The Failure of Sex Education 
October 1994

by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

"Comprehensive sex education," mandated in seventeen states, is the
educational fad of the hour, yet there is little evidence that it
"works"--prevents teenage pregnancy and stanches the spread of sexually
transmitted disease. Defended by its professional-class originators as
"getting real" about teenage sex, it fails to speak to the grim reality
of what the author calls "the new sexual revolution" among the young

Amid rising concern about the hazards of teenage sex, health and school
leaders are calling for an expanded effort to teach sex education in the
schools. At the moment the favored approach is called comprehensive sex
education. The nation's highest ranking health officer, Surgeon General
Joycelyn Elders, has endorsed this approach as the chief way to reduce
unwed childbearing and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among
teenagers. The pillars of the health and school establishments,
including the National Association of School Psychologists, the American
Medical Association, the National School Boards Association, and the
Society for Adolescent Medicine, support this approach. So do a growing
number of state legislatures. Over the past decade seventeen states have
adopted mandates to teach comprehensive sex education, and thirty more
support it.

Sex education in the schools is not new, of course, but never before has
it attempted to expose children to so much so soon. Comprehensive sex
education includes much more than a movie about menstruation and a class
or two in human reproduction. It begins in kindergarten and continues
into high school. It sweeps across disciplines, taking up the biology of
reproduction, the psychology of relationships, the sociology of the
family, and the sexology of masturbation and massage. It seeks not
simply to reduce health risks to teenagers but also to build self esteem,
prevent sexual abuse, promote respect for all kinds of families, and
make little boys more nurturant and little girls more assertive. As Dr.
Elders explains, comprehensive sex education is not just about giving
children a "plumbing lesson."

This approach is appealing for several reasons. First, it reaches the
vast majority of American schoolchildren, through the public school
system. Second, it is inexpensive. Principals have to do little more
than buy a sex-education curriculum and enroll the coach or
home-economics teacher in a training workshop, and their school has a
sex-education program. Third, to panicky parents, worried about their
ability to protect their children from AIDS and other STDs,
comprehensive sex education offers a reassuring message: The schools
will teach your children how to protect themselves.

Nonetheless, comprehensive sex education has provoked vigorous
opposition, both at the grass roots and especially in the organized
ranks of the religious right. Its critics argue that when it comes to
teaching children about sex, the public schools should convey one
message only: abstinence. In response, sex educators point to the
statistics. Face facts, they say. A growing number of teenagers are
engaging in sex and suffering its harmful consequences. It is foolish,
if not irresponsible, to deny that reality. If more teenagers are
sexually active, why deprive them of the information they need to avoid
early pregnancy and disease? What's more, why insist on a standard of
conduct for teenagers that adults themselves no longer honor or obey? As
usual, the Surgeon General states the basic proposition memorably:
"Everybody in the world is opposed to sex outside of marriage, and yet
everybody does it. I'm saying, 'Get real.'"

This rhetoric is politically shrewd. It is smart to identify sex
education with realism, honesty, and sexual freedom. (Its opponents are
thereby unrealistic, hypocritical, and sexually unliberated.) Similarly,
it is advantageous to link the sex-education campaign with the struggle
against religious fundamentalism and, more generally, with opposition to
religious argument in public life. When the issue is cast in
Scopes-trial terms, it appears that an approach to sex education based
in science will triumph over one rooted in blind faith.

But the sex educators' rhetoric is double-edged. As credentialed
professionals, trained in the health and pedagogical sciences, advocates
for a "reality-based" approach must at some point submit to reality
tests. Their claims raise the inevitable question, How realistic is
their approach to solving the problems associated with teenage sex? Or,
to be more specific, What is the evidence that comprehensive sex
education can achieve its stated goals? Does comprehensive sex education
respond to the real-life circumstances of teenagers today? Does the new
sex pedagogy take into account the realities of teenage sex in the
1990s?

The New Jersey Model 

A few months ago I set out to answer these questions by venturing into a
state with a long and strong commitment to comprehensive sex education.
Few states have worked harder or longer than New Jersey to bring sexual
enlightenment to schoolchildren. In 1980 the state adopted one of the
nation's first mandates for comprehensive sex education--or family-life
education, as it is called there--and it was the very first state to
require sex education for children in the primary grades. Its pioneering
efforts have earned New Jersey the equivalent of a five-star rating from
the Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), a
national advocacy organization that promotes comprehensive sex education.

Virtually every public school student in New Jersey receives sex
education (the average is twenty-four hours a year), and some
schoolchildren, like those in the Irvington public schools, have an
early and full immersion. Overall, teachers are trained and experienced,
averaging close to ten years of teaching a family-life curriculum.

According to recent opinion polls, public support for sex education in
New Jersey is strong. In one survey an overwhelming majority of adults
said they favored teaching teenagers about sex in school, including
controversial topics such as contraception, homosexuality, and "safer
sex." Slightly more Catholics than Protestants surveyed favor sex
education (88 percent to 84 percent), and support is nearly as high
among parents as among nonparents. Parents tend to be more knowledgeable
about the content of sex-education programs, and a majority say their
school's offerings are excellent or good. Another survey, conducted by
Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute, found that 61 percent of
parents with school-age children say they would permit their child to
get condoms from the schools.

Politically, therefore, sex education has been an all-but-unqualified
success in New Jersey. Since 1980 popular support has steadily increased,
and over that period the state mandate has held up against repeated
legislative challenges, including a recent proposal to stress sexual
abstinence.

The key to this success is a well-organized advocacy effort. A state
mandate alone rarely achieves the goal of comprehensive sex education,
because local school authorities often fail to act vigorously to observe
the mandate. It takes a strong and sustained campaign to win over
parents and teachers, beat back political opponents, and stiffen the
spines of timid school administrators. In New Jersey two closely allied
organizations advance the sex-education cause. Rutgers, the state
university, administers grants and provides office space to the advocacy
campaign. It is, though, the small but ubiquitous New Jersey Network for
Family Life Education that conducts the daily business of winning
support for sex education across the state.

The Philosophy of Sex Education 

Susan Wilson runs the Network from her handsome gated home in Princeton.
(The Network is officially headquartered at Rutgers.) Wilson, who has
been an indefatigable crusader for comprehensive sex education for more
than a decade, helped to write and pass the state mandate in the late
1970s, while she was a member of the State Board of Education. A few
years later she took over as the head of the Network. With a budget of
about $200,000 this year, mostly from foundations and the state
government, Wilson and her small staff publish a newsletter, testify at
hearings, train teachers, develop sex-education materials, fight efforts
to overturn the mandate, and perform the scores of other duties required
in their advocacy work. But Wilson's single most important task, which
she clearly enjoys, is traveling up and down the state making the case
for comprehensive sex education.

Because the case that she makes represents today's
comprehensive-sex-education orthodoxy, it deserves close attention. It
has several tenets. First, children are "sexual from birth." Like many
sex educators, Wilson rejects the classic notion that a latency period
occurs between the ages of about six and twelve, when children are
sexually quiescent. "Ever since I've gotten into this field, the
opponents have used that argument to frighten policymakers," she says.
"But there is a body of developmental knowledge that says this is not
true." And, according to Wilson, it is not simply that children are born
sexual or that their sexuality is constantly unfolding. It is also that
sexuality is much broader than most imagine: "You are not just being
sexual by having intercourse. You are being sexual when you throw your
arms around your grandpa and give him a hug."

Second, children are sexually miseducated. Unlike Europeans, who learn
about sex as matter-of-factly as they learn about brushing their teeth,
American children grow up sexually absurd--caught between opposing but
equally distorted views of sex. One kind of distortion comes from
parents. Instead of affirming the child's sexuality, parents convey the
message that sex is harmful, shameful, or sinful. Or, out of a misguided
protectiveness, they cling to the notion of childhood innocence and fail
to provide timely or accurate information about sex. The second kind of
distortion comes from those who would make sex into a commodity. While
parents withhold information, the media and the marketplace spew sexual
misinformation. It is this peculiar American combination of
repressiveness and permissiveness that leads to sexual wrong thinking
and poor sexual decision-making, and thus to high rates of teenage
pregnancy and STDs.

