Sex Education
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Cindy Patton, in Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong, argues that the more graphic and explicit efforts of safe-sex educators were simply the result of an increase in HIV infection among young people. The previous, more conservative educational approach was both ineffective and contradictory for all youth, and especially for gay youth who most needed such education. That earlier approach advocated abstinence, use of condoms, and compassion for those who have HIV, and was aimed at heterosexual youth (34; 62). The "national pedagogy" controlling such education believed that graphic safe sex education would promote sexual activity among the youth, and that gay-oriented safe sex education would promote homosexuality (117). As a result, with respect to gay youth, the highest risk category, education was not only ineffective but hard to find: While the media suggest that gay youth can learn about safe sex before it is too late, neither the media nor the schools seem prepared to provide such information. Gay teens are left with the sexual equivalent of on-the-job training. . . . (62). As a result of this ineffectual approach to safe sex education, writes Patton, "throughout the 1980s, activists and educators experimented with increasingly provocative ways of promoting safe sex, but the national pedagogy met them at every turn" (139). This "national pedagogy" is thoroughly anti-gay, and its usurpation of even graphic safe sex education is designed, says Patton, to p
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emands a hard-working reader as she revels in ideological language which seems to dare even the intelligent reader to try to understand what she is saying at any given moment, or to imagine that she should be expected to present a coherent argument. It is as if she suspects the national pedagogy is eavesdropping and she must speak in code lest her message be usurped as well. This approach would seem to be more acceptable if she were trying to raise consciousness in general by battering open the reader's conventional mind with a kind of shotgun-style analysis of sexual politics. However, isn't she trying to do something far more simple, narrow and clear---namely, stop the spread of AIDS? And the spread of AIDS, even she admits, is relatively easy to analyze: "There is only one dangerous act, being fucked without a condom. . . . " (155).
However, Patton is not merely trying to broaden safe sex education and make it more graphic so that AIDS is stopped. The difficulty in reading and understanding her, and imagining the kind of safe sex education she advocates (which she does not, after all, clearly elucidate), is found in her dual motivation. Yes, she wants to stop AIDS, but she does not want to have the lives, and especially the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1299
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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