The Means of Reproduction

"I think the real insight of the book, at least for me, was connecting the questions I was dealing with in sex education to the larger questions of women’s rights around the world. And they’re connected. Because when people say ‘we don’t think adolescents should engage in sex’, often what they’re saying is ‘we don’t think adolescent girls should engage in sex’. Obviously there are enormous double standards which we could find in almost any culture. What Goldberg does in this book is explain how this is, through a number of different controversial questions: fertility, birth control, the question of so-called gendercide (people using sonograms and aborting if they are having a girl), and also female genital mutilation. These are all issues that we’ve known about for a very long time, but the real contribution of that book was to show how the politics of these issues have globalised. That is, people on each side of the question can now have much more in common with somebody on the other side of the planet than on the other side of the street. Because of the rapid movement of ideas and peoples across the globe, if you want to stop Sex Education or if you want to promote it, you can now have an ally in another country, with whom you can share information and strategies. I think it’s those allegiances and those dynamics that the book really captured in a pioneering way. I think it’s fair to say we want it both ways. We want to respect and celebrate, even venerate, cultural differences and group cultures, but at the same time we want our values on questions like sex to be primary or even—to use your term—hegemonic. And I think it’s very hard to have it both ways."