Sexuality Education

Summary

Sexuality education is described as an ecological phenomenon, reflecting a variety of dialectical tensions in the context of U.S. society. A brief overview of sexuality education highlights historical trends in the past century. After disclaiming the notion that history repeats itself, I outline seven tentative “lessons,” or guiding principles, for planning future sexuality education efforts.     

Sexuality Education in Seminaries and Theological Schools

Summary

Sexuality education is included in professional career training but has not been comprehensively documented in seminaries and theological schools. This study's purpose was to explore and define sexuality education components in clergy training and to develop auricular implications based on faculty perceptions. The method was constructivistic inquiry authenticated by triangulation using three data sources: interviews, focus groups, and printed archives. Data included 39 semi-structured, narrative interviews with those providing exemplary education representing 9 faiths and denominations in 25 accredited U.S. institutions. Four focus groups     

Making Sexuality Visible in Australian Social Work Education

As a social axis of analysis, sexuality has not received the same level of recent attention from social work educators in Australia as it has from its counterparts in the northern hemisphere. Following McNay's notion of ‘situated intersubjectivity’ as a theoretical framework, this paper sets out a socio-cultural approach to making sexuality visible. It details a teaching exemplar, demonstrating a number of experiential exercises designed to enhance final year social work student investigations of cultural discourses and social practices of people's everyday sexual lives, including sexual diversity, homophobia, heterosexuality and heteronormativity.     

Comprehensive Sexuality Education as a Means of Promoting Sexual Health

ABSTRACT

Various international declarations have called for universal access to comprehensive sexuality education. This article looks at why comprehensive sexuality education is most effective in promoting sexual health and why it should be framed in terms of health, values, development and rights. The lack of recognition of young people as sexual beings and the return of abstinence-only sexuality education are two main challenges for rights-based, comprehensive sexuality education. To address these challenges, stronger international responses are needed to make sexuality education a comprehensive initiative supported by all, both in the community and at the international level. In order to move the agenda forward for better sexuality education, a positive approach that accepts sexual desire and pleasure as essential components of young people's sexuality should be the next step.     

Human Sexuality Education in Marriage and Family Therapy Graduate Programs

Given the likelihood that marriage and family therapists will encounter clients with sexual concerns, it is important to know how graduate training programs are preparing future clinicians to work with this domain of life. Sixty‐nine marriage and family therapy (MFT) program directors completed an online survey to examine how sexual health education is integrated into graduate training programs. Findings indicate that while the majority of program directors value sexuality curriculum, and most programs require at least one course in this area, there are barriers to privileging sex topics in MFT graduate programs. Barriers include few MFT faculties with expertise in human sexuality and marginalized sexual health topics. Implications for training MFT graduate students and their work with future clients are discussed.     

Trends in Sexuality Education in United States and Canadian Medical Schools

Summary

There has been a concern that earlier gains in the teaching of human sexuality in medical schools may have eroded in recent years. An extensive survey of 109 U.S. and 13 Canadian medical schools revealed that a dramatic decrease in the number of curriculum hours devoted to human sexuality has not occurred. In fact, 28% of U.S. and 36% of Canadian schools have actually increased hours, and ninety-two percent of all medical schools responding currently offer core curriculum material in sexuality, averaging approximately 11 hours in U.S. and 18 hours in Canadian schools. Unfortunately, nearly a third of schools in both countries do not specifically address important health issues, such as sex and illness or disability, and some schools even neglect training in the taking of a sexual history. Data on these issues is important for making future decisions regarding the contents of the increasingly overburdened medical curriculum.     

Sexuality attitudes: The impact of trauma

This study examines the relationship between traumatic events and attitudes toward sexuality. Our results show that suffering trauma is related to more accepting attitudes concerning sexuality. Generally, people who suffer negative events, many of which are traumatic, are more likely to see both pornography and having a homosexual friend or family member as acceptable. Traumatic events that are sex‐related or related to other physical assault proved to be most significant in the prediction of sexuality attitudes for women only. The results are specified by gender: Trauma predicts attitudes toward pornography for women but not for men, and traumatic events are associated with attitudes concerning homosexuality for women. These results are discussed in light of the previous research, and suggestions for future research made.     

Elder Sexuality

This article includes a discussion of elder sexuality, beginning with the problem of categorizing elders. This is followed by considerations of elder sexual practices, physiology, and social-psychological factors in elder sexuality. The article concludes with recommendations for people working with elders in regard to their sexuality.     

Individual Differences in the Effects of Mood on Sexuality: The Revised Mood and Sexuality Questionnaire (MSQ-R)

Previous research using the Mood and Sexuality Questionnaire (MSQ) has revealed substantial variability in how negative mood impacts sexual response and behavior. However, the MSQ does not address differences between desire for solo or partnered sexual activity, examine the effects of sexual activity on mood, or assess the effects of positive mood. This article presents the development and factor structure of the Revised Mood and Sexuality Questionnaire (MSQ-R). An exploratory factor analysis in a sample of heterosexual men, homosexual men, and heterosexual women (N = 1,983) produced eight factors. Considerable variability was found in how moods influence sexual desire and arousal, in the effects of mood on sexual behavior, and in the reciprocal effects of sexual activity on mood. Among other findings, heterosexual women were less likely than heterosexual men and homosexual men to experience increased sexual desire and arousal when anxious or stressed, whereas homosexual men and heterosexual women were less likely than heterosexual men to experience increased desire when sad or depressed. Heterosexual men and heterosexual women were more likely than homosexual men to report increased desire when in a positive mood. Intercorrelations and correlations with various sexual behaviors varied by group. Limitations and implications of the findings are discussed.     