Third, if miseducation is the problem, then sex education is the
solution. Since parents are failing miserably at the task, it is time to
turn the job over to the schools. Schools occupy a safe middle ground
between Mom and MTV. They are places where "trusted adults" can teach
children how to protect themselves against the hazards of sex and sexual
abuse.

Moreover, unlike homes, schools do not burden children with moral
strictures. As Wilson explains, schools can resolve the "conflict
between morality and reality" by offering unbiased statements of fact.
Here, for example, is how a teacher might handle the subject of
masturbation in a factually accurate way: "Some people think it is okay
to masturbate and some people think it is not okay to masturbate, but
most people think that no harm comes to you if you masturbate."
Consequently, when it comes to sex, schools rather than homes offer a
haven in the heartless world.

A fourth and defining tenet is that sex education must begin in the
earliest grades. Like math or reading, comprehensive sex education takes
a "building blocks" approach that moves from basic facts to more
sophisticated concepts, from simple skills to more complex competencies.
Just as it would be unthinkable to withhold math education until the
sixth grade, so, too, is it unwise to delay the introduction of sex
education until the eighth grade.

In the beginning, before there is sex, there is sex literacy. Just as
boys and girls learn their number facts in the first grade, they acquire
the basic sex vocabulary, starting with the proper names for genitalia
and progressing toward an understanding of masturbation, intercourse,
and contraception. As they gain fluency and ease in talking about sexual
matters, students become more comfortable with their own sexuality and
more skillful in communicating their feelings and desires. Boys and
girls can chat with one another about sex, and children can confide in
adults without embarrassment.

Early sex education readies grade school children for the onslaught of
puberty. By the time they reach adolescence, they are cognitively as
well as biologically primed for sex. Moreover, with early sex training,
teenagers are much more likely to engage in what Wilson and her
colleagues consider responsible sexual conduct: abstinence, noncoital
sex, or coitus with a condom. Since abstinence will not lead to
pregnancy or STDs, and noncoital and protected sex are not likely to do
so, comprehensive sex education will help to reduce the incidence of
these problems among teenagers.

This is the philosophy of comprehensive sex education. But how to
translate it into lessons for little children? Although the state
mandate allowed school districts to shop around for a suitable
curriculum, at first not much was available for primary schoolers. Most
teachers had to improvise a curriculum or adapt higher-grade-level texts
to the early grades. What was missing was a standard text: a Dick and
Jane reader for the Michaels and Ashleys of the post-sexual-revolution
generation.

Family Life 

Rutgers University Press seized the opportunity. With a growing number
of states adopting comprehensive-sex-education mandates, and with the
595 school districts of New Jersey seeking to meet their state mandate,
the market for a sex primer looked promising. The press set out to fill
that market niche. It assembled a small, sympathetic advisory panel,
including Susan Wilson, and then hired Barbara Sprung, an independent
consultant from New York City, to write its pathbreaking sex-education
text.

A graduate of Sarah Lawrence and the Bank Street College of Education,
Barbara Sprung spent eight years as an elementary school teacher before
she embarked on a second career as a diversity-education specialist.
During the 1970s and the 1980s, working first for a feminist
organization and then for her own organization, Educational Equity
Concepts, Sprung produced books, teachers' guides, and other materials
based on a "nonsexist, multicultural, disability-sensitive, early
childhood approach." The Rutgers project was her first venture into sex
education.

With her advisers, she came up with Learning About Family Life, a
"textbook package" described in the Rutgers University Press marketing
brochure as a "pioneering" approach to family-life education for
schoolchildren in kindergarten through third grade. The textbook also
carries a pioneering price tag--$250 a package. As befits a fundamental
text, the curriculum sets forth its guiding principles: "Sexuality is a
part of daily living, as essential to normal functioning as mathematics
and reading." And as befits a primer, it offers the sex basics. Here is
a representative sampling:

On female genitalia: "The vulva is the area enclosing three parts: a
vagina, the opening you urinate from, and a clitoris. . . . Clitoris is
a small sensitive part that only girls have, and it sometimes makes you
feel good."

On sexual intercourse: "To have sex, the man and woman lie very close to
each other so that their bodies are touching. Usually it happens in bed,
and they don't have any clothes on. Together the woman and man place the
man's penis inside the woman's vagina, and while they are loving each
other, many sperm come from the testicles into the man's penis. After a
while, the sperm come through the little hole at the end of the man's
penis, and they swim up the vagina and meet the egg in the fallopian
tube."

On masturbation: "Grown-ups sometimes forget to tell children that
touching can also give people pleasure, especially when someone you love
touches you. And you can give yourself pleasure, too, and that's okay.
When you touch your own genitals, it's called masturbating."

On sex: "When you are older, you can decide if you want to have sex.
Most people do, because they like it and it's a very important way of
showing that we love someone."

These sex facts are presented in a particularly captivating form. Unlike
standard sex-education curricula, which are about as exciting to read as
an IRS Form 1040, Learning About Family Life tells a story. The text
follows a fictional class of primary school children and their teachers,
Ms. Ruiz and Mr. Martin, as they experience a series of family events
during the course of the school year. The teachers and children are
characters in a continuing saga, full of drama and incident. Primary
school teachers tell Sprung that children eagerly ask, "When are we
going to talk about those kids in Class 203 again?" Little wonder. This
is sex education packaged as Sesame Street. Like Sesame Street, Learning
About Family Life deals with the social and family issues of the day.
During the year Classroom 203 encounters the following events: Ms.
Ruiz's pregnancy and childbirth, the death of Mr. Martin's father, the
drug arrest of Martine's cousin, the birth of a child to Joseph's
teenage sister, the arrival of Natan's grandmother from Russia, Sarah's
trip to see her divorced father, and the visit of Seth's HIV-infected
uncle. These events and others, presented in forty-three vignettes,
provide an occasion for straight talk about genitalia, sexual
intercourse, pregnancy and childbirth, HIV and AIDS, masturbation,
sexual abuse, physical disability, drug abuse, death, divorce,
grandparents, and all kinds of families.

As they read about Classroom 203, children acquire a scientific sex
vocabulary. "Adults in the children's families probably don't use
accurate terms like anus and buttocks," the teachers' resource guide
warns. "You, as the teacher, are the best role model for creating
comfort." Indeed, the teacher is to insist on replacing even words that
are perfectly apt for a six-year-old's vocabulary with more-scientific
terms. In a lesson on pregnancy, Brian talks about how his mother's
tummy felt when the baby was growing inside. Ms. Ruiz says, "I know we
are used to saying baby and tummy. But fetus and uterus are more
accurate words." And when it comes to a hot issue like masturbation, a
teacher's cool command of the facts is crucial: "Masturbation is a topic
that is viewed negatively in many families, based on long-standing
cultural and religious teachings. Assure parents that your approach will
be low keyed and will stress privacy, but also make it clear that you
will not perpetuate myths that can mar children's healthy sexual
development." Teachers must also debunk the myth that masturbation is
only for boys. Girls must be granted equal time to ask masturbation
questions.

If girls need nudging in the sex department, boys need coaxing in the
emotions department. Indeed, one of the strongest themes in the text is
the problematic nature of boys. Boys are emotionally clogged, unable to
cry or to express feelings. And little boys may enter grade school with
the idea that such sex-related matters as pregnancy, childbearing, and
baby care are only for girls. Therefore Learning About Family Life
enlists boys in nurturing and "feelings" activities. These may be
difficult for boys who come from macho backgrounds. But here again the
school provides a cultural haven. If the lessons in nurturing conflict
with a boy's family or cultural teachings, the teachers' manual advises,
the teacher should say, "In school, talking about feelings is a part of
learning."

