ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic discourse of adolescent sexual adjustment and maladjustment, grounded, if only loosely, by a Freudian tradition of interpretive psychology which stressed the importance of adolescents talking about their personal problems and fears, was clearly very influential among sex and health educators through the 1950s and into the 1960s. It positioned the professional health educator as psychoanalyst and put the student on the sofa, so to speak. The legitimacy and authority of the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition was well established in the public mind. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 movie Spellbound, starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, pays tribute to that authority and the power of psychoanalysis in curing psychological disorders. The hero of that movie is an aging, father-figure psychiatrist who risks his professional authority in an attempt to cure an accused murderer who has amnesia, and, in the process, prove his innocence. How different times were by the late 1960s, when Ken Kesey’s 1962 book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest suddenly became popular. In this case, the mental institute, ostensibly about curing patients, is actually a prison and its psychiatric overseers are prison wardens and normalizerstrying to make all the patients good, docile, well behaved. The so-called “counterculture” that Kesey represented and spoke for rejected the psychoanalytic model as one that sought to “adjust” people to docility and control; and it is wise to remember that the counterculture became the baby boomers, and so the antiFreud, antipsychoanalytic reaction to the conforming interpretation of Freud’s work in the 1950s has been passed down through the decades ever since. There is reason to believe this overreactive reaction, this dismissal of Freudian and psychoanalytic approaches to sexuality and adolescent development, may be coming to an end. A popular 2010 movie, Shutter Island, offers a more balanced treatment of the field, acknowledging both its authoritarian history of adjusting people to docility and discipline, and also the humanistic efforts of some psychoanalysts to help people
who are suffering and in despair, to help them face reality rather than escape into illusion. While a growing segment of the public was turning its back on the psycho-
analytic discourse of adjustment and maladjustment, so too was a younger generation of professional sex educators. In place of a mainstream progressive discourse of sex education as adjustment, and as family-life education, they began to articulate a liberal-humanist discourse on sex education more attuned to the cultural context of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1960s, liberal humanism emerged as the most viable and active force for the democratic reconstruction of culture in the U.S. Liberal humanism was built on a belief that the individual rather than the family is the basic unit of society, and that each individual should be as free as possible to define who they are and decide how they want to live their lives-so long as it does not involve oppressing others. Liberal humanists re-emphasized human rights, including the right to challenge traditional roles that kept people in their place at the margins and that thus effectively “dehumanized” and denied them basic human rights as citizens. Finally, liberal humanism in the 1960s reasserted the humanistic virtues of respect for others and tolerance for difference. To reassert the rights of individuals to control their own bodies and make choices for themselves, and to reassert the right to difference-these were radically subversive ideas in the 1950s, but they began to be thinkable and imaginable in the 1960s as the nation went through what can only be described as a cultural revolution. The sexual revolution was part of a broader transformative movement toward human freedom that was in many ways antithetical to the conformist, normalizing brand of progressivism that gripped American education under the “life-adjustment” movement. The liberal-humanist discourse on sexuality also provided a way out of the binary opposition established between “normal” and “abnormal” sexuality and sexual development. In place of a discourse of the normal and the abnormal, liberal humanists would insert a discourse of difference-the okayness of difference, the right to be different, and the “normalness” of difference. The reawakening of liberal humanism meant a reassertion of a politics of individual rights, legal redress, and individual choice, along with humanistic social norms of respect or tolerance for difference-including sexual difference. It meant linking sex education to equity agendas, particularly women’s equity. And it meant endorsing sex education as the provision of information, the “facts” of sexuality, and then shifting more responsibility to adolescents to use these “facts” to inform their own sexual decision making. The facts of the new sex-education movement had to do with birth control, abortion, STDs, and homosexuality. And they were to be ascertained through value-free scientific research involving quantitative analysis of data, not through the interpretive and normative psychoanalytic method. The first shots in the cultural battle over sex education were thus fired by two
opposing groups of sex educators-those who supported a family-life approach that continued to be about “adjusting” adolescents to gender norms of family life, and those who supported a fact-based, ostensibly value-neutral, scientific approach. Being value neutral here meant, in fact, teaching young people about condom
usage and how to avoid both STDs and unwanted pregnancies, and, later, about abortion as an option. This was a sex education for a consumer society of adolescents who wanted to know the facts in order for them to make better choices as sexual consumers, and for their parents who wanted to know that their children were protected and knew how to “stay out of trouble” sexually. To be fair, most of the advocates for the new sex education were also concerned that adolescents develop intimate, caring relationships between equal adults, and that they live a balanced and “healthy” life, but the emphasis was on giving them the facts they needed to make their own choices, and not to moralistically condemn any choices that are consensual and nonexploitive-including the choice to engage in homosexual behavior or a homosexual “lifestyle.” From the beginning, this new group of sex educators insisted that homosexuality be recognized as a normal sexual response, not as deviant, or a disorder. While the dispute between sex educators committed to a “family-life” approach and a “facts” approach was substantial and involved significant philosophical and political differences, it should not be overstated. For they agreed on the importance of being more open, honest, and frank with adolescents about sexuality, on the importance of talking about sex in public schools, and on the importance of understanding changes going on in youth culture. By the early 1970s, they would begin to find common ground and understand themselves as on the same side against a new army on the battlefield, that of the Christian right. One group in particular embodied the new sex-education discourse, and it served
