TOUCHY SUBJECTS: TEENS’ PERSPECTIVES ON STIGMA, RISK, AND ADULTHOOD

IN SCHOOL-BASED SEX EDUCATION

by

Sarah H. Smith
May 14, 2015

A dissertation submitted to the

Faculty of the Graduate School of
the University at Buffalo, State University of New York
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Sociology
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ii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to all the students, teachers, administrators, and advocates who welcomed me with
warmth and eagerness into their schools, classrooms, offices, and committee meetings
throughout this study. This dissertation would not have been possible without them.

Nor would my work over the past six years have been conceivable without the generosity and
dedication of my committee chair, Mary Nell Trautner. I have learned much from her about what
it means to be a sociologist, a teacher, and a writer. Her insights and questions have continually
pressed me to become better at thinking and at writing. And for the purple pen scribble at the
bottom of a list of notes, “Trust yourself.” Thank you for that forever.

I also thank Debi Street, Jorge Arditi, and Greg Dimitriadis. Over the past eight years, all three
helped form my identity as a scholar and my research agenda. Jorge’s challenging questions
about core meaning and methods shaped this study’s design from its infancy. For this project,
and throughout my entire graduate career, Debi has given me the encouragement, advocacy, and
constructive criticism one needs to cross this finish line. It is with great sadness that I express my
gratitude for Greg’s contributions. Greg’s death is a profound loss. He was a role model, both as
a scholar and as an educator.

I was fortunate enough to have the support of four undergraduate research assistants throughout
this project. Kaitlyn, Samantha, and Bryan, thank you for your efforts to help develop a coding
scheme. And Emma, thank you for your keen insights and your eye for detail during the final
phases of analysis and writing. For their generosity, time, and support in classrooms, workshops,
and writing groups, I thank Watoii, Sarah, Kiera, Matt, Jared, Greg, Jes, Jessica, Sibo, Meghan,
Cedric, Maureen, Kara, Abigail, and Caryl. During the study design, Dr. Laina Y. Bay-Cheng
provided key insights regarding sex research and research with adolescents, for which I am very
grateful. And to every student who has ever been through a semester with me—you are patient
and, though you may not have known it, an inspiration for this work.

For their love and encouragement, I thank my sister Janelle, my brothers Roger and Ron, and my
parents, Beverly and Servius. If he was here, Dad would’ve shout-cheered like he did when he
got gifts he actually liked. I will miss that. I especially thank my nieces Deidra, Emily, and
Emily (yes, two), and my nephews Dustin, Drew, and Jesse.

For abundant kindness and patience, for smiling when I scowl, and for throwing that one
Christmas tree off the second story porch, thank you Dan. I like that we get to be partners in
whatever comes next. I like that very much.

There is no way I would have made it through this journey without good friends, especially
Jessica Alger, Cindy Liu, Jess MacNamara, Christy Panagakis (I was here to make friends),
Alison Rosario, and Rich Strahan. Whether it was advice, reassurance, commiseration, music, or
laughter, my friends made sure that support and inspiration were never in short supply. I can’t
thank you all enough for that.

I dedicate this dissertation to Jesse. You are my hero.

iii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................vii
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER TWO: “THEY DID A REALLY GOOD JOB OF SCARING YOU”: FEAR,
TOLERANCE, AND STIGMA IN SEX ED ............................................................................ 13
Sexuality, Schools, and Robust Integration .................................................................................. 14
Methods and Data ......................................................................................................................... 22
Fear and Tolerance: Official and Hidden Dimensions of SBSE’s Curriculum ............................ 28
Bodies and Bumps ............................................................................................................. 29
Identities and Desires ....................................................................................................... 35
Conclusions ................................................................................................................................... 44
CHAPTER THREE: INFORMATION, KNOWLEDGE, AND COMPETING
PERCEPTIONS OF RISK IN SBSE......................................................................................... 48
Risk Perceptions, Teens’ Sex Lives, and SBSE ........................................................................... 49
Methods and Data ......................................................................................................................... 59
Making Sense of Others’ Risk Perceptions .................................................................................. 61
Stigma as Hazard, Knowledge as Risky in SBSE .............................................................. 65
Gendered Dimensions of Emotion as Hazards ................................................................. 68
SBSE’s Lessons about Violence and Consent ................................................................... 71
Conclusions ................................................................................................................................... 75
CHAPTER FOUR: ADULTS AND ADULTHOOD AS FRAMEWORKS FOR MAKING
SBSE MEANINGFUL DURING ADOLESCENCE ............................................................... 79
Between Adolescent/s/-ence and Adult/s/-hood ........................................................................... 81
Methods and Data ......................................................................................................................... 90
Reinforcing and Disrupting Distinctions between Adult and Adolescent .................................... 91
The Hypersexual Teen: Questioning and Legitimizing Essentialist Stereotypes .............. 96
Anticipating Adulthood: Constructing the Transition from Adolescent to Adult ........... 100
Conclusions ................................................................................................................................. 102
CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION ......................................................................................... 106
Implications for Studying Gender and Sexualities ..................................................................... 107
Implications for Studying Risk Communication in Organizations ............................................. 114
Limitation of this Research ......................................................................................................... 115
Implications for Future Research ................................................................................................ 117