In early sex education feelings talk and sex talk are closely related
for good reason: little schoolchildren do not have the capacity to
understand big adult issues directly. But many are now exposed to big
adult issues at an early age, and so it is necessary to find routes to
understanding. Early sex education thus turns to affective pathways and
to a therapeutic pedagogy.

Stuff Happens 

According to its publishers, Learning About Family Life provides a
realistic slice of contemporary family life. Nonetheless, it is a highly
selective slice. There is a vignette designed to expose children to an
"amicable divorce." But there is no corresponding vignette to give
children a picture of an amicable, much less a long lasting, marriage.
(Susan Wilson believes that you "can't beat kids all over the head" with
marriage.) There is a story about sex as a way to show love, but no
story about commitment as a way to show love. There is an effort to give
children positive messages about expressing sexuality, but no effort to
give children positive messages about the advantages of not expressing
sexuality before they are grown. And this family world is only thinly
populated by men. Ms. Ruiz is a well-defined character in the story; the
male teacher, Mr. Martin, is more of a bit player, taking center stage
in one story to talk about masturbation and in another to cry. There are
grandmothers but no grandfathers. A brand-new father makes a cameo
appearance to show off his nurturing skills, but the only other father
is divorced and a plane ride away.

Here is the dilemma: Learning About Family Life is caught between two
competing tendencies. On the one hand, it works hard to reflect the
real-life family circumstances of many children. It deals with some
hard-edged issues: sexual abuse, unwed teenage motherhood, drug dealing,
and divorce. On the other hand, it takes a deeply sentimental view of
these gritty realities. Consider, for example, the story "Joseph Is an
Uncle":

Joseph's seventeen-year-old sister has a new baby. She is not married.
The baby's father is gone. Joseph's parents are mad and sad at the same
time. His sister is tired and out of sorts. Yet things work out. The
family rallies round. An aunt takes care of the baby during the day.
Joseph's sister returns to school. Joseph shows the photograph of his
new nephew to his best friend, but he doesn't want anyone else to know
about his sister's baby. His friend encourages him to show the photo to
Mr. Martin and Ms. Ruiz.

Of all the sex tales, Joseph's story merits the closest attention. Early
sex education, after all, purports to help children avoid the fate of
Joseph's teenage sister. So what are we to make of this story? First,
though illegitimacy is not treated cavalierly, it is depicted as a
family crisis that is quickly resolved, because all the folks pitch in.
Apparently there are no longer-term consequences for Joseph's sister or
his little nephew--such as poverty, welfare dependency, or diminished
school and job prospects. Second, in a curriculum designed to teach
personal responsibility, the text misses an opportunity to do so. Unwed
teenage parenthood is not an affliction visited on people like
hurricanes or drought, yet that is the message of the story. Among the
families in Classroom 203 stuff happens.

Finally, think about the baby's father. Joseph's sister's boyfriend has
sex as an expression of love, exactly as the sex primer describes, but
then he takes off. Though Learning About Family Life has stern messages
for boys about caring and sharing, it ducks the basic question of male
responsibility. A seven-year-old boy listening to this story might well
conclude that illegitimacy is a girls' topic.

As it turns out, then, early sex education is not straight talk at all
but a series of object lessons. And these are offered not so much with a
nose for the facts as with an eye to the sex educators' philosophy.
Learning About Family Life is no less didactic in its views on family
life than Dick and Jane. To be sure, a truly fact-based approach would
have to deal with some hard truths. For example, it would have to say
that unwed teenage parenthood carries grave consequences for teenagers
and their babies; that not all families are equally capable of caring
for children; and that absent long-term commitment, responsibility, and
sacrifice, love does not conquer all. Since some children grow up in
broken or unwed teenage families, there is an understandable concern
that children not feel stigmatized by such facts. Yet such tender
concern raises a tough question: If the classroom is the source of
unbiased factual information, how can the problems of illegitimacy and
broken families be dealt with without touching on the key facts in the
matter?

The Pedagogy of Sex Education 

In the middle grades sex education takes a more technical turn. At
eleven and twelve many young people are approaching the threshold of
puberty while others are already in full pubertal flower. (Today the
average age of menarche is twelve and a half.) Now, as hormones kick in,
children are ready to express themselves sexually. Thus the focus of sex
education shifts from sex literacy to building sexual skills. This is
when students must acquire the knowledge and technical skills to manage
their emerging sexuality.

Sex-education advocates agree that abstaining from sex is the best way
to avoid STDs and early pregnancy. But they reject an approach that is
limited to teaching abstinence. First, they say, abstinence-based
teaching ignores the growing number of adolescents who are already
sexually active at age twelve or thirteen. One Trenton schoolteacher
said to me, "How can I teach abstinence when there are three pregnant
girls sitting in my eighth-grade class?" Second, abstinence overlooks
the fact that, as Susan Wilson explains, "it is developmentally
appropriate for teenagers to learn to give and receive pleasure."

Consequently, the New Jersey sex-education advocates call for teaching
middle-schoolers about condoms, abortion, and the advantages of
"protected" sex. But given the risks to teenagers, they are not crazy
about sexual intercourse either. Indeed, Wilson says, Americans are
fixated on "this narrow little thing called intercourse." The
alternative is a broad thing called noncoital sex or, in the argot of
advocates, "sexual expression without risk."

Noncoital sex includes a range of behaviors, from deep kissing to
masturbation to mutual masturbation to full body massage. Since none of
these involves intercourse, sex educators see them as ways for teenagers
to explore their sexuality without harm or penalty. And from a broader
public-health perspective, risk-free sexual expression has great
potential. According to the Rutgers education professor William
Firestone, who conducted a study of sex-education teaching in New Jersey
for the Network for Family Life Education, noncoital sex offers "real
opportunities to reduce dangers to many teens who engage in sexual
behavior, despite recommendations for abstinence." Yet as Firestone's
survey research shows, many teachers shrink from this approach. Wilson
says, "We hardly ever talk to teens about necking and petting and
admiring your body and maybe massage."

As Wilson points out, noncoital sex is most practicable when teenagers
can communicate with each other. "A lot of people think that once you
start down the road to sex, you can't stop, and that's the problem. But
I think that by talking about these things and by role playing, you give
kids control and you give them the language to say 'That's enough--I
don't want any more. I don't want to have intercourse.'"

Since safe petting and good talking go together, middle school students
need to continue to practice their communication skills. But in teaching
these skills teachers cannot rely on old-fashioned didactic methods.
Middle school students are still short-term thinkers, reckless in deed.
Therefore sex education in middle school does not yet enter the realm of
thinking and ideas but remains lodged instead in the realm of what one
teacher calls "feelings and values."

"Hello, Vulva" 

I attended a teacher-training conference sponsored by the Network for
Family Life Education to get acquainted with the way sex is taught. In
New Jersey, as in other states with mandates for comprehensive sex
education, such one-day workshops are a mainstay of teacher training.
For a small investment of time and money--a day out of the classroom and
$35--teachers learn the latest in sex-education theory and practice. On
the day I attended, the crowd was made up of physical-education, home
economics, and health teachers with a scattering of elementary school
nurses as well. Almost all were women.

Deborah Roffman, an independent sex-education consultant from Maryland
who teaches in several private middle and high schools, was the keynote
speaker. (Like Roffman, most of the trainers at this conference came to
it from the world of advocates, family planners, and private consultants.
Only one teaches in the public schools.) She was an engaging speaker
with the timing and phrasing of a good comedian. (Teacher in audience:
"What do you say when a student asks you to define 'blow job'?" Roffman:
"You say it is oral sex." Pause. Roffman again: "But what if the
student's next question is 'Does that mean you talk while you screw?'")
To kick off the conference, Roffman gave a rousing talk, urging teachers
to adopt bolder teaching methods. I was curious to see what she had in
mind, so I attended her workshop.

