much, consequently, has been invested in perpetuating the idea that the “problem” of unwed teenage mothers is (first of all) a problem primarily of the working class and poor-and even more particularly

of urban, poor, black and Latina women, and (finally) that it is a problem of lack of self-discipline and impulsivity, of the inability to defer gratification and live by the “reality principle” instead of the “pleasure principle.” In the Johnson administration, the Moynihan Report defined the problem as welfare dependency caused by a “dysfunctional” black family, and the remedy was for the black family to be rebuilt along the lines of the “normal” white, middle class, patriarchal family. In the Nixon era, the Rockefeller Commission on Population Growth reframed the problem slightly in terms of population control, in this case control of “dependent” populations to make sure their birthrates were kept in check (compared to the white middle class) and that public welfare costs to support them were kept low. In this guise, as I have argued, federal policy on sexuality education echoed the racial hygiene and eugenics movements of the early 20th century-with abortion recognized as an effective means of population control. This is certainly not the reason why women’s groups fought for reproductive rights, or why the Supreme Court upheld such rights. But it does suggest that there is nothing inherently liberal or progressive about supporting abortion as a means of population control. In fact, such support can be a form of neofascism. By 1996, with the Welfare Reform Act, the problem of the unwed teenage welfare mother had not been reframed much, except that now the remedy was to be abstinence only. If we are entering an era of abstinenceplus sexuality education, the problem continues to be framed much as it has since the 1960s, and the ideology of blaming the victim continues unchecked in federal and state welfare policy. Because welfare dependency is the result of an economy that does not provide enough good jobs at livable wages, or day care for children, the problem of the welfare mother is an ongoing one in advanced capitalist societies, and it is best to understand state policy as an attempt to better manage and contain this problem than to resolve it through structural changes. To solve the problem would also require recognizing that the “normal” family is no longer the norm, and that single-parent and other nontraditional families are not inherently dysfunctional. But it has been easier and more convenient for those who control state policy to continue blaming the victim. The case can be made that at least one “problem” of adolescent sexuality

was resolved in the period since 1950-the problem of homosexuality and the homosexual. It was resolved, as I have argued, by no longer defining homosexuality as a disorder or social problem, and by reframing the problem as intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and bigotry, and, in more political terms, as homophobia and heteronormativity, the denial of full and equal rights, and social injustice and oppression. Throughout the 1950s and much of the 1960s, sex-education texts addressed homosexuality in a section on abnormal or dysfunctional sexuality, and often organized discussion around a series of questions. How can homosexuals be identified? What are the essential aspects of their disorder? Should “normal” young men and women avoid contact with known homosexuals? Does having one or more homosexual experiences make you a homosexual? These governing questions of the “problem” of the homosexual and homosexuality were endlessly debated

among health and family-life educators, as I indicated in Chapter 4. All agreed, however, that homosexuality and homosexuals were a problem. If young people were exposed to known homosexuals, it could somehow influence their own sexual development in a homosexual direction. All this ended rather abruptly in the first few years of the 1970s with the declassification of homosexuality as a disorder by the American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association. By the late 1970s, sexuality-education discourse pretty well had made the switch to viewing homosexuality as a normal human sexual response, and homosexuals as normally happy and well-adjusted. The homosexual, the great symbol of the sexual pervert, deviant, and neurotic, became normalized in the Seventies, rerepresented as normal. Of course, this came at a price. To become normal has been to become no longer threatening to the dominant culture, to assimilate into its symbolic order. Certainly same-sex marriage may be supported not as a civil-rights issue but as the logical extension of this normalization of queerness by bringing it within the realm of the same, the realm of the intelligible. By the late 1970s and early 1980s the road to the normalization of the homo-