iv
Appendix A. Partition High School Interviewees’ Characteristics by Gender ................... 120
Appendix B. Area Accolades High School Interviewees’ Characteristics by Gender ........ 121
Appendix D. Initial Recruitment Script.................................................................................. 123
Appendix E. Recruitment Flier ............................................................................................... 124
Appendix F. Researcher Recruitment/Informational Contact Script ................................. 125
Appendix G. Informed Assent Document – Student ............................................................. 126
Appendix H. Informed Consent Document – Parent/Guardian ........................................... 129
Appendix I. Demographic Survey ........................................................................................... 132
Appendix J. Interview Questions............................................................................................. 133
Appendix K. Referrals to Support Resources Provided During Assent Procedures .......... 134
REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................... 135

v
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

Figure 2.1 School Context Indicators Partition and Area Accolades High Schools………...23
Figure 2.2 Strongest Memories of SBSE by School………………………………………...33

Figure 3.1 Students Knowledge of Consent by School and by Gender ….............................74

Figure 4.1 Students’ Attitudes about Stereotypes of the Hypersexual Teen ………....…….99
Figure 4.2 Anticipated Adulthood as a Framework for Making SBSE Meaningful ….…...100

vi
 ABSTRACT

Scholars have long argued schools play important roles in organizing and reproducing dominant
meanings and values across social fields to legitimize structural inequalities. Sex education in
particular is an important institutional arbiter in the teaching and learning of both official
language and unwritten social rules surrounding sex and sexualities, reproducing stigma
regarding sexually transmitted infections (STI), pregnancy, and sexual identity. This dissertation
extends that literature in two ways. First, by sampling at two different schools in the same public
school district, I explore ways in which teens’ perspectives may be shaped by organizational-
level differences in context, such as school rank, demographic composition, and aggregate levels
of poverty at each site. Second, where much United States based literature on sex education
focuses on adults, is limited to girls, and/or narrowly examines outcomes such as pregnancy, my
research explores patterns of thematic similarity and difference in meanings internalized by girls
and boys. Drawing on 63 interviews, I find that students perceive sex education’s lessons
through amplification of fear-based, stigmatizing messages about pregnant teens and those
suffering STI. By simultaneously muting talk about same-sex relationships and amplifying fear
of infection and pregnancy, sex education reinforced dominance of heteronormativity and
homophobia for most students. Further, I find that students make sex education meaningful first
through adults’ perceptions of risk that overshadow students’ own perceptions of risk, and
second through anticipations of their own adulthoods. Lastly, while the majority of students at
both schools lacked knowledge about consent, boys at the low-ranked school were particularly
vulnerable to this lapse, as well as to stereotypes of the hypersexual teen.

vii
 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION

Consider the former students of Daniel Yoo. Yoo was a Los Angeles area high school

English teacher who, according to administrators of the Amino Venice Charter High School, was

fired for using instructional materials and assignments with controversial content. Such content

engaged students in a mock trial of a rape case, a performance event modeled after The Moth1,

and a poem by Nobel laureate Billy Collins. The controversial dimension of each activity was

sexual content. This controversy took place among adults. In no reports is there an indication that

Yoo’s students were opposed to the curricula. However, as is often the case in public rhetoric

and in scholarship, the voices of Yoo’s students stay muted under adult voices.

