~ "Some of My Best Friends are Germs" is a long, fascinating article by Michael Pollan. It is about the microbial composition of people's guts (including how breast milk and natural birth and the food we eat impact it) and some of the ways that scholars think our gut microbes impact us (which is more speculative, from possibly impacting our experience of allergies and asthma and autoimmune diseases to affecting our weight).
But here’s the thing: it totally screws up the “good” girls, too, the one who wait until their wedding night. You can’t tell a girl that having sex is like being a chewed and regurgitated Oreo and then expect her to be totally excited when it comes time for her husband to chew her up and spit her back out. You can’t teach a girl that her sexuality is a prize for a man, that the whole purpose of her existence as a sexual being is to be used by someone else at the “right” time and in the “right” way, and then wonder where these silly girls get their “objectification” martyr complexes.
And her solution:
We need to create a new way of teaching children about human sexuality, a way that emphasizes their essential dignity as rational, spiritual, and sexual human beings. We should strive to teach them to grow in virtue, to gain temperance, to master their passions, and to love for love of the other, not out of desire for pleasure, power, or possession.
~ On the decline of Christianity in the Middle East.
~ On the French same-sex marriage debate.
3 comments:
A few years ago, I did some research on abstinence education, and I didn't find that most (or really any) of the programs in use at schools described girls this way. There was a major study of the effectiveness of these programs done in 2007, and you can look at the curricula of the programs they tracked to see if it sounds like what Smart or the blogger is describing. (Here is one of them, in bullet points.) However, I think all of these are public school programs, so they cannot be overtly religious in the way private schools' sex ed can be. I'm not sure what this blogger is referring to when she says all abstinence programs are about purity - public or private schools, or both. If the latter, it seems unlikely.
Also, it may be unduly optimistic to expect that any way of teaching sex in schools, whether its your algebra teacher telling you that you are a delicate snowflake or that same teacher performing a condom demonstration on a banana, can be non-ridiculous.
Interesting! You're right--she doesn't specify whether she's referring to sex-ed in public or private schools; in fact, I read into her article a critique of what she (probably unfortunately) calls the "purity culture" more broadly (which is to say, how sexuality is taught in churches and families as well).
I think that the author is critiquing an orientation toward avoiding sex alone, rather than cultivating a positive idea of love and its expression in relationships as they develop. You're right--it seems that several, although not all, as far as I could tell, of the programs in the 2007 study include sections on love and marriage.
That could be; I don't know anything about how abstinence is presented outside of school curricula. I suppose you can imbibe non-ridiculous messages about sex in settings that are not academic classrooms, but I remain skeptical that anything schoolteachers say about sex is going to be taken seriously.
Post a Comment