sexual and homosexuality in sexuality-education discourse was not yet complete, although some who supported the “old” interpretation of homosexuality as a disorder were still holding out. In a 1981 article in Educational Leadership by a sexeducation teacher from New Jersey, the author writes that students may raise a number of important questions that need to be discussed openly and frankly, including: “How can you know when it [homosexual behavior] is normal and when it’s an early sign of complete homosexuality?” Normal homosexuality is developmentally appropriate, “complete” homosexuality is not; and complete homosexuality is understood to be a perversion of a normal homosexuality. The failure to develop out of homosexuality is thus constituted as “abnormal,” and here abnormal references “dysfunctional” more than “not the norm.” This is really only a recycling of distinctions that undergirded sex education in the 1950s, that suggested the need to intervene in ways that discouraged “normal” adolescent homosexuality from becoming “complete” and thus “abnormal.” In 1990, in a letter to the editor in Educational Leadership, a professor wrote that he was “shocked” and “dumbfounded” to read a supportive article in the journal about a resolution by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) calling for curriculum materials and programs on gays and lesbians and the equitable treatment of students who are homosexual or bisexual in all school programs. “In the schools and media,” he wrote, “we actively promote the dangers of drug use. We should do no less when it comes to … tolerance for or passivity about adolescent sexual orientation or activity.” To do so, the author suggested, could lead to “physical, emotional, and psychological harm-or even death.”8 This was the dying gasp of an older generation of sex and health educators who had learned the conventional wisdom of the 1950s and 1960s, and who were unable or unwilling to make the discursive shift to seeing homosexuality and homosexuals as “normal.” This generation was given a space to be “shocked” and “dumbfounded”—in letters to the

editors of professional journals. But very soon even such space would disappear, as the “problem” of homosexuality was reframed as the problem of homophobia. Homophobia as a signifier shifted the problem to those who were bigoted against

homosexuality and homosexuals, like the author of the letter in Educational Leadership in 1990. The term “homophobia” did not originate in professional discourse, but rather in the alternative media. The first print use of the word is attributed to a May 1969 issue of Screw magazine, where it was used to refer to the fear among “straight” men of being taken for gay.9 By the 1970s the term was beginning to slip into professional discourse, although it was not until the 1990s that it became part of the standard professional discourse of sexuality education. There it implied a psychological disorder associated with an unnecessary and unnatural fear and aversion of homosexuality and homosexuals. Again, it is worth noting how much the tables had been turned so that the one who had the disorder was no longer the homosexual, but rather the one who had a problem with homosexuals. The term also began to enter into professional educational discourse in social studies and language arts, where it implied a cultural as well as individual psychological phenomenon, something that had to be fought by critically examining homophobia within American cultural history, showing how it has been expressed in literature and popular culture, and taken for granted in everyday life. Sexuality, through sexual orientation, began to be understood in new ways that rupture the boundaries of sexuality education in its dominant form. In a 1994 article in Phi Delta Kappan, John Anderson defined homophobia as a “school climate” that adversely impacts on gay and lesbian students and teachers. By shifting the discourse to focus on the “school climate,” the article makes another decisive shift. It suggests by “school climate” something similar to what Pierre Bourdieu meant by habitus, and Jacques Lacan meant by “symbolic order.” Each of these terms refers in a general sense to the taken-for-granted background of our lives, the culturally specific beliefs and knowledge and rules of interaction that are symbolically represented and ritualized in our everyday lives in various institutional sites. The family is such a habitus, and so too is the school, and both need to be made the subject of deliberate inquiry and reflection in order to adequately address homophobia, along with racism and sexism. At the same time, this discursive shift to define the problem as homophobia, and to recognize that it is a problem that requires addressing the school habitus or “climate” is not a shift that has occurred at most local schools yet, where the discourse continues to be one of tolerance for, or active silence about, homosexuality and homophobia. As Anderson concluded in 1994, “Our schools are in denial, and our administrative staff is in the deepest depths of denial,” and there is little reason to challenge this conclusion today.10 If there has been change since the Nineties, it has come because schools are being held more accountable for not allowing “bullying” to go unchecked, and for taking proactive steps to institute antibullying programs. Health professionals have, in some cases, also developed programs to help address bullying and homophobia as a developmental problem. A 1989 article on “problem sexual behavior” in school-age children and youth by Beverly Biehr lists