She began the workshop session with these instructions: "Turn to the
person next to you. Make eye contact. Say 'Hello, penis.' Shake hands
and return the greeting: 'Hello, vulva.'" This warmup exercise
underscores a central idea in sex pedagogy: for teachers no less than
for students, talking about sex provokes anxiety and embarrassment. Such
embarrassment stands in the way of good communication, and good
communication is crucial to responsible sexual conduct.

So is emotional literacy. To become more emotionally articulate,
middle-schoolers engage in a series of feelings exercises. The purpose
is to help students "normalize" and share common growing-up experiences.
Roffman handed out a list of sample questions: "What is the worst thing
your parents could find out about a child of theirs who is your age?"
"Have you ever experienced the death of someone close to you?" "What is
a way in which your parents are 'overprotective'?" In the middle schools
as in the elementary schools, there is a continuing effort to break down
boys' emotional reserve. Encourage your students to sit boy-girl,
Roffman suggests, and ask the biggest boy in the class the first
feelings question.

The Consortium for Educational Equity, at Rutgers, offers a similar set
of feelings-and-values exercises in a sex curriculum designed for
seventh- and eighth-graders. Some are sentence-completion exercises. In
one, seventh-graders are asked to complete the sentence "If someone
loves me, they . . ." and then elsewhere to "compare their ideas [about
love] to [Eric] Fromm's and [Leo] Buscaglia's material on love." In
another, students are to "write a positive self-statement . . .--'I am
strong' . . . 'I am happy' . . ."--and then discuss the "impact of
positive self-statements on feelings of self-esteem."

Other exercises draw on more therapeutic methods, such as role-playing
and small-group work. There are gender-reversal exercises, in which
girls and boys each play the role of the opposite sex. In small groups
students may brainstorm about ways to deal with an unwanted pregnancy or
come up with a list of their expectations of nonmarital sex.

Some of the gender-reversal exercises sound like birthday-party games.
In one exercise, called the Fish-Bowl, girls are seated in a circle in
which there is one empty chair. Boys form a circle around the girls.
Girls talk about what they like and dislike about boys. If one of the
boys wishes to speak, he sits in the empty chair in the girls' circle.
After a time the boys repeat the exercise, with the girls in the outer
circle.

Because of its intimate subject matter, the feelings-and-values
classroom institutes a new code of classroom conduct. There are
confidentiality rules. Roffman's middle school students are told that
nothing said in sex-education class goes out of the class without
students' express permission. In discussions middle-schoolers must
protect the privacy of individuals who are not class members; except for
classmates', no names may be used. Another rule is that any student who
does not want to answer a question may pass. In some classes students
agree to use only "I" statements, rather than "you" statements, in order
to express their thoughts more positively.

In therapeutically oriented classrooms, moreover, the teacher assumes
the role of confidant and peer. Like students, teachers are encouraged
to share personal experiences. An idea book for New Jersey teachers,
published by the Network, tells the inspirational story of a high school
teacher who talks to his class about his vasectomy and how he feels
about it. Yet although they are advised to share experiences, teachers
are not to impose their opinions, even when it comes to arguably the
most important question: "What is the right time to begin having sex?"
The teacher is encouraged to turn the question back to the students:
"How would you begin to make that decision?"

Sex educators defend this approach with the language of empowerment.
Students, they say, must acquire the knowledge and skills to answer
these questions for themselves. After all, grown-ups aren't around to
supervise teenagers every minute of the day. Teachers can't follow
students home, and working parents can't check up on teenagers who are
home alone. Why not invest teenagers with the power to make wise choices
on their own?

Reality Tests 

On its face, this new therapeutic sex pedagogy does not seem all that
therapeutic or all that new. Teenage girls have enjoyed self-inventory
tests at least as long as Seventeen magazine has been around. And
there's nothing particularly revolutionary about small-group discussions
of feelings and values. This, after all, is why teenagers invented the
slumber party.

But on second glance there is something radically new about
comprehensive sex education. As both a philosophy and a pedagogy, it is
rooted in a deeply technocratic understanding of teenage sexuality. It
assumes that once teenagers acquire a formal body of sex knowledge and
skills, along with the proper contraceptive technology, they will be
able to govern their own sexual behavior responsibly. In brief, what
comprehensive sex education envisions is a regime of teenage sexual
self-rule.

The sex educators offer their technocratic approach as an alternative to
what they see as a failed effort to regulate teenage sexuality through
social norms and religious values. Face facts. In a climate of sexual
freedom the old standard of sexual conduct for teenagers--a standard
separate from adult sexual standards--is breaking down. Increasingly
teenagers are playing by the same sexual rules as adults. Therefore, why
withhold from adolescents the information and technologies that are
available to adults?

To be sure, sex educators have a point. Traditional sexual morality,
along with the old codes of social conduct, is demonstrably less
effective today than it once was in governing teenage sexual conduct.
But although moral standards can exist even in the midst of a breakdown
of morality, a technocratic view cannot be sustained if the techniques
fizzle. Thus comprehensive sex education stands or falls on the proven
effectiveness of its techniques.

For a variety of reasons the body of research on sex-education programs
is not as rich and robust as we might wish. However, the available
evidence suggests that we must be skeptical of the technocratic approach.
First, comprehensive sex education places its faith in the power of
knowledge to change behavior. Yet the evidence overwhelmingly suggests
that sexual knowledge is only weakly related to teenage sexual behavior.
The researcher Douglas Kirby, of ETR Associates, a nonprofit
health-education firm in Santa Cruz, California, has been studying
sex-education programs for more than a decade. During the 1980s he
conducted a major study of the effectiveness of sex-education programs
for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and he has since
completed a review for the Centers for Disease Control of all published
research on school-based sex-education programs designed to reduce the
risks of unprotected sex. His research shows that students who take sex
education do know more about such matters as menstruation, intercourse,
contraception, pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases than
students who do not. (Thanks to federal funding for AIDS education in
the schools, students tend to be very knowledgeable about the sources
and prevention of HIV infection.)

But more accurate knowledge does not have a measurable impact on sexual
behavior. As it is typically taught, sex education has little effect on
teenagers' decisions to engage in or postpone sex. Nor, according to
Kirby, do knowledge-based sex-education programs significantly reduce
teenage pregnancy. And although teenagers who learn about contraception
may be more likely to use it, their contraceptive practices tend to be
irregular and therefore ultimately unreliable.

Comprehensive sex education assumes that knowledge acquired at earlier
ages will influence behavior. Yet the empirical evidence suggests that
younger teenagers, especially, are unlikely to act on what they know. An
analysis of a Planned Parenthood survey concludes that a "knowledgeable
thirteen-year-old is no more likely to use contraceptives than is an
uninformed thirteen-year-old." As Kirby puts it, "Ignorance is not the
solution, but knowledge is not enough."

If knowledge isn't enough, what about knowledge combined with
communication skills? Sex education does appear to diminish teenagers'
shyness about discussing sexual matters. One study shows that girls who
have had sex education may be more likely to talk about sex with their
parents than those who have not. Since talking with their mothers about
sex may help some girls avoid pregnancy, this is a mildly positive
effect. There does not seem to be a parallel effect for boys, however.

Overall, parent-child communication is far less important in influencing
sexual behavior than parental discipline and supervision. One study,
based on teenagers' own reports of levels of parental control, shows
that teenagers with moderately strict parents had the lowest level of
sexual activity, whereas teens with very strict parents had higher
levels, and those with very permissive parents had the highest levels.
Moreover, there is a strong empirical relationship between diminished
parental supervision and early sexual activity.

