Scam Artists and Sex Education
One of the oddest aspects of the sexual revolution is its tendency to present the problem as the solution. For instance, during the 1980s, the least acceptable response to the AIDS crisis was the promotion of abstinence. Promiscuity was held to be normative, opponents of it were decried as idiotic and prudish, and any acceptable solution had to be built on these foundational truths.
Thirty years on, the failed pattern continues. Britain’s Daily Telegraph reports that researchers are calling for sex education to reflect the increasing range of sexual activity in which young people are engaged. The change in sexual habits is presented not as a problem, but as a reality to be accommodated. This makes perfect sense, given the divorce of sexual activity from any kind of moral framework or personal narrative. As sex is essentially amoral (except when consent is absent—and then it is only the violation of consent, not the sex, that is immoral), so the education that surrounds it is amoral, too.
The proposal raises certain issues, which it fails to address in a satisfactory manner. Without providing any details, the Telegraph implies that these changes in behavior must bring with them new risks—hence the need for sex education to change with the times. And the change, as always, is couched in terms of the technical, not the moral. It must therefore be toward the more graphic (read: explicit and amoral). The article’s acknowledgment of the role of Internet pornography in all this merely states the obvious.
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