homophobia (along with child-child sexual intercourse and child-child sexual assault) as a problem related to a failure to successfully move out of preadolescence to adolescence, from a stage of uncritically accepting parents’ views on gender and sexual roles to a stage of being open to critically assessing those views and considering others. This would help those afflicted with homophobia, along with those they bully, according to Biehr, since one of the psychological costs of homophobia “is the young boys and girls who will never pursue an inner interest or talent for fear of being labeled ‘tomboy’ or ‘sissy.’”11 Campaigns against bullying thus provide a platform to address hegemonic masculinity that is potentially quite radical and far-reaching in its implication for reconstructing the gendered and sexed habitus of schooling, but even this remains an unrealized potential. So too does the promise of a queering of sexuality education that deconstructs sexual identity and gender binaries and recognizes sexuality and gender identity as more fluid and polymorphous than stable and fixed. Still, it seems likely that the future will be queer, at least in relation to the understanding of sexual identity that prevails in America today. The ever-expanding list of sexual Others in America-which by now is represented in the label LGBTQQIA (lesbian, gay male, bisexual, transgendered, queer, questioning, intersexual, and allies or asexual), seems to rupture any idea that sexual identity and difference can be neatly contained within hetero-homo, straight-gay binaries. Young people are beginning to imagine, and even demand, the right to live outside narrowly defined, oppositional categories of identity, even if we still live in an age of identity politics-whose project of rights, equity, and justice remains unfinished. By the mid-1990s, the AIDS epidemic was still unchecked, and the only hope to

stop the spread of the virus was through education. A decade of AIDS education in public schools had been organized around the assumption that young people needed factual information about the spread of the virus and how they could protect themselves so that they could make responsible choices-what we might call the SIECUS approach. As usual, there was evidence that young people did know more about how to protect themselves from HIV/AIDS after an AIDS education unit or workshop. But there was little or no evidence that this information affected their behavior. Many adolescents, especially young women, reported engaging in unsafe sexual behavior, even when they knew it was unsafe, because they lacked a sense of control over their own sexuality and bodies. The AIDS epidemic revealed the inadequacy of an information-driven, fact-based education, at least in dealing with something so complex and “irrational” as the education of eros. The only somewhat effective discourse and practice of AIDS education to emerge out of this period, as I indicated in Chapter 4, was community based, and developed by persons with AIDS. A 1996 text, AIDS Education: Reaching Diverse Populations, edited by Melinda Moore and Martin Forst, documented what had been learned from over a decade of community-based, activist-oriented movements and programs. The volume was published just before the introduction of protease inhibitors that proved effective in controlling the progression of the disease, at a time when,

according to the editors, health educators were “increasingly pessimistic” about the development of either a treatment for the disease or a vaccine, and that “changing behaviors, particularly sexual behaviors that often have a deeply embedded cultural base, is a monumental task.” Even the most effective community-based programs were not stopping the epidemic from “settling into spatially and socially isolated groups.”12 In the face of this catastrophe, the editors call for a redoubling of efforts at education, and “targeting” education initiatives at those “communities” most at risk (urban gay men, poor black and Latino/a communities, and intravenous drug users). The primary lesson to be learned from the most effective community-based AIDS education in changing people’s behavior was that education had to take into account the “culture and social context of those at risk,” and use the “cultural language” specific to that community. At the same time, AIDS educators needed to emphasize that “groups, particularly ethnic groups, should not be viewed as risk categories in and of themselves.”13 This tension between recognizing the necessary importance of identity and community in AIDS education, and at the same time recognizing that it is behaviors not group identity that puts people at risk, runs throughout the 1996 text, and is perhaps not resolvable or even in need of being resolved. It points to the need for a sexuality education that recognizes the importance of identity and community, and also troubles or unsettles the meaning of these terms as stable, unified markers of sexual behavior. Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) had, by the mid-1990s, assumed the status of

an exemplary community-based program, intended to influence gay men to adopt safe-sex practices. In the first major chapter in AIDS Education: Reaching Diverse Populations, James Holmes and Steven Humes documented the successes of the GMHC model, and the techniques of “experiential workshops” and support groups. GMHC staff assumed (based on some solid evidence) that unsafe sexual behavior was related less to a lack of information on how to practice safe sex, than to “feelings of grief and loss, low self-esteem, societal homophobia, hopelessness about the future, survivor guilt, a tenuous connection to the gay community, and feelings of inevitability about contracting HIV.”14 Many men who came to GMHC had a negative view of themselves and their sexuality, so the first workshops in 1985 were designed to provide a space for participants to explore their feelings and attitudes in an environment where people could give and receive support for change, and where “sex-positive” attitudes could be encouraged and reinforced. Part of making the group workshops “sex positive” was the use of an erotic language of sexuality rather than a clinical, de-eroticized language-something that was called “eroticizing safer sex.” The “cultural language” of sexuality of the men was used in dialogue, and dialogue centered around their own fears of sexuality, intimacy, their internalized homophobia, their anger, and their sense that AIDS could not be avoided. Slowly, within a support-group setting, “group norms could begin to be modified and mutual support for behavior change could develop.”15

