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Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education
The first comprehensive history of sex education around the world
Too Hot to Handle is the first truly international history of sex education. As Jonathan Zimmerman shows, the controversial subject began in the West and spread steadily around the world over the past century. As people crossed borders, however, they joined hands to block sex education from most of their classrooms. Examining key players who supported and opposed the sex education movement, Zimmerman takes a close look at one of the most debated and divisive hallmarks of modern schooling.
In the early 1900s, the United States pioneered sex education to protect citizens from venereal disease. But the American approach came under fire after World War II from European countries, which valued individual rights and pleasures over social goals and outcomes. In the so-called Third World, sex education developed in response to the deadly crisis of HIV/AIDS. By the early 2000s, nearly every country in the world addressed sex in its official school curriculum. Still, Zimmerman demonstrates that sex education never won a sustained parents and religious leaders rejected the subject as an intrusion on their authority, while teachers and principals worried that it would undermine their own tenuous powers. Despite the overall liberalization of sexual attitudes, opposition to sex education increased as the century unfolded. Into the present, it remains a subject without a home.
Too Hot to Handle presents the stormy development and dilemmas of school-based sex education in the modern world.
Too Hot to Handle is the first truly international history of sex education. As Jonathan Zimmerman shows, the controversial subject began in the West and spread steadily around the world over the past century. As people crossed borders, however, they joined hands to block sex education from most of their classrooms. Examining key players who supported and opposed the sex education movement, Zimmerman takes a close look at one of the most debated and divisive hallmarks of modern schooling.
In the early 1900s, the United States pioneered sex education to protect citizens from venereal disease. But the American approach came under fire after World War II from European countries, which valued individual rights and pleasures over social goals and outcomes. In the so-called Third World, sex education developed in response to the deadly crisis of HIV/AIDS. By the early 2000s, nearly every country in the world addressed sex in its official school curriculum. Still, Zimmerman demonstrates that sex education never won a sustained parents and religious leaders rejected the subject as an intrusion on their authority, while teachers and principals worried that it would undermine their own tenuous powers. Despite the overall liberalization of sexual attitudes, opposition to sex education increased as the century unfolded. Into the present, it remains a subject without a home.
Too Hot to Handle presents the stormy development and dilemmas of school-based sex education in the modern world.
216 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 2015
12 people are currently reading
368 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Zimmerman
14 books18 followersJonathan Zimmerman is professor of education and history, New York University. His previous books include Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century and Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools. He lives in Narberth, PA.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
July 12, 2015
A pretty good history, though it focuses mostly on the U.S. and Sweden -- and reveals that most countries have been having the same debate about sex education since roughly the 1900s, which is a little disheartening to note. I wish the book had provided some kind of recommendations for going forward, but it is what its title promises -- a history of sex education, and little more than that.
May 8, 2024
“To sex educators, across the twentieth century and around the world, the key to improving sexual behavior was spreading knowledge about it; like any other social issue or dilemma, the problem of sex would be solved by more information, discussion, and understanding. “The world has probably never known any such universal consensus as the present belief in education,” wrote G. Stanley Hall, perhaps America’s best-known psychologist, in 1911. But when it came to sex, Hall added, “it would almost seem as if civilized man was afraid of knowledge, laid a heavy ban upon instruction and deliberately chose darkness rather than life.” That same year, but an ocean away, France’s most famous sociologist took a very different tack on sex education. Debating a physician who demanded that schools teach the “facts of life” about sex, which religion had made into something frightening and “mysterious,” Émile Durkheim rejected the idea that sex could be anything other than religious—or mysterious. Even the “crudest and most primitive religions” regarded sex as a “grave, solemn, and deeply religious act,” Durkheim observed. Such ideas were not simply “superstitions” or “deceptions,” he cautioned; they instead reflected social reality, “some sentiment which men of all times have truly felt.”
To Durkheim, sex could never be reduced to a matter of health, science, or even knowledge. This book is about the possibility that he was right.”
-Zimmerman, Too Hot to Handle
Might be one of the absolute hardest quotes ever, and the rest of the book is just as fascinating. Favorite book read this year so far.
To Durkheim, sex could never be reduced to a matter of health, science, or even knowledge. This book is about the possibility that he was right.”
-Zimmerman, Too Hot to Handle
Might be one of the absolute hardest quotes ever, and the rest of the book is just as fascinating. Favorite book read this year so far.
March 2, 2022
There's good stuff at the core here but it probably would have been better as an article. Other than the first chapter about the initial development and popularization of sex education as a concept, the chapters aren't particularly well defined and continue circling the same points about conflict between conservative parents\communities and secular educators, and jumping around how this played out in different venues, but rarely with enough depth (it's a very short book) to distinguish the different examples as meaningfully distinct case studies. The intro is great and the first chapter is very solid, but the rest can mostly be skimmed
February 3, 2016
The content of this book could have been condensed into a single essay of moderate length. The extra pages are due to repetition. Essentially, the debate has remained the same over the last century with a few nuanced changes, but he readdresses it every few decades like an entirely new social conflict.
March 2, 2016
The most exciting thing about this book was the title. Meh.
August 16, 2024
It's not Jonathan Zimmerman's fault that this book was kind of boring. One man's sex education is another man's hardcore pornography and a third man's insistence that it's not going far enough. The history of sex education in the schools is a history of people who think children (undefined, because one man's child is another man's adolescent who should be assumed to have their own agency) should learn about sex in schools and people who think that they absolutely, definitely should not. Sex education is undefined too, because one man's sex education is another man's quick explanation of sperm and ovaries and another man's assurance that homosexual experimentation is okay and another man's brief explanation of your changing body. Any kind of consensus about what sex education is is so impossible that Zimmerman doesn't even bother discussing it.