In boy-girl communication, girls say that they want help in rejecting
boys' sexual overtures. In a survey taken in the mid-1980s, 1,000
teenage girls aged sixteen and younger were asked to select from a list
of more than twenty sex-related topics those areas where they would like
more information and help. The girls were most likely to say they wanted
more information on how to say no without hurting boys' feelings. This
is especially noteworthy given that all the girls in the survey were
sexually active, and some were mothers.

Beyond "no," better communication about sex does not seem to contribute
to higher levels of sexual responsibility. To be sure, there has been
little research into this aspect of teenage sexuality. But even absent
research, there is good reason to be skeptical of the claim. If free and
easy sex talk were a key determinant of sexual behavior, then we might
expect the trends to look very different. It would be our tongue-tied
grandparents who had high rates of illegitimacy and STDs, not today's
franker and looser-lipped teenagers.

"You Are Not Ready for Sex" 

Unsurprisingly, there is not a shred of evidence to support the claim
that noncoital sex, with or without communication, will reduce the
likelihood of coitus. William Firestone, of Rutgers, who wrote the study
for the Network for Family Life Education, concedes that his enthusiasm
is empirically unfounded. In fact, several studies show just the
opposite. Outercourse is a precursor of intercourse. But do we need
studies to tell us this? Is it not graven in our memory that getting to
third base vastly increases the chances of scoring a run? In fact, it
could be argued that teaching noncoital sex techniques as a way of
reducing the risks of coitus comes close to educational malpractice.

And what about empowering students to make their own sexual decisions?
Douglas Kirby's work shows that teaching decision-making skills is not
effective, either, in influencing teenage sexual behavior. Similarly,
there is little empirical support for the claim made by comprehensive
sex education's advocates that responsible sexual behavior depends on
long years of sexual schooling. In fact, the evidence points in the
opposite direction. Math and reading do require instruction over a
period of time, but sex education may be most effective at a key
developmental moment. This is not in grade school but in middle school,
when pre-teens are hormonally gearing up for sex but are still mainly
uninitiated.

In pursuit of a more effective sex pedagogy, researchers have turned
away from technocratic approaches and dusted off that old chestnut,
norms. According to Kirby's research review, several new and promising
sex-education programs focus on sending clear messages about what is
desirable behavior. When middle-schoolers ask "What is the best time to
begin having sex?" teachers in these programs have an answer. It is "Not
yet. You are not ready for sex."

Evidently, too, sex education works best when it combines clear messages
about behavior with strong moral and logistical support for the behavior
sought. One of the most carefully designed and evaluated sex-education
courses available is Postponing Sexual Involvement, a program developed
by researchers at Grady Memorial Hospital, in Atlanta, Georgia, and
originally targeted at minority eighth graders who are at high risk for
unwed motherhood and sexually transmitted diseases. Its goal is to help
boys and girls resist pressures to engage in sex.

The Grady Hospital program offers more than a "Just say no" message. It
reinforces the message by having young people practice the desired
behavior. The classes are led by popular older teenagers who teach
middle-schoolers how to reject sexual advances and refuse sexual
intercourse. The eighth-graders perform skits in which they practice
refusals. Some of them take the part of "angel on my shoulder,"
intervening with advice and support if the sexually beleaguered student
runs out of ideas. Boys practice resisting pressure from other boys.
According to the program evaluator, Marion Howard, a professor of
gynecology and obstetrics at Emory University, the skits are not like
conventional "role plays," in which students are allowed to come up with
their own endings. All skits must end with a successful rebuff.

The program is short: five class periods. It is not comprehensive but is
focused on a single goal. It is not therapeutic but normative. It
establishes and reinforces a socially desirable behavior. And it has had
encouraging results. By the end of ninth grade only 24 percent in the
program group had had sexual intercourse, as compared with 39 percent in
the nonprogram group. Studies of similar programs show similar results:
abstinence messages can help students put off sex. It is noteworthy that
although the purpose of the Grady Hospital program was to help students
postpone sex, it also had an impact on the behavior of students who
later engaged in sexual intercourse. Among those who had sex, half used
contraception, whereas only a third did in a control group that had not
taken the course.

Postponing Sexual Involvement and similarly designed sex-education
programs offer this useful insight: formal sex education is perhaps most
successful when it reinforces the behavior of abstinence among young
adolescents who are practicing that behavior. Its effectiveness
diminishes significantly when the goal is to influence the behavior of
teenagers who are already engaging in sex. Thus teaching sexually active
middle school students to engage in protected intercourse is likely to
be more difficult and less successful than teaching abstinent students
to continue refraining from sex. This seems to hold for older teens as
well. In a 1991 study Kirby points to one curriculum for tenth-graders,
Reducing the Risk, which has been successful in increasing the
likelihood that abstinent students will continue to postpone sex over
the eighteen months following the course. However, although the program
emphasizes contraception as well as sexual postponement, it does not
increase the likelihood that already sexually active tenth-graders will
engage in protected sex. "Once patterns of sexual intercourse and
contraceptive use are established," Kirby writes, "they may be difficult
to change." For that reason the Grady Hospital researchers have
developed a program for sixth-graders, since 44 percent of the boys
taking their course in the eighth grade were already sexually
experienced (this was true of just nine percent of the girls).

It does not follow, however, that this approach will work for younger
children. The evidence strongly suggests that children who are
sexualized at very early ages are likely to be victims of sexual abuse
and other forms of traumatic sexualization. Teaching refusal skills to a
"sexually active" nine- or ten-year-old is not the answer. Such children
need far more intensive care and support than can be provided in the
classroom.

In a sharp break with the Surgeon General's approach, President
Clinton's welfare-reform proposal strongly endorses the Grady Hospital
approach. Similarly, the President's recent bully-pulpit message to
teenagers, counseling sexual postponement and marriage before parenthood,
is strikingly at odds with the Surgeon General's message to "get real."
Thus the Administration finds itself in the awkward position of
advancing contradictory approaches to sex education and pregnancy
prevention.

Judging by the available evidence, the President has the stronger case.
None of the technocratic assumptions of comprehensive sex education hold
up under scrutiny. Research does not support the idea that early sex
education will lead to more-responsible sexual behavior in adolescence.
Nor is there reason to believe that franker communication will reduce
the risks of early-teenage sex. Nor does instruction about feelings or
decision-making seem to have any measurable impact on sexual conduct.
Teaching teenagers to explore their sexuality through noncoital
techniques has perverse effects, since it is likely to lead to coitus.
Finally, although teenagers may be sexually miseducated, there is no
reason to believe that miseducation is the principal source of sexual
misbehavior. As we will see, the most important influences on teenage
sexual behavior lie elsewhere.

Moreover, if comprehensive sex education has had a significant impact on
teenage sexual behavior in New Jersey, there is little evidence to show
it. The advocates cannot point to any evaluative studies of
comprehensive sex education in the state. Absent such specific measures,
one can only fall back on gross measures like the glum statistics on
unwed teenage childbearing in the state. In 1980, 67.6 percent of
teenage births were to unmarried mothers; eleven years later the figure
had increased to 84 percent. Arguably, the percentage might be even
higher if comprehensive sex education did not exist. Nevertheless, it is
hard for advocates to claim that the state with the nation's fourth
highest percentage of unwed teenage births is a showcase for their
approach.

The absence of empirical support for comprehensive sex education does
not, however, discomfit or deter its advocates. Up and down the
sex-education ranks, from the Surgeon General to local advocates, there
has been little effort to make a reasoned case for comprehensive sex
education. Challenged, the sex educators simply crank up their rhetoric:
Criticize sex education, they say, and you contribute to the deaths of
teenagers from AIDS.

