Designing an Abstinence Mission:

 sticky shame,              b o n d a g e,

Y

     forbidden pleasures,

     HELL,

             Purity

    & 

           Reproductive

                        Abundance

 

Presenting at: International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Annual Conference - Rome, Italy - February 2011

you: touch my heart 

is different from: you touch my heart

click the heart

 

The design of sex education curricula in U.S. public schools, driven by abstinence-only-until-marriage (AOUM) programs supported by federal and state funding, commonly establishes heterosexual marriage as the exclusive benchmark for a healthy sexual relationship. As well as this standard being patently offensive to those who cannot or choose not to marry, no credible evidence supports marriage, per se, as a healthy benchmark for sex. Further, the design of activities and materials provided by AOUMs, fetishizes sex, belittles the students, and inhibits the development of critical thinking skills - the students’ ability to make significant choices about their relationships and sexuality so that they continue to develop their own value system. AOUM programs fail to acknowledge that consensual sexual activity within a diverse range of relationship models, allowing for multiple partners over a lifetime, can be a healthy part of human development.

 

Offering abstinence from sexual activity until marriage as the only healthy “choice” belies the values and behaviors of our culture, reflects a reductive view of human sexuality, and ignores that humans have sex for a variety of reasons, many of which have healthy effects, including pleasure, joy, and fun. AOUM programs problematize the “natural” design of healthy sexuality and, instead, reflect a design of socially engineering people into a specific moral standard. The argument for teaching that sex ideally occurs only inside of marriage is based on religious ideology rather than evidence, is erroneous, and is a message that should be eliminated from sex education curriculums in U.S. public schools. It needs to be replaced with a conceptual framework that helps students gain an understanding of human sexuality that transcends subject matter and allows them to make reasoned, rational judgments about their own beliefs and actions.