The New York Times‘ Elaine Blair recently lauded a children’s sex education trilogy written by Cory Silverberg, a sex educator and the owner of a “sex-positive sex shop” in Toronto, Canada. Silverberg, the son of a sex therapist who self-identifies as a “queer person” and uses “they” pronouns, claims he is “skeptical” of sex positivity. “For some people sex is great, for some people it’s terrible, for some people it means nothing…I want to phrase things in a way that leaves all those possibilities open.” Though Silverberg professes that he does not want to contribute to any “normative pressures” surrounding sex, it’s hard to imagine that he could do so even if he tried. But if the new normative pressure is precisely to lack of behavioral norms for the sake of inclusion, this spells disaster for children, who need clear and simple boundaries to thrive. At stake is not only the health of their future selves, friendships, and courtships, but the lives of future generations adrift in moral confusion.
“Liberal-ish” Is Just the Beginning
Blair’s main complaint with liberal-minded books like Robie Harris’ “It’s So Amazing!: A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families” is that its attempts at non-judgment stop short of inclusion. They are circumscribed by traditional values, where non-traditional sex, “though very loving, is off-brand.” This reminds her of her own “liberal-ish” sexual education, where parents preached non-judgment but left the impression that “some desires and practices were less good than others.” Harris’ books never fully discard the biological meaning of sexuality as reproduction, despite her frank celebration of sexual pleasure as morally-neutral, but it’s for this Blair seems to think that Silverberg has done more on the part of inclusion by showing less, offering less adult presumption and more empathy. His focus on the physical and social transformations of puberty abandons the role of authoritative guide in favor of accepting peer.
Pleasure First, Babies Last
The problem with Silverberg’s totally nonjudgmental, non-normative approach is that it gives the impression sexuality has no moral meaning whatsoever. If sexuality itself is so context-dependent that it’s up to each person to define or participant to negotiate, there is no way of settling what we owe to one another in an objective sense. Can we really give our bodies to another, even partially, for the purpose of pleasure without illusions, and without lying to ourselves about the consequences? If sexuality is only a highly individualized journey of self-discovery, with occasional glimpses of “others” along the way, is there any basis for adult anxiety over the innocently curious expressions of children and insistent questioning of teens? Blair recounts her experience of reading You Know, Sex, as though she were her back to her “childhood self”:
“Having sex can look like a lot of things,” reads the text in a second panel, where the same smiling stick people, solo or in pairs, do things like make eye contact, hold hands, give foot massages, sit in front of laptops and have fantasies involving the torso of a broad-shouldered, hairy-chested hunk.
If sex is about the pursuit of personal pleasure and the sharing positive feelings first – and just “one way grown-ups make babies” last, rather than an inherently marital act of spousal unity and fruitfulness – then it really is no different from any other type of social interaction. Is that what we want to teach our kids? Of course, no one believes that sex is just about the individual or that it can be interchanged with any other run-of-the-mill interaction. Everybody knows that eye contact, hand-holding, and foot massages can be charged with sexual meaning in a certain context.
Get Beyond the Obvious
Young people know instinctively due to biology that sex is “something we can do to feel good in our bodies, and also feel close to another person.” That much is obvious. But how do you convince a hormonal teenage boy that a life without sexual activity, “whether that’s for religious reasons, moral reasons, or reasons that have to do with your body, can be a completely full life,” without deferring to moral authorities and an accompanying moral vision? What is difficult to explain is why, because of our biology, we owe it to ourselves and others to steward our instincts responsibly. It’s also difficult to explain the comprehensive nature of the sexual act, which binds two people together literally in a way so wholly miraculous that it manifests as a new human person, a son or a daughter. The lack of normative pressure toward understanding and embracing our given bodies in Silverberg’s book effectively neutralizes the positive pressure to embrace nature’s design, where the marital act is the best way to welcome new life. We should fervently resist a world in which sex is defined by its pleasure-inducing capacity, for when sex ceases to be imbued with moral meaning is when various utilitarian purposes come to overtake the business of reproduction. In a sense, they have already begun.