Nor, for that matter, has there been much critical challenge from the
research community. Perhaps this is because comprehensive sex education
is a policy crafted outside the precincts of the academy. It is not
rooted in a single discipline, or even a set of disciplines, but can
best be described as a jumble of popular therapies and philosophies,
including self-help therapies, self-esteem and assertiveness training,
sexology, and certain strands of feminism.

The unifying core of comprehensive sex education is not intellectual but
ideological. Its mission is to defend and extend the freedoms of the
sexual revolution, and its architects are called forth from a variety of
pursuits to advance this cause. At least in New Jersey, the
sex-education leaders are not researchers or policy analysts or child
development experts but public-sector entrepreneurs: advocates,
independent consultants, family planners, freelance curriculum writers,
specialty publishers, and diversity educators. However dedicated and
high-minded they may be, their principal task is not to serve the public
or schoolchildren but to promote their ideology.

For better or worse, sex-education advocacy is largely women's work. And
there is an unmistakably female bias in the advocates' idea of what is
sexually nice. It favors what thousands of American women have told Ann
Landers: in their sex lives women would like more talking, more hugging,
more outercourse. At the teacher-training workshop I attended, a family
planner explained a classroom exercise designed to show all the things
we can do without sexual intercourse: we can have children; we can show
love and affection; we can gain self-esteem; we can achieve success in
life. Reaching her summation, she proclaimed, We can have orgasm without
sexual intercourse. After a moment, in the back of the classroom, one of
the few men attending cleared his throat and politely protested this
ideal of intercourse-free sex.

Comprehensive sex education reflects not just a gender bias but also a
generational bias. Despite its verbal swagger, it offers a misty-eyed
view of early-teenage sexuality. It assumes that the principal obstacles
to responsible sexual conduct are ignorance, guilt, and shame. Once
properly schooled in sex and freed of these repressive feelings, boys
and girls can engage in mutual sexual pleasuring. But there is a dated
quality to this view. Indeed, many of the arguments for sex education
are filled with anecdotes from the fifties: Susan Wilson, for one, urges
middle-aged teachers to think back and remember how inadequate their own
sex education was. Though the educators' notions may accurately reflect
what it was like for eighteen-year-old females to come of age before the
sexual revolution of the 1960s, they have little to do with what
fifteen-year-olds face in the 1990s. The MTV generation may indeed have
a distorted image of sex, but it has not been distorted by shame or
repression.

Thus comprehensive sex education flunks the reality test not just once
but twice. Indeed, much of the evidence suggests that less-comprehensive,
more-targeted sex education would be far more effective in reducing
early sexual involvement and its associated risks. But more important,
comprehensive sex education is woefully out of touch with the realities
of teenagers' sex lives. Surely any policy with claims to steely-eyed
realism must begin with an appraisal of what the evidence tells us about
the sexual lives of today's adolescents, especially teenage girls.

The New Sexual Revolution 

There is a new sexual revolution in America. Unlike the old sexual
revolution, which has been documented and celebrated ever since its
boisterous beginnings, in the late 1960s, the new sexual revolution has
arrived unheralded. Its vanguard is found not among confident,
self-dramatizing students on college campuses but among gawky
adolescents in the crowded hallways of the junior high.

The children of the Baby Boom generation are beginning to have sex at
earlier ages than their parents did. In 1970, five percent of
fifteen-year-old girls and 32 percent of seventeen-year-old girls
reported having had sex; by 1988 the figures had increased to 26 percent
of fifteen-year-olds and 51 percent of seventeen-year-olds. By age
nineteen nearly 80 percent of young women have had sexual intercourse.
As a result of earlier sexual initiation among girls, the historical
gender gap in first sexual experience is narrowing; according to the
1988 National Survey of Young Men, one third of teenage males have had
sex by age fifteen, and 86 percent by age nineteen. With early
initiation, today's adolescents are more sexually active. They have more
partners: among never-married sexually experienced teenage girls in 1971,
38 percent had had two or more sexual partners; by 1988 the figure had
increased to 59 percent. And they have sex more frequently: the 1988
National Survey of Family Growth reported that 45 percent of
never-married sexually active girls had intercourse at least once a week,
as compared with 40 percent when the survey was administered in 1982.

But these figures alone do not capture what may be the most striking
feature of the new sexual revolution: the rise in the proportion of
younger teenagers engaging in sex. The largest relative increase in
sexual intercourse among teenage girls has occurred among those fifteen
years of age, from 4.6 percent in 1970 to 25.6 percent in 1988. (Below
the age of fifteen, the evidence strongly suggests, sexual initiation is
involuntary for a large proportion of girls who report having had sexual
intercourse.)

Within this overall pattern of earlier sexual initiation there are
significant racial and ethnic differences. African-American males are
more likely than white or Hispanic males to engage in early sex. At age
fourteen, 35 percent of black males have had intercourse; the comparable
percentages for white and Hispanic males are seven and six respectively.
Apparently because they begin their sexual careers earlier, black males
also report more partners than white or Hispanic males (those who are
sexually active at age fifteen, for example, report 6.4, 3.5, and 1.9
respectively). Though data comparing teenage girls from all three groups
are not available, the evidence points to similar differences between
African-American and white females. African-American girls are more
likely to have had premarital sex in the early teen years than their
white counterparts. However, the differences become less pronounced
among older teens. For example, at age sixteen, 24 percent of white
girls, and 33 percent of black girls, report having experienced sexual
intercourse; by age nineteen the percentages are nearly identical: 76
percent of white girls and 79 percent of black girls.

Family structure strongly influences early sexual activity as well.
Daughters in single-parent families are more likely to engage in early
sex than girls who grow up in two-parent families. Several factors may
be involved: less supervision in the home, less exposure to adults'
sexuality, and the lack of a father's steady affection and protection.
Girls whose relationships with their fathers have been severely damaged
by divorce or their parents' nonmarriage are more likely to engage in a
frantic quest for male approval and to seek love through early sex than
are girls from intact families. Both parents and teenagers in divorced
families have more permissive attitudes toward sexual intercourse
outside marriage. In fact, there is evidence of a kind of sexual
trickle-down in families, not just from parent to child but also from
older siblings to younger. Teenagers with sexually active siblings are
likelier to begin having sex at an early age.

Religiously observant teens are likelier than others to refrain from
early sex; the highest level of premarital intercourse occurs among
teens with no religious affiliation. At the same time, the University of
Michigan sociologist Arland Thornton reports, cause and effect can work
in the other direction. Early sexual activity can dampen religious ardor.

In the midst of this sexual upheaval one trend is quite clear: the new
sexual revolution has been a disaster for teenage girls. Even more now
than in the past, girls bear the heavy burdens and penalties of
nonconjugal sex. Early sexual initiation puts girls at increased risk
for sexually transmitted diseases. This is partly because teenagers who
are sexually active at an early age have more partners and partly
because young teenage girls are likely to have older, sexually
experienced partners. Some researchers also contend that teenage girls
are at greater risk for STDs than adult women because their cervical
lining is not yet fully mature and is therefore more vulnerable to
pathogens. Whatever their causes, STDs can lead to serious, sometimes
permanent, damage to the reproductive system, including infertility,
chronic pelvic pain, ectopic pregnancy, and cervical cancer.

And despite reported high levels of contraceptive use among adolescents,
teenage girls continue to get pregnant. A million teenage girls each
year find themselves pregnant. About 37 percent of teenage pregnancies
end in abortion and about 14 percent in miscarriage. Roughly half of all
these pregnancies result in childbirth, and since less than 10 percent
of teenagers today give their babies up for adoption, teenage
childbearing commonly results in teenage motherhood--usually unwed
motherhood.

This fact constitutes one of the more perplexing aspects of the new
sexual revolution. Teenage girls have greater control over their
fertility today than they had in the past, and yet the percentage of
births to unwed mothers continues to rise, having already increased from
30 percent among teenagers in 1970 to nearly 70 percent in 1990. In some
cities in America 85 or 90 percent of all teenage births are to unwed
mothers. Twenty-five percent of all babies born to teenagers are not
first children. And the earlier a teenager begins her maternal career,
the more children she is likely to have.

