Sexual Pedagogies: Sex Education in Britain, Australia, and America, 18792000 [Hardcover]

Understandings of sexuality and sex education have changed dramatically, and in this collection, the authors explore the various texts that were used to teach, to entertain, to sanction and to form a sexual standard for a nation. According to Nelson and Martin, these include a puberty education, sermons on abstinence, medical writings promoting sexual fulfillment, Hollywood comedies about sexual coming of age and picture books validating homosexuality. The essays included here are designed to illustrate the many responses that Anglophone culture has had to such texts for over a century.Introduction; C.Nelson & M.H.Martin That Other Eden: Adult Education and Youthful Sexuality in The Pearl 1879-1880; C.Nelson Ignorance Is Not Innocence: Sex Education in Australia, 1890-1939; S.Swain, E.Warne & M.Hillel Eyes Tightly Shut, Lying Rigidly Still, and Thinking of England? British Women and Sex from Marie Stopes to Hite 2000; L.A.Hall Molding the Man: Sex Education Manuals for Australian Boys in the 1950s; S.Pearce He's Gotta Have It: Teen Film as Sex Education; K.Kidd Power and Repression / Repression and Power: Homosexuality in Subversive Picture Books and Conservative Youth Novels; A.M.Salas 'No One Will Ever Know Your Secret!' Commercial Puberty Pamphlets for Girls from the 1940s to the 1990s; M.H.Martin

Why do some sexual pedagogies succeed and some, perhaps most, fail? Sex education - the whole question of who should be entrusted to persuade whom to do what - has never been so hotly contested as it is today. Yet in many ways the relationship between what is taught and what is practised is as little understood as ever. This thought-provoking volume looks unblinkingly at over a century of efforts, in Britain, the United States and Australia, to intervene in citizens' understandings of their own desires. The contributors take to task purveyors of pornography, children's books, films, sex manuals and tampons, and illuminate some surprising conjunctions bel³+