Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality

"In Risky Lessons, Jessica Fields takes a deep dive into how students experience sex education in three different schools in North Carolina and into what the grownups around them think they’re promoting through that sex education. What’s so groundbreaking and important about this book is that she shows that even comprehensive sex education frequently contains an anti-sex message because it emphasizes the dangers of sex. Risky Lessons disrupts the long running controversy around sex education in America. People were divided into two camps: the evidence-based camp that promotes comprehensive sex education and what I would describe as the homophobic misogynist camp that promotes what used to be called ‘abstinence only’ sex education and is now called ‘sexual risk avoidance.’ “Even comprehensive sex education frequently contains an anti-sex message because it emphasizes the dangers of sex” Even comprehensive sexual education sometimes omits an important message—that sex is an important part of a full and satisfying life. Fields shows that only the students in a very progressive private school had sex education which was grounded in an acknowledgement of young people’s right to positive sexual self-determination. Well-meaning people in public health have ceded the moral high ground by taking a health-centric view of sex education. So, Fields opens your eyes not just to why comprehensive sex ed is important, but how it falls short. Insisting on every individual’s right to sexual self-determination is the moral value that we should be fighting for. When we asked young people to tell us about their experiences with sex education they mostly laughed and said, ‘you mean my sexual diseases class?’ For those who had gotten the least-bad sex education, it was most memorable for figures of fallopian tubes. We don’t teach young people to drive by teaching them about spark plugs. We teach them how to get where they want to go without hurting other people. That’s what is missing in sex ed. When we spoke with LBGTQ+ students, none of them had ever had sex education that even acknowledged the kinds of sex that they desired. They didn’t just feel not helped by sex ed, they felt actively erased in a way that left them particularly underprepared. Regarding race, we know that sexual violence happens as a result of many different forms of inequalities. If sex education only talks about inequalities between men and women, it leaves out the ways in which racial inequality creates the social context of sexual violence. Every single black woman with whom we spoke reported experiencing unwanted sexual touching during her time at Columbia and Barnard. You can’t interpret those experiences only as instances of sexual violence. If we’re going to really prepare students to think critically about how their own social position can make them either vulnerable to being assaulted or vulnerable to assaulting someone, we must provide sex education in a way that integrates attention to America’s history of racism and other forms of inequality."