Teenage childbearing on this scale has monumental social consequences,
both for the mothers and for their young children. In fact, if one
wanted to spawn a generation of vulnerable families, one would seek to
increase the number of families headed by fifteen- and sixteen-year-old
mothers. A single teenage mother is less likely to complete high school
or to be employed than her peers, and her child is at greater risk than
other children for a host of health and developmental problems, and also
for physical and sexual abuse. Both mother and child are likely to
experience poverty and its predictable social consequence, chronic
welfare dependency. If three risk factors for poverty are
present--teenage childbearing, failure to complete high school, and
nonmarriage--then it is all but inevitable that the mother and her child
will live in poverty: 79 percent of all children born to mothers with
those three risk factors are poor.

Exploitative Sex 

Beyond these statistical measures researchers are beginning to piece
together a portrait of teenage sexuality in the 1990s. There is still
much to learn, but recent research tells us two things: first,
fifteen-year-old sex is riskier than eighteen-year-old sex; and second,
early-teenage sex is often exploitative sex. This evidence indicates
that few young teenagers are ready or able to engage in kinder, gentler
sex. In fact, sexual encounters between fifteen-year-olds are likely to
be nasty, brutish, and short.

To begin with, there are sharp polarities in the way male and female
teenagers approach sex. Despite changes in teenage sexual behavior, boys
and girls continue to view love and sex relationships in different ways.
Girls look for security, and boys seek adventure. Boys are after variety,
and girls want intimacy. The classic formulation still seems to hold
true: girls give sex in order to get love, and boys give love in order
to get sex. According to one study, more than 60 percent of sexually
experienced girls were going steady with or engaged to their first
sexual partners, whereas less than 40 percent of teenage boys had their
first sex with a steady or a fiancee. Boys were more than twice as
likely as girls to have had their first intercourse with someone they
had only recently met. As Freya Sonenstein, of the Urban Institute, and
her colleagues report, "A typical picture of an adolescent male's year
would be separate relationships with two partners, lasting a few months
each."

Such gender polarities are most pronounced in early adolescence. Boys
and girls both experience physical changes during puberty, but these
changes carry different psychological meanings. For boys, increases in
body weight and size bring an enhanced sense of power and dominance,
whereas similar changes frequently provoke ambivalence and anxiety among
girls. In a culture obsessed with skeletal thinness as a standard of
female beauty and achievement, weight gain can inspire feelings of
"grossness" and self-disgust among teenage girls. Carol Gilligan and
other researchers have noted a decline in young adolescent girls'
feelings of competence and confidence at roughly the same time that
adolescent boys are becoming more assertive and, well, cocky.

The younger a girl is when she begins to have sex, the more vulnerable
she is to its risks. She is less likely than an older teenager to be in
a steady relationship, to plan her first intercourse, or to use
contraception. Thus girls who were fifteen or younger at first
intercourse are almost twice as likely as eighteen-year-olds to
experience pregnancy within the first six months of sexual activity. Nor
can it be said that a fifteen-year-old girl really chooses to engage in
sex, given the enormous gap between physical readiness on the one hand,
and emotional and cognitive readiness on the other. On this point Laurie
Schwab Zabin, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, writes, "Whether
or not to engage in coitus, whether or not to contracept, whether or not
to bear a child when faced with an unintended conception--are all
decisions. Unfortunately, they are often not true 'choices.'" David
Ellwood, the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, puts it
even more plainly: "There seems to be ample evidence to support almost
any model of teenage behavior except a model of pure rational choice."

Girls who are sexually active at early ages are likely to experience
coercive sex. Teenage girls tend to have first sex with male partners
who are three or more years older, whereas teenage boys are likely to
have their first sexual encounter with girls who are less than a year
older. Thus the balance of power is dramatically skewed. Surely one has
to be skeptical of claims of "voluntary" sex between girls and much
older partners. As one researcher put it, "Could one possibly call the
pairings of eleven-year-old girls and twenty-five-year-old men 'dates'?"

Indeed, age disparities between girls and their sexual partners are
often markers for sexual abuse. In one study of abused teenage mothers
and mothers-to-be, only 18 percent of the girls reported abuse by men
near their age, while 46 percent reported abuse by men ten or more years
older. Sexual abuse is a significant factor in girls' early
sexualization. Studies show that teenage girls who have been sexually
abused are significantly more likely to engage in voluntary sexual
intercourse and are likely to have intercourse at an earlier age, to be
more sexually active, and to engage in a wider range of sexual
activities than girls who have not been abused.

Girls' sexual conduct, unlike that of boys, is governed less by hormones
than by social controls. But in a cultural climate of sexual freedom,
girls have lost much of their authority in boy-girl relationships. Until
quite recently girls organized, managed, and regulated the social
pursuits of their peer groups, with the strong support of adults. In
romantic relationships girls exercised their power by withholding sex,
keeping boys in the role of craven sexual petitioners. At the same time,
they moved their boyfriends in the direction of commitment and monogamy.
"Going steady," the ultimate romantic achievement for teenage girls,
offered a pseudomarriage that might include parceling out some of the
sexual favors of marriage. Of course, this system was seriously flawed.
In the intimacy of a steady relationship, girls could lose control,
"give in," and go all the way. Then they had to deal with the dire
consequences of their sexual transgression--a guilty conscience, a
ruined reputation, and sometimes an unwanted pregnancy.

The sexual revolution overturned this system of social controls by
giving women technological control over their fertility. Its emblematic
moment came when college health services began providing birth-control
pills to eighteen- and nineteen-year-old women. Liberated from many of
the penalties of premarital sex and the burdens of a sexual double
standard, women were able to behave like men in their sexual pursuits.
Yet although a single standard for men and women promised greater
honesty and equity in relationships, it tilted away from women's goals
of intimacy and commitment in the direction of what one sociologist has
aptly called sexual "freedom with a male bias": no holds barred and no
strings attached. (A nosy mother, I once asked my college-age daughter
if there were any differences in the way young men and women conducted
their sex lives on campus. "Only that girls wait for a phone call the
next day," she said.)

In the 1980s, with the advent of AIDS, the condom, an all-purpose
contraceptive, gained new favor. As an appurtenance of the sexual
culture, the condom led to a second shift in the control of sexuality:
it brought back protection with a male bias. Although pressure to engage
in early sex did not diminish, teenage girls' ability to protect
themselves did. One of the great ironies of the new sexual revolution is
that having won the "right" and the freedom to engage in sex at an early
age, girls must resort to some of the old wiles and cajolery to get
their male partners to use protection. Although girls may carry Trojans
in their purse, as the Surgeon General urges, they cannot wear them.

The Lure of Motherhood 

Recent thinking about unwed teenage pregnancy has focused on the links
between teenage motherhood and the economic incentives of the welfare
system. Charles Murray and others argue that poor teenagers choose
motherhood because it offers economic rewards such as health care, day
care, and an apartment of one's own. Yet some of the most compelling
research on unwed childbearing among poor teenagers suggests that the
strongest incentives for early teenage motherhood may be psychological
rather than economic. As Judith Musick argues in her book Young, Poor
and Pregnant, early pregnancy and childbearing must be understood as a
response to the developmental demands of adolescence.