Consider the case of Gilbert Arizona School District. In late 2014, the Gilbert school

district in Arizona made national headlines with a local debate surrounding two pages in a

textbook recommended by teachers for high school biology. Sections in the two pages described

STIs and contraception. Despite approval of the text by the state’s education department, several

members of the school board (who were also parents of children using the book) found those

pages in violation of a law passed in 2012 endorsing abstinence-only sex education. Ultimately

the issue was dropped and the pages were not removed. According to reports, this decision was

due, not to concerns for providing students with information, but to the school board’s fears that

removal would violate copyright law and potentially bring legal action against the school district.

Consider recent controversies over affirmative consent policies at colleges and

universities. While this move to institutionalize rules and expectations about consent is

happening at the level of higher education, it has stirred debates about teaching affirmative

1
The Moth is a New York City based group that hosts live storytelling events, across the United States and abroad,
in which individuals tell true stories to live audiences. In addition to main stage events that often feature notable
literary figures, the group also hosts story slams in public high schools in which volunteers are either chosen from
the audience or sign up to share their stories. The Moth celebrates the ability of storytelling to reach across
boundaries such as socioeconomic status, race, and gender in ways that foster connection.

1
consent at earlier stages in education. The most notable and public of such debates took place in

Ontario early in 2015, where controversy erupted when a new curriculum for sixth grade health

to be implemented in the fall of 2015 was introduced. This curriculum introduces sixth graders to

the basic concept of consent through lessons about topics such as self-advocacy in interpersonal

relationships, respect for one’s own body and others’ bodies, and the meanings of different

gestures, facial expressions, and tones of voice. The Ontario controversy is one of few in North

America in which youth were spokespeople, featured prominently in media coverage as active

participants.

As the polemics over SBSE persist, resources continue to crop up for teens outside of

schools and homes. Jonathan Zimmerman (2015), historian and education scholar, argues that in

a diverse and increasingly connected global society, schools are not the most likely places for

youth to learn about sex. Zimmerman posits that this is because “people,” a term by which he

appears to mean parents and educators who can vote, cannot agree enough on sexual values to

establish a consistent and ubiquitous curriculum that meets students’ needs. He argues that more

promise lies in venues such as websites like Scarleteen.com, Sexetc.org, Sexplanations, and text

services like In Case You’re Curious (ICYC), all sources dedicated to answering the questions

young people have about sex and sexuality. The promise, he argues, lies particularly in their

ability to inform knowledge in environments that are free from adult scrutiny.

However, researchers have made compelling cases for the need for comprehensive sex

education in schools as a means for intervention in unintended pregnancy and STI (see Douglas

Kirby’s work, especially Kirby 2008). The underlying question of this research, and of practices

of SBSE, is: how do we best prevent teen pregnancy and STI transmission? Critical scholars also

argue for the need to provide sex education specifically in schools because sex education is an

2
issue of human rights and social justice, and schools are crucial institutional sites of socialization

to citizenship (Fields and Hirschman 2007; Fine 2005; Lamb 2010). However, interrogations of

policies and curricula (e.g., Doan and Williams 2010; Fine 1988; Fine and McClelland 2006)

lead critical scholars to argue that pedagogies surrounding SBSE need to begin with the question

Sharon Lamb asks (2010: 99), “How do we integrate moral education with sex education to

prepare teens to become self-reflective and full participants in their society, a society in which

sex intersects with a variety of problems and pleasures?”

Still, in spite of efforts to compile evidence linking messages about sex and their sources

to teens’ sexual practices and their outcomes, there is little empirical work that considers

adolescents’ own perspectives on those dynamics. This dissertation contributes empirically to

these questions by gathering rich, qualitative data in interviews with adolescents. Where I

contribute to existing scholarship is in considering how, at the intersections of race, class, and

gender, teens interpret the lessons of SBSE, how they make sense of adults’ perceptions of risk

in light of their own perceptions of risk, and SBSE’s relationship to teens’ attitudes about the

boundaries between adulthood and adolescence.