A lot of men up in here; way too many of them are gym teachers.
Which is another problem! Teachers are young women who couldn't possibly know about sex, or they're dried up spinsters who hate sex, or they're suspected homosexuals, or they're the biology teacher who's worried about losing his job if he teaches sex education, or it's being foisted on the gym teacher again, or it's a twelve minute filmstrip and some random weirdo who goes from school to school answering questions so the teachers don't have to. Teachers throughout the world are unprepared to teach sex ed, even if there's a national curriculum, or they're worried about community reaction, or they're embarrassed, or they just don't want to.
Sex education is America and Sweden disseminating ideas and everyone else blaming America and Sweden for disseminating ideas while conservative Americans protest and defund sex education.
No one has studied outcomes. No one has done any comprehensive studies of sex education or its outcomes. Zimmerman has a few studies where 30% of teens in a country who were supposed to get a robust sex ed curriculum say they never heard a word about it, or 30% percent of teens who have completed their high school's sex ed curriculum say you can get pregnant from a toilet seat.
As Zimmerman says at the end, Italy, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have the lowest teen pregancy rates in Europe. All three countries have wildly different approaches to sex ed. What's going on? Who knows.
This book was pretty dull. Sex educators like to have international forums that are big on ideas that never get followed through. So do sex ed protestors. A lot of the record on global sex education is which countries attended which international conference.
A lot of men up in here; way too many of them are gym teachers.
Which is another problem! Teachers are young women who couldn't possibly know about sex, or they're dried up spinsters who hate sex, or they're suspected homosexuals, or they're the biology teacher who's worried about losing his job if he teaches sex education, or it's being foisted on the gym teacher again, or it's a twelve minute filmstrip and some random weirdo who goes from school to school answering questions so the teachers don't have to. Teachers throughout the world are unprepared to teach sex ed, even if there's a national curriculum, or they're worried about community reaction, or they're embarrassed, or they just don't want to.
Sex education is America and Sweden disseminating ideas and everyone else blaming America and Sweden for disseminating ideas while conservative Americans protest and defund sex education.
No one has studied outcomes. No one has done any comprehensive studies of sex education or its outcomes. Zimmerman has a few studies where 30% of teens in a country who were supposed to get a robust sex ed curriculum say they never heard a word about it, or 30% percent of teens who have completed their high school's sex ed curriculum say you can get pregnant from a toilet seat.
As Zimmerman says at the end, Italy, Switzerland, and the Netherlands have the lowest teen pregancy rates in Europe. All three countries have wildly different approaches to sex ed. What's going on? Who knows.
This book was pretty dull. Sex educators like to have international forums that are big on ideas that never get followed through. So do sex ed protestors. A lot of the record on global sex education is which countries attended which international conference.
April 24, 2018
Interesting to see the history of resistance to sex education. The Scandanavian countries are the role models. There was not much on Latin America and Ghana and South Africa were mentioned.
February 20, 2019
This was an absolutely essential resource for my research on sex education in the United States. If you’re looking for a history of sex education this is a great place to start!
October 31, 2020
great intro on the history of sex ed
October 9, 2022
Very dense read. Great information and historical look. Amazing resource. Just makes me sad to see how we've slid backwards and it keeps getting worse.
March 30, 2023
Also read this for class, was kinda interesting to see how sex ed has been controversial for so long but it got very repetitive and wasn’t really as global as it advertised itself to be
December 29, 2025
I thought this book did a good job at looking at the international history of sex education in a straightforward way. It helped me with my research paper.
September 30, 2015
A little bit mechanical in spots and cluttered with detail about factions in the sex education battles, it is nevertheless valuable in presenting the history of such a hot topic as it continues to inform the dialogue in the current culture wars. There are a number of humorous anecdotes which liven up the readability and the book deserves a high rating for showing the multiple national perspectives on the progress or lack of it in establishing sex education as part of school curricula.
Although Scandinavian nations have been the most enlightened about open discussion of sexuality and transferring that knowledge to the classroom, they clearly represent an exception. Most countries, including the U.S. tiptoe around the topic and indeed, attacks from the conservative flanks in many nations have intimidated educators in significantly modifying course content or abandoning altogether.
Despite the still enduring curse of venereal disease and AIDS, those of puritanical mindsets prefer ignorance to prevention. Hopefully this work will make some strides in correcting that.
Although Scandinavian nations have been the most enlightened about open discussion of sexuality and transferring that knowledge to the classroom, they clearly represent an exception. Most countries, including the U.S. tiptoe around the topic and indeed, attacks from the conservative flanks in many nations have intimidated educators in significantly modifying course content or abandoning altogether.
Despite the still enduring curse of venereal disease and AIDS, those of puritanical mindsets prefer ignorance to prevention. Hopefully this work will make some strides in correcting that.
October 10, 2015
Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education (Hardcover)
by Jonathan Zimmerman
from the library ILL
Contents:
The century of school, and the century of sex --
The birds, the bees, and the globe: the origins of sex education, 1898-1939 --
A family of man?: sex education in a Cold War world, 1940-64 --
Sex education and the "sexual revolution." 1965-83 --
A right to knowledge?: culture, diversity, and sex education in the age of AIDS, 1984-2010 --
A mirror, not a spearhead: sex education and the limits of school.
by Jonathan Zimmerman
from the library ILL
Contents:
The century of school, and the century of sex --
The birds, the bees, and the globe: the origins of sex education, 1898-1939 --
A family of man?: sex education in a Cold War world, 1940-64 --
Sex education and the "sexual revolution." 1965-83 --
A right to knowledge?: culture, diversity, and sex education in the age of AIDS, 1984-2010 --
A mirror, not a spearhead: sex education and the limits of school.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews