THE WORLD is a mean place to kids. You would think that, having all been kids, we would conspire to make it a somewhat better place than we experienced for those who are new here.

I'm speaking of something in particular. Every child has an abusive uncle, whose name is Sam. Uncle Sam thinks the only right way to teach sex education is not to do so. This occurs in the form of abstinence-only sex education programs, the only form of sex education sanctioned by the U.S. government. Since 1998, more than $500 million has been spent on abstinence-only sex education programs in public schools, money which is accepted by every state save one, California. It's not education; it's more a disinformation campaign aimed at young people exactly when they need the most information about sexuality.

Last week we read about how toxins in the environment are spreading hormone mayhem in the form of xenoestrogenic compounds. This week we'll get a tour of the same effect coming from the government, and see what some people and organizations are doing about it.

The gist of abstinence-only (which I'll call AO) sex education is that refraining from sex until heterosexual marriage is the only acceptable option for sexual practice. By default, this shuts out gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students, including those who come from non-hetero households. AO indoctrination includes things like the "virginity till married pledge," which young people sign and which, in some instances, succeeds in delaying the onset of sexual activity by an average of 18 months (hardly until marriage). Of the few sociological facts known about the effects of abstinence-only indoctrination is that once its survivors do have their first sexual experience, they are 30% less likely to use contraception, thus increasing their risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Perhaps this pattern has something to do with the mandatory AO teaching that contraception is discussed only in the context of how ineffective it is; that is, the failure rates, most of them trumped up or exaggerated, with the implied message, "why bother?" The importance of contraception and its correct, medically sanctioned uses are subjects banned from the discussion. The physical, emotional and spiritual experience of sexuality, the diversity of sexual experience and just about everything else relevant to an honest discussion of sexuality, are banished in schools that subscribe to this program -- and quite a few do.

"The theory," writes Katha Pollitt in the Nov. 3 edition of The Nation, "is that even mentioning condoms, much less admitting that they dramatically reduce the chances of pregnancy or HIV infection, sends a 'mixed message' about the value of total abstinence until marriage. How absurd -- it's like saying that seat belts send a mixed message about the speed limit or vitamin pills send a mixed message about vegetables."

Do you remember how curious you were about sex, and how much every little bit of information mattered? Can you imagine the pain and struggle this skewed information creates in the hearts and minds of teenagers? Do you remember the damage that being told lies about your sexuality as a kid did to you as an adult?

Students are exposed to this "information" just as sexual reality is making itself known in the onrush of hormones, breasts, pubic hair and desire. Do you remember the overwhelming power of those changes and feelings, and how urgently you sought any confirmation that they were okay? Do you remember how curious you were about sex, and how much every little bit of information mattered? Can you imagine the pain and struggle this skewed information creates in the hearts and minds of teenagers? Do you remember the damage that being told lies about your sexuality as a kid did to you as an adult?

Somehow, despite my persistent interest in news and politics surrounding sex, reproductive rights and gender themes, I missed the abstinence-only issue entirely. I got the picture last weekend at the annual conference of the Institute for 21st Century Relationships (ITCR) held just outside Seattle. The conference brought together a diverse range of sex educators, sex activists, a full-time sexual rights lobbyist, spiritual leaders, teachers and professors, writers and the otherwise curious.

Once again I was reminded that there is a sexpositive movement, that it's brave and that it's extremely intelligent. I met a couple of people I want to introduce you to, and I learned about a bunch of organizations I'll put you in contact with via links at the end of this essay. But first a PS to the abstinence-only issue.

Researching the issue, I was speaking this week with a woman named Adrienne Verrilli who tracks sex education issues on the federal level for an organization called the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. or SIECUS. I learned that last year, when the federal law which provides money for abstinence-only programs came up for reauthorization before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, a few amendments were proposed.

The first proposal was a requirement that federally funded sex education programs be medically accurate. The second was that states have greater discretion in how to spend the federal money they receive for sex education programs, i.e., that they be able to teach something besides abstinence-only. The third was a requirement that programs be evaluated as a requirement for funding, and be proven effective. All three amendments failed; they were what's called killed in committee.

Hence, under current law, the federal government provides money for sex education programs that directly contradict medical science, that have no established record of effectiveness and (politely stated) appear to be backfiring. In sum, adolescent sexuality has become a political battle zone, with teenagers, as usual, getting caught under the punches. It doesn't matter that AO programs teach young people to hate themselves and to invalidate their feelings.

The reason California doesn't accept federal funds for AO programs is that to do so would violate a state education law requiring sex education to be medically accurate. What a great idea for a law.

The reason California doesn't accept federal funds for AO programs is that to do so would violate a state education law requiring sex education to be medically accurate. What a great idea for a law. I could barely have thought of a better one myself. Applying some logic to this fact, it would seem that the other 49 states are free to make up reality as they choose. Or as Uncle Sam and the religious fanatics who inhabit the government freely choose and, in fact, that is what happens. Sex education in schools in 49 states consists of teaching fear, guilt, shame, intolerance and repression, publicly funded as a matter of public policy. Individual school districts or municipalities may opt out of the program, but most take the money and get with the program.

Federal funding of an idea comes with considerable clout; no matter how stupid that idea is, it carries weight in the minds of professionals. I'm not exactly a big fan of medical science, or of science. But the mainstream medical profession has come a lightyear in recent decades on such nonissues as homosexuality and masturbation being normal aspects of the human experience. Doctors agree: you're okay for being gay or lesbian, if you masturbate and even if you like to be tied up. Speaking of which, I know a few senators I think would benefit from a date with a riding crop. If there are any professional doms in the reading audience who want to take part in a public service project, please contact me.


Penis-Vagina Dialogs

Prof. Mim Chapman teaches education at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, and her students are people making midlife changes to teaching careers. She's one of those adventurers who's tried every wild job you can name, stuff like treasure hunter and trapeze artist, and for a while she also served as a school principal in the Alaska public school system. She was a presenter at last weekend's ITCR conference. She opened her presentation with a little story. One day when she was a junior high school principal in Anchorage, she was told by her boss that she was appointed to the health education committee.

"That's the committee that argues about sex education?" she asked. Her boss said yes.

"I want you to know that I have some very strong beliefs about that area," she told him.

"'Somehow I thought you would', he replied. 'That's why I'm assigning you to this committee'."

"I said, 'Okay, this is my first year as a principal and you want me on a committee where I'm going to be arguing with the radical right about what we should be teaching kids about sex'."

"It was a very enlightening experience," Chapman said. "Anchorage is one of the 20 largest school districts in the country, it is the home of Arco, British Petroleum and all those other drill people. It's not like Dillingham, Alaska with a population of 2,000. It's a diverse culture. We have more languages spoken in the homes of the Anchorage school district than they have in the Los Angeles school district."

When the M word came up, three hours were spent arguing. It was decided that teachers could define it, and that was all. Final definition agreed on was: 'Masturbation, though no longer considered harmful, is a practice which some groups you may belong to do not condone'. I am not kidding.

She knew she was in for a battle. "I had expected that when we came to the H word, homosexuality, we would have some controversy. I was not expecting the controversy over the M word. Remember that in most curriculum areas you are discussing the minimum that you can teach kids. The minimum they need to know in language and math. In sex, the curriculum was to define the maximum that teachers could teach at the junior and senior high schools."

And, she said, the maximum wasn't that much. "When the M word came up, three hours were spent arguing. It was decided that teachers could define it, and that was all. Final definition agreed on was: 'Masturbation, though no longer considered harmful, is a practice which some groups you may belong to do not condone'. I am not kidding. That is the maximum that any junior high school or senior high school teacher in Anchorage, Alaska can teach kids about masturbation."

Is this medically accurate? "After three hours of discussion of the definition of masturbation," she said, "there was this very quiet and very dear pediatrician on the committee who had sat there through all this arguing. After we finally got the definition in, he was sitting there with this wry grin coming up on his mouth and finally said, 'Well, research shows that 98% of humans do it'."

She had decided to save her political capital for a more important battle with the committee. "I was sitting there saying, okay, I have only so many chips and I know that in this homophobic town I've got to save them for the H word. When we got to homosexuality the initial proposal was that it could not be mentioned, but if any student asked a question regarding homosexuality they would be referred to their counselor, priest, rabbi or minister. I'm not making this up. I wish I were making this up."

In essence, such a definition suggests that a student was sick even for inquiring about the subject of homosexuality.

"Finally, after much, much negotiation, we agreed that homosexuality could be defined with an emphasis on tolerance. And when the curriculum went to the Parent Committee, the entire health curriculum was rejected because of the word 'tolerance'. They did not want homosexuality defined with an emphasis on tolerance. This let me know that schools were not where kids in Anchorage were going to be learning about sex. And I thought, there is only so much you can battle. Let's go elsewhere."

Elsewhere turned out to be the Burning Man art festival in Nevada, where she dressed up as a gigantic vulva and circulated surveys about people's experiences of learning about sex, such as where they got their information. The surveys included a space for questions you would ask a friendly penis or friendly vagina, and from those questions she developed the idea for a play called The Penis-Vagina Dialogs. The title is a pun on The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, which has become something of a feminist cult classic garnering more enthusiasm than anything since The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The Penis-Vagina Dialogs begins with the premise that everyone belongs in the sexual discussion, that sex is healthy and normal, and that everyone has questions about sex. Chapman wears her vulva costume, and created a comparable penis costume for her male counterpart in the performance. The play's chorus, in the tradition of the great Greek dramas, consists of the "pubes," human pubic hairs who surround the penis and vagina and who take turns reading questions from survey responses, which are then answered by other pubes.

It's effective, effortless and hilarious sex education, which is technically accurate and which gets past the usual discomfort with sexual subject matter by using humor as social lubrication and as a tension -breaker.

Here are some of the results of her "where did you learn about sex" survey. The numbers represent how many people who responded to her survey checked off that particular box about where they got their sex education.

Lobbying for Sexual Freedom

Did you know there's a lobbying organization dedicated to sexual freedom? It's called the Woodhull Freedom Federation. An educational arm of the same group is called the Woodhull Freedom Foundation. "Basically, the organizations believe that consensual sexual expression is a fundamental human right, and that's what we would like to see happen in legal changes, and political and social changes, throughout the United States and the world," said Judy Guerin, a presenter at the ITCR conference and Woodhull board member.

"Victoria Woodhull was the out-spoken, 'racy' activist who introduced sex-positivist values to America during the Victorian era," says the Woodhull web page. "She believed that both men and women had a right to 'free love' without government or public intervention. Throughout the 1870s, she lectured and published, arguing against society's sexual double standard. Woodhull advocated sexual satisfaction and love for all, legal prostitution, the right to multiple partners, and supported people's abilities to make their own decisions about consensual sexual activities."

In Woodhull's own words, "To those who denounce me, I reply: Yes I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please."

It is with this mission that Guerin works on Capital Hill speaking to legislators and policy makers -- and working the Beltway's social circuit, where she finds herself in many interesting conversations over dinner. It is brave work, which Guerin does with heartfelt compassion, patience and a sense of practicality.

"We have a primary focus in the United States but we do a lot of work internationally related to HIV and AIDS funding," she said. "We also believe that one of the most effective ways of effecting change on U.S. policy on sexuality is international pressure from the European Union and Canada."

An important mission of the Woodhull organizations is addressing the issue of abstinence-only indoctrination. "I think we're putting our children at serious risk as well," she said. "We're endangering our children by allowing abstinence-only education."

"If you look at the trends in where the religious extremists are going with our current administration, this is what they've been waiting for since Reagan, to find Bush, who would really champion some of these things. The combination of Bush, [Attorney General John] Ashcroft, [House Majority Leader Tom] DeLay and some of the key Republican leaders is an extremely moralistic approach. The thing that states how this administration views sex issues is that John Ashcroft had to clothe the artistic statues in the Justice Department so that he didn't have to look at bare breasts, statues that had been there for something like 60 years. To me that says everything about how uncomfortable he is with any kind of sex or nudity to have to cover up art. That's the mentality that we're dealing with in this administration. Sex is bad and sex is evil and we're on a mission from God to save the world."

She takes the long view of cultural progress in sexual freedom.

"I think you see these kinds of trends and backlashes and cycles in evolution. If you look at the Reagan era, this was a time when the lesbian, gay and transgender movements mobilized and did a lot of the grassroots organizing work they needed to do in order to be successful politically. We experienced some freedom, and we had eight years of Clinton on these issues, then it retracts or swings back the other way and we have a different kind of administration in place. But I think what happens in these cycles is that we don't necessarily go backward that far. It also becomes an opportunity for people to mobilize and organize, and they see the need to do it, and it makes the overall movement much stronger when [regressive trends] happen."

I asked her about the recent Lawrence v. Texas decision by the Supreme Court, which banned sodomy laws, and how it's possible that could happen at the same time that the federal government seems intent on shutting down the sexual discussion.

I think the court was just grappling with the fact that this has reached a public acceptance level with respect to gays and lesbians that socially we can't back down and go backwards. The public really wants this. And also there's a very Republican, Libertarian view on privacy that even on a conservative court can render interesting legal decisions.

"I think the court was just grappling with the fact that this has reached a public acceptance level with respect to gays and lesbians that socially we can't back down and go backwards. The public really wants this. And also there's a very Republican, Libertarian view on privacy that even on a conservative court can render interesting legal decisions." She noted, "Much of the support we get on certain types of issues isn't necessarily from the left wing. It's sometimes from very conservative right wing groups."

"I think what happens socially is that it takes time, even if the population feels a certain way, it takes time for that to translate into government and into the politics of the administration. I think the public acceptance of gays and lesbians happened quite a few years before we came to the Lawrence v. Texas decision. And I think the same thing will happen with other sexual freedom issues, that public opinion will eventually translate and shift into the political environment."

This appears to grossly contradict the anti-gay message of the abstinence-only movement. "If you look at surveys of parents, they want their children to have comprehensive sex education. It's that the religious political extremists are so well organized and so well funded that they are able to effect the funding programs primarily, as well as legislation."

She continued, "One of the advantages of Lawrence v. Texas on the abstinence-only situation is that in many states, you cannot promote homosexuality in schools; you can't talk about it unless you say it's a criminal act, because sodomy is illegal in certain places." Now that laws against sodomy are unconstitutional, that line of reasoning has been undermined and in theory cannot be taught in schools.

She views her work as laying a foundation for the future and is not expecting any great coup or victory any time soon. It's a realistic approach. You can't push the tide, but you can get the clam rakes ready.

"We think the only thing we'll be able to effect during this particular administration is building a base of legislators and school board people who say that abstinence only education doesn't work. This would give us the basis for making a legislative change. This is not the time to try to repeal any federal funding for abstinence-only education."++

Organizations referenced in this article:

Woodhull Foundation

Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S.

Institute for 21st Century Relationships