School-Based Sex Education and Socialization to Sex and Sexualities

Public interest in school-based sex education (SBSE) is perennial. In the United States,

formal sex education can be traced to the social hygiene movement of the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries. This movement was an effort to control what was then referred to as

the “venereal” health, as well as the moral and genetic composition, of the population (Luker

2006). Since its inception, deliberate efforts at public sex education have been made by various

institutions including the church, secular community groups, government agencies, and schools

(Moran 2000; Zimmerman 2015), but few sources have met with such sustained cultural

3
controversy as SBSE (Irvine 2002; Kendall 2012). I use the term SBSE, interchangeably with the

terms “sex ed” and “sex education” throughout this manuscript to refer to any formally organized

attempt, within primary and/or secondary schools, to provide education regarding any or all of

the following: sex organ functions, reproduction, sexually transmitted infections (STI),

sexualities, and any dimensions of the intimate relationships in which these phenomena are most

relevant to individual behavior. The term SBSE encompasses all types of programs, including

comprehensive, abstinence-focused, and abstinence-only, which are the dominant approaches in

the United States.

Schools and families, while they are preferred by teens as sources of information about

sex (Hoff, Greene, and Davis 2003; Somers and Surmann 2004), do not represent the only, or

even the most accessible, source for the range of social information about sex and sexualities.

Non-school sources of sexual information and socialization to sex and sexualities include media

(Bleakley 2009; Giroux 2011; Hoff, Greene, and Davis 2003; Sutton 2002; Ward 2003; Ward

and Friedman 2006) and family (Alldred and David 2007; Elliot 2012; Measor 2004; Measor,

Tiffin, and Miller 2000). Although parents remain important sources of support and

socialization, throughout adolescence peer relationships become more salient and influential,

broadening the range of experiences through which teens can explore intimacy and learn new

meanings of social status. These peer relationships often take place in schools and trade on social

capital valued by teens, including media fluency.

Scholarly interests in the messages popular media send about bodies, sex, and gender are

often warranted by concerns about the implications that such messages can have for both

physical and psychological health of teens, especially girls (e.g., Attwood 2006; Brown, Steele,

and Walsh-Childers 2002; Gigi Durham 2008; Gill 2007; Kilbourne 2003; Oppliger 2008;

4
Phillips 2000; Wray and Steele 2002). Depending on standpoint, SBSE can be viewed as

reinforcing detrimental sexual messages in media, as a corrective to misinformation, or as a

space in which teens can, via interaction with peers and teachers, make sense of such messages.

At the very least, SBSE is meant to deliver lessons that equip youth with knowledge, enabling

them to protect themselves and their sexual partners against undesirable outcomes.

However, meta-analyses find that intended knowledge-practice relationships are not

clearly nor overwhelmingly the result of current strategies of SBSE (Kirby, Laris, and Rolleri

2007; Silva 2002; Trenholm et al 2007). At best, these studies show that abstinence approaches

are ineffective whereas comprehensive approaches are much more promising than abstinence

approaches to reduce instances of unintended teen pregnancy and STI. With more systematic

mixed-methods studies yielding rich data that illustrate not only how programs maximize

effectiveness, but also exactly what is meant by effectiveness, it may be possible to design

curricula that simultaneously support teens’ healthy practices and provide what teens want and

need from sex education.

SBSE, regardless of type of programs, can also be a forum for teaching and reinforcing

gendered sexual stereotypes (Connell and Elliot 2009; Fields 2008; Wilson and Wiley 2009). For

example, Fields (2008) identified a hidden curriculum exemplified by women teaching sex

education who, in the SBSE classroom, modeled women’s subordination by ignoring sexist

speech, slurs against homosexuals, and sexual harassment by boys. Coming from an authority

figure, such behaviors have the potential to reinforce other normative messages available to boys

and girls, telling them sexual harassment is acceptable because boys are essentially sexually

aggressive, and girls should expect such treatment.

5
 Discourse analyses of policy and curricula involved in SBSE are critical of its tendency

to essentialize adolescence and sexuality (Bay-Cheng 2003; Doan and Williams 2010; Fine

1988; Fine and McClelland 2006, 2007; Irvine 2002). In this view, SBSE programs give an

overwhelmingly negative characterization of sexual practice, emphasize risk and danger by

portraying sex as victimization (especially for young women), and present young women’s

subjective sexual desire as non-existent (Fine 1988; Fine and McClelland 2006). Part of the

socialization process involves learning to make sense of feelings, how to interpret and express

them. This includes learning to reconcile sexual feelings with social demands. Teen girls often

must navigate new experiences with arousal, attraction, and pubertal changes in the body in a

cultural climate that privileges and presumes sexual desires among boys, but does not foist upon

teen boys the same intense and normative pressures of accountability experienced by girls (Bay-

Cheng and Eliseo-Arras 2008). Cultural scripts of adolescent sexual development often presume

boys to be full of unbridled desire and ill-equipped to control their arousal when stimulated.