According to Musick, whose research is based on her work as a
developmental psychologist and her six years as the director of the
Ounce of Prevention Fund, a public-private venture that runs
pregnancy-prevention and teenage-parent programs in Illinois, many of
the girls most at risk for unwed motherhood grow up without adequate
nurturance and protection. Some experience early and traumatic
sexualization in households where they are left in the care of their
mothers' boyfriends or other "play daddies." Thus the emotional lives of
many of the most vulnerable girls are defined by "repeated experiences
of personal harm at the hands of those who should be their protectors."
As these girls become teenagers, they bring limited inner resources to
the key developmental task of adolescence: the formation of a stable
identity. Whereas a more resilient teenager is ready to face the classic
questions of adolescence--Who am I? and What will I do with my life? and
How will I be different from my mother?--the fragile girl may still be
wrestling with questions associated with an earlier developmental stage:
Who cares about me? and Whom can I depend on? and Where can I find
safety and security?

Through pregnancy and early childbearing a young woman finds a way to
reconcile her contradictory needs for autonomy and security. She may be
able to draw closer to her mother and to place a claim on maternal
affection, albeit indirectly, through a grandchild. And she may even
gain the fleeting attention of a wayward boyfriend or a faraway father.
Thus early sexual activity and maternity offer a way to retrieve
childhood and enter adulthood simultaneously.

Not to be ignored in this developmental drama are the universal
satisfactions of motherhood itself. If most new mothers are thrilled
with their infants, why would young girls not feel a surge of ecstatic
fulfillment? And if mothers everywhere enjoy dressing and showing off
their newborns, why would a teenage mother not derive maternal pleasures
from such activities? For a disadvantaged girl with few outlets to
express herself, exhibit her talents, or win recognition, becoming a
mother is a way to be fussed over and admired.

Reinforcing the immediate benefits of maternity are the psychological
costs of postponing sex and motherhood. Within the peer group as well as
the family, going to school and doing homework can be far less appealing
than showing off a baby, particularly if a girl's older sisters and
friends have babies of their own. Moreover, as Judith Musick explains,
pursuing a dream that does not include early motherhood involves a
painful and radical kind of split from mothers and other influential
women in a girl's life. So threatening is this separation that many
teenage girls on the threshold of change--enrolling in
high-school-equivalency classes, completing a job-training program,
breaking off with a violent boyfriend--fall back into an abusive
relationship, get pregnant a second time, or go back to an old drug
habit.

Thus changes in economic incentives, however politically attractive, may
not be enough to reduce unwed teenage childbearing. It may be necessary
to alter the psychological-incentive structure as well, including
"prettifying" the unglamorous business of going to school, doing
homework, and earning respectable grades. The process may also include
fostering strong relationships with adult women mentors who can exercise
firm guidance and give direction as well as support. Finally, it may
require some imaginative measures to "uglify" unwed teenage motherhood
or even to re-establish some of the disincentives that worked in the
past, including separation of the girl from her peer group. Perhaps
teenage mothers should attend special high schools, as they do in some
cities, rather than mixing with the general high school population. This
contemporary version of being "sent away"--though it would not interrupt
education--would segregate teenage mothers from nonpregnant teenagers
and perhaps change a peer culture that views schoolgirl pregnancy as an
unobjectionable, even enviable, event.

The Retreat From Adolescence 

Adolescence is a modern social invention, designed to deal with a modern
problem: the lengthening period between biological and social maturity.
Earlier in the nation's history girls entered puberty and left school at
about the same time--around age fifteen or sixteen. Although most young
women waited another five or six years before marrying, they continued
to live at home; teenage marriages were not common until the 1950s. By
the beginning of this century, however, the age of menarche was
declining and the period of formal schooling was lengthening. At the
same time, parents, churches, and schools were relaxing their close
supervision of young women. Many young people were living in cities,
where the seductive attractions of the street, the saloon, and the dance
hall replaced the more wholesome pastimes of rural life. Under these new
social conditions youthful risk-taking became perilous, its penalties
more severe.

As a social invention, therefore, adolescence represented a clear effort
to define, order, and regulate a life stage that was becoming socially
chaotic. Among other things, adolescence provided institutional
reinforcement for the moratorium on youthful sexual activity, giving
young people the opportunity to acquire the competencies and credentials
of adulthood before they took on the responsibilities of marriage and
parenthood.

In the past decade or so, however, a new way of thinking about teenage
sexuality has emerged. It, too, recognizes the gap between biological
and social maturity, but responds with a different set of controls. The
new approach contends that teenagers should be expected to express
themselves sexually as part of their normal growing up, but should be
able to do so protected from the risks of early sexual activity. The way
to protect teenagers is to give them the interpersonal skills and the
technical tools to manage their own sexuality.

These competing traditions assign radically different responsibilities
to adults. In the classic model, adults are the custodians of the
moratorium. They secure and maintain this special life stage by
establishing familial and institutional controls over teenage sexuality.
Indeed, this approach requires some measure of sexual restraint, or at
least discretion, on the part of adults in order to set an example. In
the contemporary model, adults have a more limited responsibility. Their
job is to train teenagers in the management of their own sexuality and
to provide access to contraceptives. In the new technocracy adults are
called upon to staff teenagers in their sexual pursuits while teenagers
themselves are left to decide whether or not to engage in sex. Refusing
sex, no less than having sex, becomes a matter of following individual
dictates rather than following socially instituted and culturally
enforced norms.

One can, of course, imagine a creative synthesis of the two models: a
little more freedom for the kids, a little less supervision from busy
grown-ups. But this is not what has happened. In the past decade the
technocratic approach has gained ground while the classic approach has
steadily lost it. This has brought about a corresponding shift in adult
responsibility. Increasingly the litmus test of adult concern is one of
access: will grown-ups give teenagers the skills and tools to manage
their sex lives? Seen in the broader historical context, two seemingly
opposing responses to teenage sex--handing out condoms and teaching
refusal skills--reflect the same trend toward technocratic solutions and
diminished adult responsibility.

There has been a similar shift in public concerns. For most of this
century the debate over youthful well-being covered a broad social
terrain. The deliberations of the decennial White House Conference on
Children, which began in 1909 and ended in the early 1970s, ranged
widely from improving health and schooling to building character and
citizenship. Today public ambitions and public concern for adolescents'
well-being are narrower. Attention has turned to the task of managing
the collapse of the moratorium. As a consequence, the entire public
debate on the nation's youth has come down to a few questions. How do we
keep boys from killing? How do we keep girls from having babies? How do
we limit the social havoc caused by adolescent acting out?

There has been, as well, a shift in the notion of responsibility among
health and school professionals. As an idea, adolescence is closely
identified with the work of the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall.
But it was a liberal reform coalition of school, health, and social-work
professionals that took the idea of adolescence and translated it into a
set of new institutions designed to protect vulnerable city youth from
the burdens and responsibilities of too-early adulthood. The juvenile
justice system, the youth center, and child-labor laws are all part of
that institutional legacy. This coalition also fought hard for sex
education in the schools. But today a similar liberal coalition is
turning its back on that larger legacy.

The health and school establishments did not create the problems
associated with teenage sex. Thus it is impossible not to view their
response to these problems with a measure of sympathy. On the front
lines of the new sexual revolution, overwhelmed by the clinical evidence
of breakdown--thirteen-year-olds with gonorrhea, sixteen-year-olds
giving birth for the third time--the youth-serving professionals respond
with the tools of the clinic. At the same time, they seem to have lost
sight of the meaning and purpose of adolescence and of their own
historical role in creating and sustaining it.

Despite its confident assertions, comprehensive sex education implicitly
acknowledges a lifting of the moratorium and a return to a more
Darwinian sexual environment. What sex educators are offering now is
training in sexual survival. Once the kids have been equipped with
refusal skills, a bottle of body oil, and some condoms, "reality-based"
advocates send them into the world to fend for themselves. Perhaps that
is the best protection that today's school and health leaders are able
to offer from a harsh and predacious sexual environment. But it is not
realism. It is retreat.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is a vice-president of the Institute for
American Values, in New York City. She is at work on a book about
parents and children in a post marriage society.

Copyright © 1994 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; October 1994; The Failure of Sex Education.