to build bridges of support among health professionals and family-life educators as social conservatives and Christian fundamentalists began to attack sex education and sex educators. The Sexual Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS) brought together a power block of “human-service” professionals, including those in the fields of marriage counseling, sociology, family life, psychiatry, religion, education, and preventive medicine. Mary Calderone, its first leader, was a health educator who had become a tireless lobbyist for sex education at Planned Parenthood. With the help of generous grants from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in the Johnson administration era, she helped SIECUS become a major source for information and resource materials on how to implement a sex-education program in local schools, and how to involve parents and community groups. When, in 1964, she was invited to contribute an article to a special issue of Phi Delta Kappan on “The School’s Responsibility for Moral Behavior,” she reframed the debate over sex education in terms of a question of to whom the school is responsible to, and what the school is responsible for-avoiding entirely a language of morality. Instead, she invoked a humanist language of sexuality as part of a “vital, creative” force that everyone has a natural right to-including adolescents. Moralist approaches to sex education too often were “negative” in their view of sexuality, and it was thus imperative that sex educators join with those forces being unleashed in the culture that believed it was not too late to “change the ‘set’ of our country from negative to positive with regard to sex and the part it could and should play for individuals, for families, and for society.”1 Calderone
turned to no less a figure than the popular historian of Western civilization and the rise and decline of civilizations to support her contention that unless there was a change in the “set” of Americans regarding adolescent sexuality and sex education, American civilization might be in decline. Arnold Toynbee had written an opinion piece for the New York Times Magazine on May 10, 1964, on “Why I Dislike Western Civilization,” in which, among other things, he had argued that contemporary Western culture was more and more contradictory when it came to young people and sex. On the one hand, he wrote, through popular culture “we drive them [young people] to a premature awareness of sex even before physical puberty has overtaken them.” This early development of a “sex consciousness” in American young people-presumably through their exposure to Hollywood movies, television, and popular music-had, Toynbee feared, spread to Britain, and “who knows how many other Western countries.” This is basically a conservative argument about the decline of Western civilization wrapped in the language of liberalism-that is, of young people’s human rights. “We deprive our children of the human right of having a childhood,” he wrote, when we expect them to grow up too quickly, and when the mass media and the public expect young people to be sexually active at an earlier age. “This forcing of sex consciousness” at an ever earlier age, this lowering of “the age of sexual awareness and frequently the age of sexual experience” in the U.S. was, Toynbee argued, making the U.S. “closer to the Asian than the European,” making adolescents sexual beings “to a veritably Hindu degree.” While this “Hindu course” is more and more the American way, it is in conflict with another American trend, to prolong the formal education of young people and postpone marriage, perhaps until after higher education. What Toynbee proposes is a theory of Western civilization, and its decline and
fall relative to other civilizations (here Asian civilization and the Hindu course) that is thoroughly colonial, yet is folded within a liberal-humanist discourse on modern sex education for adolescents in the U.S. The decline and fall of Western civilization as the highest, most civilized of the civilizations of the world, is linked to the Western capacity to defer gratification of sexual desire. This is supposedly one of the things that made the colonial European subject superior to, and more powerful than, the sexually more “primitive” colonial subject. And, of course, all colonial subjects, all subjugated races, are represented with a universalizing brush. The Asian Other is also the Hindu, as if Islam and Buddhism could be all reduced to a sexual Hinduism in which even children are expected to have sex lives, with no room for an age of “childhood innocence.” But Toynbee then turns to acknowledge this Hinduization of U.S. youth culture to argue that we have to face facts. Young people could not be expected to postpone sexual fulfillment while pursuing 16 or more years of education and then a few more years of job hunting before marriage. There was even evidence, Toynbee suggested, that social stigmas against adolescents having any kind of sexual life “may be one very important cause of so-called feminine frigidity.” This concern with “frigidity” is a very masculinist, and heteronormative concern. But feminists and women’s rights advocates were also emphasizing the importance
of a sexually fulfilling sex life for women in a society that had taught women that their sexuality was bad, and that they only existed to give pleasure to men. Sex education had to address what Toynbee called “psychosexual inhibitions” programmed into the personality.2 To Toynbee, as for Mary Calderone, this meant a focus on sex education to counter “psychosocial inhibitions,” and to encourage some limited fulfillment of sexual desire on the way to marriage-preferably through masturbation (that practice which had so long been discouraged by sex educators, including many family-life educators), and through sexual intercourse (when passion rules the moment) with the use of condoms and other forms of birth control. Calderone called for a form of sex education that treated adolescents as “persons on the way to becoming adults,” which meant according them rights we wish for ourselves, “especially as relates to information about sex as a vital, creative force.”3