Girls, on the other hand, are often held fully accountable for managing their own actions and

appearances as a proxy for managing the attractions and desires of boys and men. Along with

ultimate responsibility for use of contraception, girls and young women are also faced with the

accountability for consent (Martinez et al. 2010; Phillips 2000).

In a world of round the clock and immediate access to a range of messages about sex and

sexuality via the internet, students and their SBSE teachers tend to face circumstances in which,

as educator Andrew Simmons recently described, “[p]arents want to shield their children from

stories about sex, but kids are force-fed powerful narratives about physical attraction a decade

earlier” (2015:1). Those narratives, however, often fail to meet standards that parents, teachers,

6
and health professionals would have for medically accurate information that promotes individual

health, public health, and mutually satisfying relationships.

Situating My Research in Sociology and in Existing Scholarship on SBSE

In sociology, there is a rich literature examining the roles that factors such as race, class,

and gender play in young people’s interpretations of messages about sex and sexuality (e.g.,

Arnett 2010; Giordano et al 2009; Irvine 1995). Such scholarship examines cultural and

institutional sources such as media (e.g., Ward 2003), religion (e.g., Meier 2003), family (e.g.,

Miller 1986), and school contexts other than formal SBSE classrooms (e.g., Pascoe 2007). SBSE

is often preferred and trusted by teens as a source of information about sex and sexualities (Hoff,

Greene, and Davis 2003; Somers and Surmann 2004). While the internet provides speedy access

to information about sex and relationships, information that may be free of scare tactics, formal

SBSE still matters. School curricula, whether “official,” “evaded,” or “hidden” (Fields 2008)

inform identities (Apple 1996) and factor into the construction of “normal adolescence” (Carlson

2012). Contextual factors such as aggregate socio-economic status, racial composition of student

body, and academic achievement indicators impact students’ experiences in schools (Anyon

2006; Neckerman 2007; Weis 1988).

Those characteristics also impact how SBSE is constructed by adults. Fields (2005)

observed school board officials (both liberal and conservative) relying on the trope of the black

teen mother when making decisions about curriculum policy, invoking racialized images of

impoverished communities as a “cautionary tale” when discussing teen sex. The curriculum is

chosen according to such raced and classed frames and reaches students at various locations in a

series of hierarchies, including those structured along gender, race, SES, sexual preference, and

status along other hierarchies (e.g. student/teacher, popular/unpopular). For example, Fields

7
(2008) observed an activity in which students responded to anonymous questions about sexuality

asked across traditionally defined gender divides. Fields found that, when choosing boys’

questions for girls, teachers chose questions that made room only for popular girls who were

sexually active to speak about their lives. The questions and answers evoked emotional responses

from students, illustrating the connections between sexual practices and social status in high

school. Fields’ analysis points out how crucial both sexual experience and emotions were, not

only in terms of what students wanted to know about each other, but also in terms of how they

received and responded to this classroom activity in sex ed. Feelings are important elements in

sex education’s ability to convey norms and moral standards, regardless of abstinence-only or

comprehensive approach (Lesko 2010). Fear and shame are two strong feelings invoked by sex

education in its efforts to teach norms and values.

Scholars who focus squarely on the impacts SBSE can have on teens’ sexual practices

acknowledge that teens’ sexual attitudes and beliefs, motivations and intentions are the strongest

factors that determine risk and/or protection (Kirby, Laris, and Rolleri 2007). Even with a

substantial body of quantitative research, there remains a paucity of rich qualitative data helping

scholars and practitioners understand how young people make sex education meaningful. My

research aims to contribute empirical focus on how youth perceive and describe SBSE to help

close that gap.

While the complexity involved in explaining the precise connections between cultural

messages, attitudes, and behavior may limit theoretical explanation (e.g., whether cultural

messages cause behavior, or patterns of behavior determine content of cultural messages),

Laumann et al. (1994:530) worked from the assumption that, regardless of causal direction,

“people will try to establish some correspondence, at the cognitive level, between their beliefs

8
and their actions.” By identifying “normative clusters” constructed of composite data on sexual

attitudes, they found that attitudes, or “normative orientations,” are associated with a variety of

sexual experiences and relative appeal of particular sexual activities, and tend to be patterned

according to place. SBSE represents a formal, institutionalized attempt to foster a particular set

of “normative orientations,” or dispositions toward sex and sexuality. I interviewed 63 teens in

order to explore SBSE’s relationship to attitudes that might influence normative orientations to

sex and sexualities.

