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Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870-1924
Dirty The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870-1924, details the approaches and outcomes of sex-education initiatives in the Progressive Era. In analyzing the rhetorical strategies of sex education advocates, Robin E. Jensen engages with rich sources such as lectures, books, movies, and posters that were often shaped by female health advocates and instructors. She offers a revised narrative that demonstrates how women were both leaders and innovators in early U.S. sex-education movements, striving to provide education to underserved populations of women, minorities, and the working class. Investigating the communicative and rhetorical practices surrounding the emergence of public sex education in the United States, Jensen shows how women in particular struggled for a platform to create and circulate arguments concerning this controversial issue.
The book also provides insight into overlooked discourses about public sex education by analyzing a previously understudied campaign targeted at African American men in the 1920s, offering theoretical categorizations of discursive strategies that citizens have used to discuss sex education over time, and laying out implications for health communicators and sexual educators in the present day.
The book also provides insight into overlooked discourses about public sex education by analyzing a previously understudied campaign targeted at African American men in the 1920s, offering theoretical categorizations of discursive strategies that citizens have used to discuss sex education over time, and laying out implications for health communicators and sexual educators in the present day.
201 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2010
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October 3, 2019
Takeaways (Rhetoric):
Ambiguity and censorship tend towards actually increasing the total number of perspectives on the topic of discourse. The ambiguities inherent in the rhetoric of vice reformers, social purists & hygienists, free lovers, etc. were each heard by audiences that not only agreed with the message, but were confident that the message argued against those other audiences that heard and agreed with the same rhetoric. Rather than proving such rhetoric to be ultimately meaningless, this proved to be a major part of what allowed sex education to break into public consciousness.
Presenting the world through the perspective of another subject than yourself both makes it really possible for the audience to genuinely understand other points of view and facilitates the entrance of that presented POV into the audience's in-group. Yarros was not simply telling the audience of her lectures about what it was like to be an immigrant with a venereal disease; she was reshaping what it would mean both to be an immigrant and to be the type of public citizen that would hear her lectures.
Takeaways (sex ed):
Alliances of convenience have brought seriously-lasting damage on the movement for Sex Ed in America. Public Sex Ed advocates, the scientific community, and the eugenicist movement all found resonances within each other that made all three far more popular and appealing to widespread public adoption than they would have each been received separately. This alliance helped Margaret Sanger build Planned Parenthood; it also led to her abandoning many of her socialist convictions and PP continues to be maligned for its racist origins to this day. As a matter of course, many third-world populations are now sterilized or kept from having children (mediated by the US via the IMF & world bank) as population control policy. Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control This is the legacy of the sex ed movement's unholy alliance; it prevents the realization of reproductive justice and mingles with new racist discourses of the sort whose movements wouldn’t exist for another sixty years.
Ambiguity and censorship tend towards actually increasing the total number of perspectives on the topic of discourse. The ambiguities inherent in the rhetoric of vice reformers, social purists & hygienists, free lovers, etc. were each heard by audiences that not only agreed with the message, but were confident that the message argued against those other audiences that heard and agreed with the same rhetoric. Rather than proving such rhetoric to be ultimately meaningless, this proved to be a major part of what allowed sex education to break into public consciousness.
Presenting the world through the perspective of another subject than yourself both makes it really possible for the audience to genuinely understand other points of view and facilitates the entrance of that presented POV into the audience's in-group. Yarros was not simply telling the audience of her lectures about what it was like to be an immigrant with a venereal disease; she was reshaping what it would mean both to be an immigrant and to be the type of public citizen that would hear her lectures.
Takeaways (sex ed):
Alliances of convenience have brought seriously-lasting damage on the movement for Sex Ed in America. Public Sex Ed advocates, the scientific community, and the eugenicist movement all found resonances within each other that made all three far more popular and appealing to widespread public adoption than they would have each been received separately. This alliance helped Margaret Sanger build Planned Parenthood; it also led to her abandoning many of her socialist convictions and PP continues to be maligned for its racist origins to this day. As a matter of course, many third-world populations are now sterilized or kept from having children (mediated by the US via the IMF & world bank) as population control policy. Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control This is the legacy of the sex ed movement's unholy alliance; it prevents the realization of reproductive justice and mingles with new racist discourses of the sort whose movements wouldn’t exist for another sixty years.
Displaying 1 of 1 review