More Than 100 Years of Sex Education

And We're Still Fighting the Same Battles

I’m excited to tell you that today SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change is releasing History of Sex Education, a report written by yours truly. I feel like I lived some of the modern history of sex education. I started at SIECUS months after Bill Clinton signed the welfare reform legislation that included $50 million for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that taught young people that sex outside of marriage was morally wrong and inherently dangerous (yes, we could talk about the irony of that law being signed by him, but the jokes are so obvious, they’re beneath us). For the next 10 years or so, I had a front row seat to the rise and, thankfully, the fall of the abstinence-only-until-marriage industrial complex. My job was to review the curricula, listen to their speakers, and help communities that really didn’t want this type of program in their schools. But there is so much more to the story of sex education than the abstinence-only movement of the late 90s and early 2000s. In the article I go over more than 100 years of history in which sex education both reacted to and helped define cultural shifts, and come to the ultimate conclusion that while sex ed was not designed as a vehicle for social change (just the opposite, it began with a racist, sexist, and classist belief system closely tied to the eugenics movement) if done right, it has “the power to create a culture shift across the United States—granting all people the ability to experience and enjoy sexual and reproductive freedom, as they define it for themselves.”

Please read the whole report here. 

Amazon Quietly Takes Anti-LGBTQ Books off Its Virtual Shelves

Amazon has rapidly become the source for everything (anyone else buy a gallon of gluten free eel sauce recently?), but it began as a book seller and made news recently for the books it would no longer sell. Apparently, in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis, there’s not all that much for Republican senators to do which may be why Josh Hawley (MO), Marco Rubio (FL), Mike Braun (IN), and Mike Lee (UT) had time last month to write a letter questioning why the book When Harry Became Sally had been removed from the site.

In a harshly worded letter of which they must have been very proud, the senators called this “an assault on free speech that carries weighty implications for the future of open discourse in the digital age,” accused Amazon of making arbitrary decisions, questioned why the book was permitted on the site when it was published but not now, and demanded to know “the step by step process under which the determination to remove the book was made.”

Amazon answered the questions in a reply written by Brian Huseman, vice president of public policy. Huseman said the company’s policy had, in fact, changed since 2018 and it had removed this particular book because “we have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” He went on to say, Amazon provides its customers “with access to a variety of viewpoints, including books that some customers may find objectionable….That said, we reserve the right not to sell certain content.” 

The author of the book tried to argue that he does not say that being transgender is a mental illness, but instead has different ideas on how to treat severe gender dysphoria, which he says everyone agrees is a mental illness. This sounds very much like the arguments used to justify harmful conversion therapy—a hate the sin/ help the sinner approach, that can never (and doesn’t really want to) get past its own biases. Kudos to Amazon for taking it off the site. 

Could an Ancient Herb Become Modern Male Birth Control?

I’ve been working in sexual health for a couple of decades now and male birth control pills have been “just around the corner” that whole time, and yet they are nowhere near making it to market. The biological and scientific challenge has been creating a medication that would lower sperm count (or otherwise mess with sperm) without also lowering sex drive, erection capabilities, and other secondary sex characteristics. Whereas biological women produce one egg a month and have a natural precedent for turning this function off (pregnancy), men can produce sperm at a rate of 1,500 per second.

The latest attempt at a reversible contraceptive option for men has its roots in, well, roots. Researchers at the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation, which is part of UCLA Medical Center, extracted a substance called Triptonide from an herb known in Chinese Medicineas lei gong teng or thunder god vine, which has traditionally been used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune disorders. It was already known that this herb can cause male infertility if taken for more than three months in a row.

For this study, lead researcher Wei Yan and his team isolated the Triptonide compound and gave it to otherwise fertile male mice. The mice continued to produce sperm, but the heads on the sperm were bent backwards which made them unable to swim toward an egg. After four weeks on Triptonide, the mice were presented with fertile females with whom they did in fact have sex (proof the mice were still able to get it up), and none of the female mice got pregnant. To prove this was reversible, they stopped the Triptonide and tried the sex again, and the very same male mice were able to impregnate their female partners.

The researchers then moved up the food chain to macaque monkeys and had the same results—deformed sperm and no pregnancy while on Triptonide, and then a reversal and some pregnant monkeys after a few weeks of being off of it. The ongoing sperm count in the treated monkeys was lower than that of monkeys in the control group, but the researchers said this was not statistically significant.

Of course, this miracle new male birth control remains years from pharmacy shelves. If more animal studies are successful, the team will have to test the safety and efficacy in humans. And, then, there is still the looming question as to whether men are interested in taking a compound that messes with the shape of their sperm and whether their female partners would be comfortable having them take on the responsibility of birth control.

For now, men who want to share the burden of contraception can use condoms or–once they’re sure they don’t want [more] children—have a vasectomy. But a male birth control pill is just around the corner, really it is.

Tom Davis is No Topper McFaun, But He Got Something Right, Kind Of

Months ago, I wrote about Topper McFaun, the Vermont Republican who gave me hope by introducing a law to make condoms available in middle schools and high schools as a way to reduce abortion in his state. Sex educators have been arguing for years that access to information about contraception is the key to reducing unintended pregnancy which is in turn the key to reducing abortion. McFaun said at the time: “I’m talking about allowing people to be in the position where they don’t have to make the decision, that crucial decision, to have an abortion or not — that’s what I’m trying to prevent. And the way to do that is to provide ways to allow people to protect themselves.” His stance was particularly refreshing as the same forces that vote to restrict abortion often also vote to make contraceptive access more difficult.

Now, we have Tom Davis. He’s a Republican state senator in South Carolina who along with his colleagues voted earlier this year to make abortion illegal in their state as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected—a gestational marker that is meaningless in terms of viability and often happens before a woman knows she is pregnant. (Like so many other states’ attempts to bulldoze past Roe v. Wade in the hopes of testing our new conservative Supreme Court, this law was instantly under a judge’s temporary restraining order).

Though Tom had no problem taking away women’s right to choose, he does worry about unintended pregnancy. So, he proposed a law that would allow pharmacists to distribute birth control pills, telling the Associated Press: “Women, especially those living in rural areas or who are poor, deserve easier access to birth control in light of the new [abortion] law.”

We agree, Tom. Birth control access is important and any barrier to it that can be removed, like seeing a doctor, is a good step forward. The South Carolina Women’s Rights & Empowerment Network (WREN) supported the bill, noting that there are a number of counties in the state that don’t even have any OB-GYNs. At least 12 state have laws letting pharmacists provide birth control.

Of course, Tom could have done this without first taking over control of uteruses across the Palmetto state.