Sexuality Education in the United States: Shared Cultural Ideas across a Political Divide

“Sexuality education”– broadly defined as teaching and learning about a range of issues related to puberty, sexuality, and relationships – occurs all day every day, formally and informally, intentionally and unintentionally. Nevertheless, adults organize policy and instruction for young people around a constrained set of concerns: first, that the sexuality education youth receive does not help them navigate an increasingly sexualized and dangerous world and, second, that the lessons are themselves damaging, exacerbating the risks youth and children already face. I discuss sexuality education’s entanglement with these conventional cultural ideas about youth, sexuality, and education. I consider the ways that abstinence‐only and comprehensive school‐based sexuality education rest on a series of a discursive framings, including a commitment to regulating sexuality and youth, a contemporary “moral panic” that renders all talk about youth and sexuality provocative, and normative and instrumental conceptions of teaching and learning about sexuality. I conclude by discussing the implications of these discursive framings for classroom practice and imagining an alternative model in which sexuality education might embrace ambiguity and ambivalence as a necessary and even welcome condition of young people’s sexuality and education.     

Pleasure-Centered Educational Program: A Comprehensive Approach to Pleasure-Oriented Sexuality Education in Domestic Violence Shelters

ABSTRACT

Women in a domestic violence shelter in Georgia were recruited to participate in a series of comprehensive, sex-positive, educational workshops. The purpose of the series was to provide a place for survivors of domestic violence to discuss positive and negative aspects of their previous sexual experiences and to offer a forum in which all aspects of sexuality, including pleasurable sexuality, could be discussed. The focus of the program was to educate women in the group on a wide array of topics from negative sexual rights (e.g., the right to be protected from or ability to protect oneself from sexually transmitted infections) to positive sexual rights (e.g., the right to experience pleasure). The program was based on previous strengths-based educational formats and tools. Positive feedback from informants included the applicability, accessibility, and engaging format of the program. Women reported that this program was informative and structured in a way that safely encouraged open discussions among participants, as well as encouraged open dialogue with their children.     

Sexuality and the Second Slavery: Figuring Sexuality in Racialized Labor Formations

From the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, sexuality was a key factor in the reorganization of New World slavery through the period described as the Second Slavery. With the early nineteenth century bans on the transatlantic slave trade initiated by the United States and the British Empire, there was a corresponding transition from prior plantation economies focused on US Upper South tobacco and Caribbean sugar islands toward more differentiated forms of labor based on hiring out in domestic services, manufacture, and the expansion into new frontiers of accumulation in the New South of the Mississippi Delta, Cuba, and Brazil. This qualitative change and expansion of New World slavery carried gendered understandings based on the sexuality and reproductive capabilities of enslaved people. Using Tomich's conception of the Second Slavery, I incorporate an analysis that demonstrates how conceptions of sexuality were integral to racializing and gendering processes of subordination that reveal the heterogeneity of the historical and economic moment.     

Sexuality and mental handicap

Abstract

In the twenty years since the appearance of Janet Martinson's important and immensely readable book, many wide-ranging changes have taken place in the field of mental handicap. These changes have had important consequences for the way in which we now discuss sexuality in relation to people who have a mental handicap or learning difficulties.     

Sexuality and digital Space

Since the Internet's inception, sociologists have sought to understand the role digital spaces play in mediating communication, interaction, and its impact on the broader social world. Sociological literature at the intersection of sexuality and digital space presents a key area of inquiry, charting the generative, and sometimes utopian, aspects of sexuality's insertion into the virtual sphere, as well as the problems and drawbacks of this relationship. By drawing on select empirical studies, this article charts three dominant research strands on sexuality and digital space: (a) the influence of digital platforms in sexual selfhood projects; (b) macro‐level trends and micro‐level practices of desire, attraction, and dating online; and (c) the role of digital platforms in sustaining sexual subcultures. I propose additional approaches and lines of inquiry to further develop research in these areas.     

An Incitement to Discourse: Sociology and The History of Sexuality

Sociological Forum -     

The Role of Religiousness and Gender in Sexuality Among Mexican Adolescents

This study examined the role of religiousness and gender in age at first intercourse, and sexual expectations and values in Mexico, a macrocontext where the majority is Mexican and Catholic (83%). Participants were Catholic and nonreligious adolescents (54% girls) attending middle (71%) or high school. Findings indicated that Catholic adolescents engaged in sexual intercourse at later ages than nonreligious adolescents. Both religious attendance and importance of religion and values in sexual decision making were associated with more conservative sexual values. Boys who were raised Catholic were more likely to endorse female virginity values and were less likely to expect to wait to have sex until married than nonreligious boys. These associations were not significant among girls. Catholic boys may be more likely to internalize sexual double standard beliefs regarding premarital sex than nonreligious boys. This study expands our understanding of the role of religiousness in Mexican adolescents’ sexuality.     

Beyond Sexuality,Beyond Perversion: The Annihilated Last Scream

Starting with an ancient, dark story from the Babylonian Talmud, the paper proposes that beyond severe sexual perversion lies—buried, silenced, annihilated—an infant’s last scream. This is explored in the theoretical-clinical psychoanalytic writing on the last scream, early breakdown, madness, and catastrophe and illustrated through a detailed account of an analysis with a severely fetishistic-masochistic patient. In this long and difficult analysis, the cessation of perverse practices led to an extreme collapse into breakdown, profound devastation, emptiness, psychic death, and suicidal despair. Working within this collapse in analysis enabled the deep reason for the patient’s breakdown in early life to unfold. And most important, it engendered the crucial possibility of reliving the patient’s unbearable breakdown, deadness, and last scream—this time patient-with-analyst t(w)ogether—and experientially coming through it differently. Yet it still remains without an ending of love.