Sex Education’s Lessons in Inequality

Debates over school-based sex education have been commonplace across the USA in recent decades (e.g., Irvine 2002; Luker 2006). These debates have largely centered on whether youth should be taught contraceptive information (i.e., comprehensive sex ed) or should be taught solely to abstain from sex until marriage (i.e., abstinence-only sex ed), with any given sex education program’s success gauged in terms of its ability to reduce the negative consequences of teen sexual activity. In this engaging feminist ethnography, Jessica Fields calls this “sex education’s stunted vision of both sexuality and education” (p. 170) and boldly demands more of sex education. Rather than cast “young people’s sexuality as a problem to solve, delay, or mute” (p. 169), Fields envisions the sex education classroom as a transformative space in which educators help to foster in their students “a sense of sexual entitlement and rights, an appreciation of sexual pleasure, and a critical understanding of sexual danger” (p. 17). In making a case for this bold vision, Fields takes us inside the sex education debates as they unfolded in the late nineties in North Carolina and inside three distinct sex education classrooms, two located in public schools, one in a private school. In addition to observing sex education lessons and debates, Fields also interviewed middle school students, teachers, community advocates, and school board members to gain an understanding of the meanings and discourses of youth and teen sexuality inside and outside the sex education classroom. The book begins with an empirical look at the debates over sex education in North Carolina. Although recent ethnographies have examined these debates as they have occurred across the USA (e.g., Irvine 2002; Luker 2006), Risky Lessons is the first to examine not only the debates, but also how sex education policy is translated into districtwide curricula and implemented (or not) in the classroom. Fields’ examination of the debates over sex education also adds a new dimension—the extent to which inequality is woven through their tone and content. In the language of these debates, Fields observed the consistent use of an “adultist framework” (p. 19), whereby adults cast young people’s sexuality in terms of innocence and risk because they are young, eliding their sexual agency and subjectivity. Fields argues that this notion of childhood sexual innocence and vulnerability not only disempowers young people, it also conceals and mystifies larger social inequalities. That is, saying all youth are at risk because they are youth elides the ways in which social conditions, such as poverty, racism, sexism, and heterosexism, make a profound difference in young people’s experiences of risk. Ultimately, Fields contends, claims of youthful sexual innocence and vulnerability do not allow young people “the possibility of having full, complicated, active sexual lives that might include desires, pleasure, violence, agency, missteps, and respect and care from adults in their communities” (p. 64, emphasis in original). It effectively creates two possible sexual trajectories for youth; they can either be hypersexual or asexual, a danger to themselves and their peers or vulnerable and endangered by sexually predatory peers and adults. In the next two chapters, Fields takes us inside the classroom where she explores the multiple, competing curricula at work in sex education. This includes the formal curriculum (i.e., the official planned course of study), the Sex Roles (2009) 61:133–135 DOI 10.1007/s11199-009-9590-z