Participants then began to express new needs beyond that of eroticizing safe sex, specifically the need to meet other men in nonsexual situations and learn how to

“date” and even “court,” and this led to workshops titled “Men Meeting Men.” A third generation of workshops, beginning in 1992 and called “Keep it Up,” helped participants “analyze barriers to safer sex and triggers for unsafe sex,” such as alcohol and drugs, and how to negotiate sexual and intimacy needs in an open manner to protect themselves and their partners.16 Holmes and Humes, however, do not offer up a story of success that is without qualification. They argue that the success of GMHC must be situated within the context of a second wave of HIV infection in gay communities across the nation, and thus the failure to stop the spread of HIV and AIDS. This failure was one of not examining the social construction of homosexuality, a failure to “consider the assumptions about the population for whom the program had been designed.” That targeted audience consisted of “self-identified,” “gay” and “bisexual” men, all of whom were supposedly characterized by a universalized gay sexuality and “cultural language.” Yet GMHC emerged out of the context in order to serve a predominantly white, middle class, educated, gay community, which in reality represented only a small part of the group of self-identified gay men. It also failed to recognize the continuum of homosexual sexuality. The authors conclude that Kinsey had been right about homosexuality, that it was more polymorphous than people liked to acknowledge. Much homosexual at-risk behavior occurs among men who do not self-identify as gay, and who may even be married or in a sexual relationship with a woman. This helped explain the spread of AIDS in the black and Latino/a communities, where it was less acceptable to be “gay,” and where men on the “down low” often spread the virus to their female partners. To seriously address the AIDS crisis, the fear of publicly acknowledging homosexual desires and behaviors will need to be addressed so that, as the authors say, men must develop a “willingness or ability to allow others to know about the private identity,” to “come out” about homosexual desire and behavior, even if the labels “gay” or even “bisexual” may not be appealing.17 For that to happen, of course, the immobilizing fear of homophobia must be acknowledged and overcome. The continuing spread of the HIV virus in communities of difference in the U.S. and the failure to check this spread, was, ironically, also related to the beginning of an era in which the progression toward the disease could be managed effectively by a new generation of protease inhibitors that began to dramatically reduce the death toll from AIDS in the U.S. by 1996. As public fear dissipated, the sense of crisis did as well, and with it federal monies for AIDS education-which had always been minimal. In federal policy discourse, attention began to shift from managing AIDS within

domestic subpopulations to larger concerns having to do with managing transmission of the HIV virus as a global pandemic, impacting particularly upon the developing world. This pandemic was, in a sense, symbolic of the new interconnectedness and interdependency of people in an age of global travel and border crossings of all sorts. Unless checked, the pandemic threatened to undermine development efforts in the “developing” world. Just as unchecked population growth threatened development in many areas, declining population growth because of AIDS now threatened

development in other areas, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, the health costs of managing the disease were a tremendous drain on resources in Africa, which also stunted development. Of course, development meant economic development first and foremost, integrating the developing world into a transnational capitalist economic order, but social development-rising levels of education and women moving into the workforce-were always linked to economic development. Two organizations have played a particularly influential role in this discourse of HIV/AIDS as a global pandemic and in reframing sexuality education as a global movement: the World Bank and the Population Council. John D. Rockefeller 3rd founded the Population Council in 1952 as an international, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization headquartered in New York City, and with a focus on global “reproductive health” through contraceptives and sex education. These concerns connected the Population Council to the early 20th century eugenics or racial-hygiene movement in the U.S., and Rockefeller appointed Frederick Osborn, president of the American Eugenics Society, to lead the council. By the late 1960s, when the eugenics movement was being discredited as racist, Osborn wrote that “[e]ugenic goals are most likely to be achieved under another name than eugenics.”18 The council’s journal, Population and Development Review, links issues of population control to social and economic development in the Third World. It is another one of those ironies of history that an organization with links to the

