Abstract
Certain parties in the United States often proclaim their disgust with the practice of educating students about sex in schools. As it stands, many rail ‘against sex education’, claiming that the responsibility of teaching young people about such topics should sit firmly within the domain of the household, or even the church, synagogue or mosque. Caitlin Howlett offers a different angle in Against Sex Education: Pedagogy, Sex Work, and State Violence. She disrupts current approaches to sex education which ignore the lived experiences of sex workers and, by extension, other marginalized groups. Howlett argues that federal policies surrounding sex education seek to preserve a neoliberal, capitalist, heteronormative agenda in order to preserve the health of the economy. In doing so, they enact violence by eliminating experiences of sexuality outside of the ‘moral’ norms of heterosexual marriage and the family. She goes beyond this critique to show how this erasure damages our ability to conceive of sexuality in novel, non-exclusive ways, threatening to foreclose the possibility of non-violent sex education now and in the future.
In Chapters 1 and 2, Howlett recounts a history of the federal role in shaping sex education policy. However, her arguments provide additional intrigue because she offers a nuanced understanding of the intentions behind these policy progressions. Largely through a queer of color critique, she reveals the federal government’s erasure of sex workers, accomplished by framing sex work as threatening to public health and the maintenance of the family. Casting sex work in this light protects economic interests because it helps preserve the family as the site of reproductive labor, reducing burdens on the state. It also maintains patriarchal control over women by creating divisions between ‘morally sound’ individuals who honor the status quo, and those ‘deviant’ women who accumulate unsanctioned income with sex. This ignores the fact that economic systems and disparities in wealth have created the need for women to take up sex work in the first place. It also glosses over the disproportionate ways in which this has affected Black women, who were even more severely impacted by the need to survive through alternative means of labor. In the end, Chapter 2 moves the story forward to present day, arguing that the need to control perceptions of sex work remains salient to the neoliberal agenda. Essentially, the rationale behind erasing sex workers or painting them as purveyors of vice has stayed the same.
Chapter 3 extends these critiques further by showing how this erasure serves as a form of state violence, especially given that populations of sex workers have grown to include ever more members from marginalized groups. This means that entire communities of real, living, breathing individuals are excluded from the sexuality narrative. The ‘straightening’ of sex education, as Howlett calls it, further dehumanizes those who do not recognize themselves in the picture of the ‘successful’ married, monogamous, reproductive ‘functioning adult human’ (p. 76). In Chapter 4, Howlett then identifies a few ways in which this form of state violence interacts with sex education in other countries. Because the United States maintains extensive economic and social power in the world, these forms of violence through sex education are reproduced globally.
Up to this point, Howlett’s critiques are well taken. She succeeds in convincing the reader that historical and present-day forms of sex education exclude sex workers, which commits a form of violence against many intersecting populations of marginalized peoples. Those who actually teach about sex to students might want a book entitled Against Sex Education to help them formulate some kind of alternative. I wonder how Howlett’s arguments add up to something meaningful for those actively involved in teaching and learning about sex. In particular, I am concerned about her focus on federal sex education policies. True, there is a salient connection between capitalism, neoliberalism, and sex, which Howlett makes stunningly clear. Yet the emphasis on the federal level seems overly detached because it tends to have very little, authentic connection to the classroom level. Said differently, the framing of this approach through the lens of federal policy can sometimes read as hollow because of the massive gap between policymakers and what educators and students actually encounter when exploring ideas about sex. If we care deeply about the experiences of individuals, we certainly do not want to ignore the worlds that real teachers and students inhabit.
Thankfully, in Chapter 5, Howlett begins to assuage these concerns. She does so by refusing to prescribe a set of concrete recommendations, as this would likely stultify sex education even more by codifying it into a system of ‘rules’. Instead, she explores sexual pedagogies shaped by the ‘radical imagination’. This means moving away from critiques of past violence, or of the problematic realities these histories have enacted, so that individuals can envision new, wholly creative, utopian possibilities. This requires progressing toward a not-yet-possible future as opposed to relying on futile attempts to change current circumstances with policy. Here Howlett offers an important distinction that honors the fluidity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of classroom contexts that policy cannot capture.
This still leaves the question open as to what educators should actually make of her suggestions. I feel certain that if I presented these ideas to my students – all of them in-service teachers – that befuddlement would ensue. What can Howlett’s book mean for their practice? For the practice-oriented, there is a somewhat foggy yet workable way forward. In her conclusion, Howlett offers some poetic examples of the ‘radical imagination’ she illuminates in her final chapter. In doing so, she leaves us ruminating on the kinds of stories that educators and students can begin to formulate in order to envision the impossible future. In the end, this disconnect between Howlett’s work and the lived experiences of classroom participants does not serve as an indictment, so long as it provides a genuine invitation to bring educators and students into the act of imagining.