[CSPS] post-SBOE meeting

Tue Oct 10 15:19:28 CDT 2006

Folks,
         We had an excellent meeting last night -- over 50 people 
turned out to hear Don McLeroy and Maggie Charleton discuss their 
race and answer a wide range of questions from the audience.  The 
proceeding was civilized, informative, and, I hope, worthwhile for 
those who attended.
         Keep October 26 on your calendar for Steve Ogden.

         Jonathan

P.S.  By chance, sex education, one of the items discussed last 
night, was the subject of this article:

Beyond the Birds and the Bees
U-Md. Professor Puts the Human Element Into Sex Education

By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 10, 2006; C01

"If we taught driver's ed the way we teach sex education," says the 
professor, his voice assuming a deep, mocking tone, "we'd be saying 
things like, 'Stay away from the car. Don't stand next to the car.' 
Yeah, right."

So it's a perfect time to teach sex these days if you're on a college 
campus, says Robin Sawyer, a public health professor at the 
University of Maryland.

At 55, the former soccer striker from Yorkshire, England, has been 
lecturing students on the perils and payoffs of sex for 22 years. He 
teaches human sexuality to five sections a year; four of them have 
more than 200 students. This means about 16,000 students have heard 
him lecture on everything from crocodile dung (an early recipe for 
female contraception) to foot fetishes, with anatomy, childbirth, 
infections and lots of other practical details thrown in.

Students raised on a tell-all media diet are eager to talk about 
everything, have done a good bit of it, but don't know very much. How 
strange: They have walked the walk, but they can't talk the talk.

So great is student interest in learning how to talk intelligently 
about such matters that each semester, Sawyer's course has a waiting 
list of 100 students or more. This means most of the students are 
seniors, who get first pick, rather than freshmen, who might benefit 
more from the course.

The class topic last Tuesday was contraception. Sawyer arrived at the 
College Park auditorium in khakis and a navy polo shirt and carrying 
a bag of birth control pills, patches and other props. He scribbled 
types of contraception on the giant blackboard in order of 
effectiveness -- Norplant, Depo Provera, oral conception and condoms 
among them -- knowing that three-fourths of the students there were 
probably sexually active, half of them since they were 17, and 
probably fewer than half were using condoms to prevent pregnancy or 
reduce the possibility of disease.

"The most common form of contraceptive device is prayer," Sawyer 
says, with the accent that ruled a worldwide empire by its tone of 
utter authority. Picking up on the students' puzzled faces he adds: 
"You make a bargain with God. 'Just this once,' you say."

And: "Fifty percent of you aren't using any birth control method 
except withdrawal. Here's what you say: Sex just happened, it wasn't 
planned. Or, you broke up with your boyfriend and went off the pill. 
Or you were so drunk you don't know what happened."

After running through the methods of birth control, he encourages the 
questions to fly.

Does going off the pill, then on again, affect how well it works? a 
young man asks. (Short answer: "Yes.")

Some women who have been on the pill say they ended up having trouble 
getting pregnant later. Is that true? ("There's no scientific 
evidence to prove that.")

I have these incredibly heavy periods. Will the pill help that? ("Perhaps.")

Sawyer moves on to contraceptive devices. There's a paradox here, he 
tells the class. As a group, you perform oral sex and other sexual 
acts more often than past generations, but you still resist using any 
device that requires touching your genitals.

"A young woman recently told me she liked the idea of a diaphragm; 
she just didn't want to have to put her hand down there. I said, 'You 
think it's like a flying saucer? It's just going to go whoosh and fly 
up there on its own?'

"The best birth control device is the one you're willing to use."

A young man asks Sawyer about timing intercourse around a woman's 
menstrual cycle, the so-called rhythm method of birth control. Sawyer 
resists the urge to ask what decade the young man is living in.

"What do you call the woman who uses 'natural' family planning?" he 
responds. "Mommy."

Sometimes Sawyer learns from the students. Last semester, he split 
the class into men and women and encouraged them to ask questions of 
each other. A young man raised his hand wanting to know, "How many of 
you fake orgasms?"

Sawyer recalls: "Before I could say anything, 90 percent of the women 
raised their hands. The men's jaws dropped." The women were asked why.

"Didn't want to hurt his feelings," said one young woman.

"Guys just want to go on and on, and we have things to do," said another.

Sawyer is a sandy-haired, reasonably trim married man with four 
daughters and a cheeky attitude that students love. He has won 
virtually every teaching award that the 35,000-student university gives.

Apart from student attire, his lecture hall could have been lifted 
right out of "Kinsey," the 2004 movie about professor and sexual 
researcher Alfred Kinsey, who stunned America with his frankness and 
his findings more than half a century ago -- and provoked the 
sex-education debate that continues to this day.

All eyes are on Sawyer. Many students appear to be writing down 
everything he says; he actually stops lecturing a couple of times to 
persuade them to put down their pens and simply listen.

The students will ask or say anything. Frequently they do both.

"Does anal sex cause AIDS?" one young woman recently inquired. 
"Because my boyfriend wants to have anal sex, and I don't know 
whether I should let him."

One would think that today's undergraduates might know more. The 
grade point average of entering students has improved considerably 
since Sawyer started teaching. "I get a higher intellectual level 
now," Sawyer says.

But students don't know much more about sex than their parents did, 
he says. They're somewhat better at preventing pregnancy but continue 
to acquire life-threatening infections at an alarming rate. He blames 
this on lousy sex education in the lower grades.

At the beginning of this school year, he asked his class how many had 
had sex education in middle school or high school. Virtually all 
listeners raised their hands.

Then he asked how many had had sex ed for at least a semester. 
Three-quarters of the hands went down. How many had been taught by a 
certified health professional? A bunch of other hands went down, 
leaving about five students out of the 200 who had had, in his view, 
adequate preparation for sexual activity.

Sexuality is a complex psycho-social behavior, he says in an 
interview, and it takes more than six weeks of lectures by a football 
coach to understand. Current efforts by political conservatives 
restricting sex education in the public schools to abstinence-only 
programs is making a bad situation worse. "There is no scientific 
evidence showing that dogma works," he says.

Sawyer's ire over political agendas is not confined to the political 
right. The left, he says, has made it more difficult for his male 
students to talk about their attitudes toward women. Fearful of being 
politically incorrect, they're afraid to say, for example, that in 
certain instances of sexual assault, they believe the women in 
question bear some responsibility for what happened.

"He's really up-to-date," says student Megan Lhotsky, "and he knows 
what young people are interested in."

Classmate Matthew Liebman provides an example. He says Sawyer asked 
him to start a recent class discussion on sexual communication.

"So I asked the girls, 'When a young man comes up to you at a bar and 
starts dancing, it's natural for his body to, uh, wake up. Is that a 
compliment or an insult? Do you run away?' "

One thinks of the old line attributed to Mae West, who reached her 
peak as movie star and scriptwriter in the 1930s: "Is that a gun in 
your pocket or are you just glad to see me?"

Some questions keep getting asked, generation after generation. 
Sawyer plans to keep answering them.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/09/AR2006100901272.html

Jonathan Coopersmith
Associate Professor
Dept. of History
MS 4236
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas  77843-4236
979.845.8584
979.862.4314 fax

Secretary
History & Philosophy of Science Section (L)
American Association for the Advancement of Science
www.aaas.org 
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