eugenics movement and to the interests of global capitalism in population management in the “developing world” has initiated an HIV/AIDS education initiative that most progressives in the U.S. would heartily endorse. The Population Council determined early on through research in the developing world that gender attitudes needed to change in order to effectively stop the transmission of HIV. According to a 2007 Population Council report, evidence demonstrated that women who experienced sexual coercion were less likely to use condoms, more likely to report unintended pregnancies, more likely to have multiple sexual partners, and more likely to have the HIV virus. Conversely, “young women who believe they are entitled to pleasure from their partner have greater self-efficacy such as feeling confident in knowing how to use condoms or in discussing condom use” were least likely to have the virus. The implication, according to the report, was that a paradigm shift was needed in thinking about sexuality education, toward social-studies approaches “that foster the development of critical thinking skills and emphasize learning and reflection about the ways that gender, rights, and other aspects of social context … affect sexual experience.” The report called for critical reflection on how “messages about masculinity lead boys and men to ‘prove’ their manhood and heterosexuality, including through sexual conquest and gender-based violence,” and on how young women’s economic circumstances make them vulnerable to “unprotected, coerced, and/or transactional sex.”19 This comes very close to cultural-studies approaches to sexuality education that I discussed in the last chapter, with their attention to the performance of gender within power relations, and to a pedagogy of critical reflection on the messages about gender young people receive

in their everyday lives. Sexuality education, in the form of this globalizing discourse of social and economic development, thus challenges many cultural traditions around the world-including those that oppress women-and this raises questions that will no doubt be the subject of much discourse in the years to come. How is it possible to construct a global democratic discourse that respects and even celebrates cultural difference and also promotes gender equity and fights homophobia and heteronormativity? In 2009, the Population Council published a much-heralded global curriculum

“for a unified approach to sexuality, gender, HIV, and human-rights education,” titled, It’s All One Curriculum. That curriculum begins with a unit on human rights, which includes reproductive rights and a right to a sexuality education. According to the text, “these human rights are universal,” applying to all regardless of sex, age, marital status, sexual identity or behavior, gender identity, race, ethnicity, national or social origin, political beliefs, citizenship, religious beliefs, social or economic status, where people live, physical and mental ability, and health status.20 The text includes activities on critically reading popular media images of what it means to be a “real” man or woman, and on “speaking truth to power,” where students practice speaking up for gender equality in relationships. One activity on “feeling different” includes a homework assignment in which students are asked to think about how a minority group (“people with disabilities, people of lower social castes, ethnic or racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities”) is treated in their community, whether their rights are sometimes violated, and whether members of that group have ever stood up to defend their rights. The follow-up activity on “feeling attracted to someone of the same sex,” provides three generic, universal stories of adolescents who realize they are homosexual, none of which is situated within a cultural context, but each of which is designed to help students “empathize with them, and to correct misinformation.” Teachers are advised that “if the terms used here (‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’) have negative connotations in your context, use other terms that do not carry negative connotations.”21 Of course, given that these terms do not carry positive connotations in heteronormative Western culture, it begs the question of whether the same advice might be offered to teachers in the supposedly enlightened, developed world. Still, the real phenomenon here worthy of note is that the discourse of human rights, including reproductive rights, women’s rights, and gay and lesbian rights, is being carried on the back of global capitalism in the developing world. Even as global capitalism organizes the developing world as the site of the new global working class, and thus participates in oppressing and exploiting Third World peoples, it brings with it the language of universal human rights, equality of opportunity, and toleration and respect for those who are minorities or different from the norm. Marx understood capitalism as an oppressive and exploitive system, but also one that undermined all traditions and irrational forms of bigotry and discrimination, including gender discrimination. This in no way means that global capitalism is primarily a force for democratic progress in the developing world today, only that it does open up some space for discourses of freedom,

equity, and social justice in the face of traditional bigotries and commonsense beliefs. The long battles that defined the era of sex education, battles between social and

