Glenden BrownNot will we teach but what will we teach
Over at her place, Debra Haffner has a post up about a cancelled speaking engagement in Connecticut. For those not in the know, Debra is the head of the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing. She’s an author, a speaker, a pastor and a mom.
Debra writes:
I was supposed to speak to parents next week in a nearby town on how parents can educate their children and teenagers about sexuality in their own homes.
The school superintendent cancelled the talk as too controversial, after as I understand it, receiving some concerned calls. Part of the issue that was raised was the flyer that was to be sent home to parents contained the word “sexuality”, and the fear was that some parents might now want that word coming into their home.
Really. I wonder what those parents do about television, magazines, radio, newspapers…and oh yes, those ubiquitous Victoria Secret Catalogs.
On a relatively regular basis, I confront the school superintendent’s attitude. Talking about sex is “too controversial.” The word itself is problematic. As often as not, adults think sexuality and think sex and freak out.
I really believe that we’re reaping a harvest from silence and misinformation. For generations, we’ve done a really good job of not teaching about sexuality. We rely on the hope that parents will have a talk with their kids about “the wedding night” and hope that those parents have a healthy, mature sexuality. Chances are good that the parents good bad information themselves and have never had a space in which to talk about sexuality, to sort out their own issues. Chances are good those parents had their own emotional scars about sexuality and are doing their best to sort that out without any real help support or honesty from their friends, family, and churches. Abstinence advocates live in the dream world of the 5% of Americans who don’t have premarital sex are the majority. They imagine that if we just don’t say the word no one will think about sex.
Having done our best to keep people uninformed, however, our culture has managed to misinform. We flood kids with images and then don’t provide tools to manage those images. We talk talk talk but it’s mostly noise.
I’ve run across parents for whom the very thought of teaching sexuality to their kids is so shocking they recoil. They believe they are protecting their children, but I actually believe they are protecting themselves.
March 5th, 2008 at 8:42 am
20 years ago there was a book about entitled “Show Me”, a beautiful production graphically and if I recall, lovingly portraying the whole deal. It was characterized as porn and given the boot. So we’re squeemish about putting a condom on a cucumber, yet insist that the junior high schools inform our kids. It’s just too bad that sexuality and the bob-given tools are so nasty and iky and…well…shameful. Not to mention pleasurable.
March 5th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
It’s arguable that hysteria is THE driving force behind our society. I remember several instances from my very early childhood where one of my friends or their siblings came to the door scantly or unclothed, ALWAYS AND WITHOUT EXCEPTION followed by a mother screeching in terror with me standing there looking at something pleasant thinking WTF!
Maybe there is a connection between that and all those movies like “Halloween” where teens are thinking about or having sex and then brutally murdered. Was it OK to have stories about teen sex as long as it was followed by the big, bloody payback?
How long has this been going on. Since the sixties, a millennia, the beginning of time?
March 5th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Cav - Yeah, it’s the pleasurable part that concerns so many people.
Larry - I think it’s a feedback loop - we have adults who are scandalized by sight of naked flesh teaching kids is shocking so kids learn it’s shocking even though they were originally thinking “wtf?”
Attitudes towards the body change over time - I remember reading accounts of mid 19th century Americans who considered swimming together in the nude (at beaches and lakes) was no big deal - an attitude that changed later in that century. It’s an attitudinal shift that we have yet to undo. There’s also an idea that nudity is inherently sexual - and seeing someone unclothed will excite sexual desires that are not appropriate.
March 5th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
If it feels goood…DON’T do it.
March 5th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
It all depends on how each generation grows up. In my Dad’s country being naked has all of the sexual implications that any puritan inherits, it is however balanced by the common sense conclusion that yippee, it’s only as God hath made ya!
The rest of how to act and react is all driven by the culture of common sense and respect. But boys are at particular disadvantage (advantage?) in that their anatomy is revealing when naked attraction makes its presence known. If you know what I mean.
It is no different in any culture, human reaction is the same, it is in the maturity that it is responded to, that makes all the difference.
Americans have very little control, in many ways, cultural especially…, which is why puritan orthodoxy exists in the first place. Cultural responses are in the hands of the People. Make sense ya’ all, and you might find someone to properly lead us.
Anyone who would lead us in our current state is either…
1) Nuts.
2) an egomaniac.
3) A fool.