Modern love
Joannides, who is 58, made sex education his life's work following the success of his sex manual for older teenagers and adults called, "The Guide to Getting It On." Lauded for its voluminous accuracy and wit, the 900-plus-page paperback took him 15 years to research and write. Joannides argues that pornography can be used as a teaching tool, not a bogeyman, as is apparent in a short Web video he made called "5 Things to Learn About Lovemaking From Porn." "In porn," he affably lectures, "sex happens instantly: camera, action, crotch. . . . In real life, the willingness to ask and learn from your partner is often what separates the good lovers from those who are totally forgettable." (Another of Joannides's assertions is that the best way to reach heterosexual boys -- who he believes are the most neglected in the current environment -- is to play to their desire for "mastery", because by middle school, they've thoroughly absorbed that to be a man is to be a stud.)
-- NYT
In other words, as much as Joannides criticizes his opponents on the right, he also tweaks the orthodoxies of his friends on the left, hoping to spur them to contemplate how they themselves dismiss pleasure. His main premise is that young people will tune out educators if their real concerns are left in the shadows. And practically speaking, pleasure is so braided through sex that if you can't mention it, you miss chances to teach about safe sex in a way that young people can really use.
For instance, in addition to pulling condoms over bananas -- which has become a de rigueur contraception lesson among "liberal" educators -- young people need to hear specifics about making the method work for them. "We don't tell them: 'Look, there are different shapes of condoms. Get sampler packs, experiment.' That would be entering pleasure into the conversation, and we don't want that."
While the conference attendees couldn't have agreed more with Joannides about what should be taught in schools, much of the crowd thought he was deluded to imagine they could ever get away with it. Back in 1988, Michelle Fine, a professor of social psychology at the City University of New York, wrote an article in The Harvard Educational Review called "Sexuality, Schooling and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire." In it, she included the comments of a teacher who discouraged community advocates from lobbying for change in the formal curriculum. If outsiders actually discovered the liberties some teachers take, Fine was told, they'd be shut down.
"The campaign for abstinence in the schools and communities may seem trivial, an ideological nuisance," Michelle Fine and Sara McClelland wrote in a 2006 study in The Harvard Educational Review, "but at its core it is . . . a betrayal of our next generation, which is desperately in need of knowledge, conversation and resources to negotiate the delicious and treacherous terrain of sexuality in the 21st century."
It's axiomatic, however, that parents who support richer sex education don't make the same ruckus with school officials as those who oppose it. "We need to be there at the school boards and say: 'Guess where kids are getting their messages about sex from? They're getting it from porn,' " Joannides exhorted. "All we're talking about is just being able to acknowledge that sex is a good thing in the right circumstances, that it's a normal thing."
Laurie Abraham wrote "The Husbands and Wives Club: A Year in the Life of a Couples Therapy Group," which began as an article in the magazine.
Editor: Ilena Silverman
MAGAZINE
Teaching Good Sex
By LAURIE ABRAHAM
Published: November 16, 2011
Introducing pleasure to the peril of sex education.