religious conservatives on the one hand and liberals and progressives on the other, have subsided in recent years if not totally disappeared. Several factors have contributed to this decline in conflict. As federal sex-education monies became tied to abstinence-only and abstinence-in-preparation-for-marriage curricula in the 1990s, those on the religious right could declare a victory of sorts. Their sexual ideology had been enshrined in state-policy discourse and local-school practice, and at the same time sex education was being stripped from the “basic skills” curriculumwhich long had been their ultimate goal. A number of states did not apply for federal monies to support sex education in protest to the abstinence-only restrictions, and family-life education programs-where sex education was often taught-were cut in many districts. Health-education certification programs are also being eliminated, so the sex-education curriculum that remains is often delivered by biology or physical-education teachers, or by members of religious groups invited into the school. Then there is the fact that the public-school curriculum has, over the past several decades, been reorganized around “basic skills,” related to the needs of workers in the new global economy. Those subjects that cannot justify their existence in these economically functional terms, and in terms of raising standardized test scores in the new basic skills of math, science, and literacy, have been placed on the chopping block. In a time of shrinking budgets and a curriculum tightly coupled to standardized testing, traditional forms of sex education haven’t been able to compete. Finally, reducing the size and scope of sex-education programs has been one way of managing conflict, since almost any sex-education curriculum, no matter what it teaches or leaves out, is guaranteed to spark protests from parents and community groups. The result has been that sex education as a movement in health education, with its roots in the 1950s and 1960s, has become antiquated and in need of reconceptualization and reconstruction. As sex education as a movement was reaching its discursive limits, new move-

ments in the academy loosely organized around cultural studies have begun to offer a counterdiscourse to reframe sexuality education and the “problem” of adolescent sexuality around a study of youth culture, popular culture, media literacy, and identity. That is the movement I sought to describe and interpret in the last two chapters. It implies reterritorializing sexuality education within social studies, literature, and history; studying the “problem” of adolescent sexuality as socially constructed and dynamic; and analyzing and reflecting on media-industry images and performances of sexuality and identity. High-school youth culture is increasingly produced by youth in relation to the culture industry, and they bring this culture industry in their backpacks, so to speak, when they come to school. School is itself a major site for the production of adolescent identity as it provides a space where youth come together to engage in their “body projects.” This culture-industry “curriculum” of sexuality education, which has been reterritorialized to public schooling, is now so

pervasive that it begins to make what currently passes for sexuality education largely irrelevant. If popular culture is the new text which adolescents draw upon to construct a sexual self, sexuality education must become about media literacy. That is one of the major, unavoidable conclusions of this study. It is unavoidable in that almost everyone now understands that the role of the mass-media industry in shaping, narrating, and representing adolescent sexuality is hegemonic in the strong sense of that term. That is, the media industry produces and circulates commonsense images and narratives with strong appeal to adolescents, and, because they are commonsense, they go unquestioned and are taken for granted as the way things are. It is, at the same time, impossible to unplug adolescents from the virtual world of popular culture or youth culture, as if we could somehow return to a more “innocent” age. We can at least teach adolescents to be more critical consumers of popular culture-to know what they are buying with certain images of masculinity and femininity. Then we can engage them in using the new media technologies to produce their own narratives and images of sexuality and identity that counter and parody those produced by the media industry. Ironically, the desublimation of eros that Marcuse had seen as a possibility as machines

took over the disciplined, repressive work of production, and individuals and groups were freer to express their desires for freedom and expressivity, has come to passin a somewhat different form, however, and within the logic of capitalism. As the citizen laborer has given way to the citizen consumer, capitalism has shifted toward a less repressed form, one in which appeals are made to people’s long repressed desires, and this includes sexual desires. This means that capitalism in its advanced forms has opened up some space to challenge “traditional” sexual norms and mores. At the same time, it attaches people’s desires to commodities and objectified images they can buy and consume as substitutes for a more authentic expression of eros. Once eros is transformed into a desire to consume images and objects, then it can be made “productive” (profitable). It can be integrated within a consumer logic of “having fun” and sexually marketing the self. The hope of many political activists in the 1960s through the mid-1970s, influenced by Marcuse, was that the youthful “sexual revolution,” along with “women’s liberation” and “gay liberation” movements, would challenge the established social order in such a fundamental manner that it would lead to a cultural revolution. Indeed, something of a cultural revolution did occur. But it was a revolution that was kept under control, and even capitalized on, by the culture industry. Indeed, the media industry pushed sexual revolution further, but in a direction that was less politically subversive. Young people today grow up in a culture saturated by images and performances of sexuality that leaves little (or everything) to the imagination. “Sexting” (sending sexually explicit messages or photographs, usually between mobile phones) has become a growing phenomenon among young people over the past few years (and here it can be argued that they are only following the lead of political leaders). The news media gaze now intrudes into the sexual lives of all deemed newsworthy, and has the effect of turning politics into a game of sexual “scandal” in which an enormous amount of

time is devoted to reporting the minute details of sexual acts and sexual texting (as in the recent case of former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner).22