“The Use and Misuse of Pleasure in Sex Education Curricula” uses qualitative, thematic analysis of sex education curriculum in America over a decade to understand how pleasure discourse has and hasn’t been incorporated into sexuality curriculum. Pleasurable sex is often linked in sex education curriculum to negative outcomes such as unwanted pregnancy or STD’s, proposing that pleasurable sex and safe sex are mutually exclusive.

Michelle Fine, sited in the article, wrote about the lack of female pleasure in sex education curriculum, arguing that while female victimization was broached it was not included with female pleasure in sexual situations. The debate over sex education pleasure inclusive curriculum has continued since Fine’s article in 1988. Many sex education program including those that have accepted funding for Abstinence Only Until Marriage (AOUM) programs provide fear-based sex education programs instead of presenting sexuality in a positive and healthy light, thus promoting sexual stereotypes. The lack of pleasure based curriculum is problem with both abstinence based and comprehensive sex ed programs.

Teaching fear based curriculum promotes trends of slut shaming or negative messages involving female sexuality.

“While President Barack Obama and congressional leaders have called for an end of funding for programmes that do not have evidence to support their effectiveness and have recommended increasing funding to states for teenage pregnancy prevention programmes (Guttmacher Institute 2009), in 2010 the US Congress elected to maintain $50 million of funding for states that wanted to continue to use AOUM curricula”( Lamb, Lustig, Graling, 2013.)

The three researchers studied three different types of curriculum across a decade including AOUM, comprehensive sex education (including sex education that is built to fit into a abstinence promoted curriculum), and liberal, private, sex education programs offered outside of school. “This sample included four AOUM curricula, six CSE curricula, and one nonschool-based CSE curriculum” (Lamb, Lustig, Graling, 2013.)

In regards to the teaching of the body in sex education curriculum, pleasure is often referred to in medical terms which has both benefits and costs. The benefits include a normalization of pleasure, taking away stereotypes that condemn masturbation or pleasure centers in the body, however the costs play out when the conversation of pleasure is not carried out into normal conversations between the educators and students, and thus may not fully inform students, promote dialogue, or even ostracize students who experience alternative forms of pleasure or who identify as asexual. Lamb, Lustig, and Graling note that most scientific oriented curriculum discussing the sexuality of the body leave out the anus as a potential pleasure center for males.

Pleasure was often equated to dangerous and opposed to safe sex. Whilst Lamb, Lustig, and Graling note that sex can be both pleasurable and safe, using the example of condom use, although wearing a condom may decrease some bodily pleasure, the knowledge that both partners are safe, may increase emotional pleasure. They also note that both parties may engage in sexual acts that do not require penetration to achieve pleasure.

Pleasure is also seen as opposed to self-control. This model of sex that involves pleasure as hormonally overwhelming presents that argument that sex is animalistic in nature. This argument is very problematic, promoting the ideology that inclusion of pleasure is mutually exclusive to choice. This presentation of sex is promotional of rape culture in essence. Pleasure is also posited to pressure and regret within relationships in sex education curriculum, unless within a monogamous relationship, which is seen as a safe place to practice sex pleasure between two individuals.

This research is very interesting in regards to my senior thesis on California’s new sex education standards implemented in the California Healthy Youth Act. Comprehensive sex education is now required in California, and has been updated to include many new issues that were not addressed in the previous curriculum, however pleasure not being one of them.

http://0-web.a.ebscohost.com.books.redlands.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=17&sid=7ad68c02-a035-4858-a840-6fa112010103%40sessionmgr4008&hid=4104

Lamb, S., Lustig, K., Graling, K., (2013). The Use and Misuse of Pleasure in Sex Education Curricula, 13(3), 305-318.