Adding to empirical studies that use samples in the southeastern and midwestern United

States, my sample is drawn specifically from two schools (one low-rank, high-poverty and the

other high-rank, low-poverty) in the same public school district of an economically troubled city

in the northeastern United States. In this dissertation, I explore place or context based similarities

and differences at two distinctly different schools within the same district. My research

contributes to the growing body of qualitative scholarship on SBSE that provides rich, nuanced

data about students’ perspectives. In particular, my findings contribute evidence to support

existing studies with both teens and adults that examine racialized, classed, and adultist

discourses surrounding SBSE (Fields 2008; Garcia 2012; Elliot 2012; Schalet 2012). For

example, most interviewees in my sample describe SBSE as invoking fear and stigma

surrounding STI, yet this trend was emphasized among students in a predominantly black and

low-income school context.

Existing studies of SBSE in the United States focus on political rhetoric and debate

surrounding adult concerns with policies, curricula, and outcomes (Doan and Williams 2010;

Fine and McClelland 2007; Irvine 2002; Kirby 2008; Kirby, Laris, and Rolleri 2007; Poobalan et

al. 2009; Rose 2005). Other scholarship criticizes SBSE (and the surrounding rhetoric) for

9
discussing sex and sexuality predominantly in terms of risk and danger (e.g., Epstein and Sears

1999; Tolman 2002); for reinforcing a construction of teens as essentially irresponsible and

hypersexual (e.g., Bay-Cheng 2003); and for presenting curricula that are both heteronormative

(meaning they assume, expect, and prefer heterosexual relationships to the extent of neglecting

homosexual relationships) and homophobic (e.g., Fine and McClelland 2006, 2007). In contrast,

cultural conservatives, even within academia, accuse SBSE of promoting a liberal ideology,

encroaching on parental rights while encouraging dangerously permissive sexual attitudes and

risk-taking among youth (George 2010).

Analyses of these cultural divides are illuminating, and reveal influences that shape the

delivery and content of SBSE. However, they provide little insight into the ways youth

interpretations of SBSE compare to adults’ interpretations. As such, the conclusions and

criticisms assume relationships among SBSE, teens’ attitudes, and practices that are, as yet,

underexplored. My research adds to scholarship on SBSE by asking the following questions:

How do students describe SBSE? What, if any, associations do teens make between SBSE and

their own attitudes about sex? Do their accounts differ by race, gender, class, or other

characteristics? To address these questions, I conducted interviews with 63 students from two

different school contexts in the northeastern United States (31 students from a low ranking urban

school serving low SES families, and 32 from a high ranking urban school serving higher SES

families).

Organization of the Dissertation

In Chapter Two, I analyze what students did and did not recall of their curriculum in

SBSE. Students affirmed concerns raised by scholarship on SBSE in the United States that,

regardless of approach, curricula employ scare tactics and emphasize a narrow set of lessons for

10
teens. However, there was variability across school context in the ways students framed their

memories of SBSE. In contrast to their privileged peers, boys and girls at the relatively

disadvantaged school indicated there was more emphasis on fear of STI symptoms and

pregnancy but less emphasis on how to manage or tolerate those threats. In contrast, advantaged

students more often recalled the lessons of SBSE in terms that recognized the real possibility of

STI and pregnancy, but emphasized those hazards as tolerable or manageable. At the same time,

students characterized unease in talk about same-sex relationships, but with differences across

school context in students’ sense of agency in debate about sexual identities and in what ways

such talk was deemed threatening. These differences suggest that while they perceive themselves

as “liberal” and “progressive,” students at the privileged school were learning stigmatizing

lessons via SBSE about LGB identities in ways that their disadvantaged peers were not. I argue

that these two findings constitute a case of institutional and organization roles in stigma

processes, the specific mechanisms of which include scare tactics and messages about tolerance.

Additionally, I posit that these lessons work with existing stigma to further disadvantage the

sexual health and wellbeing for already disadvantaged teens.

Where the second chapter focuses on how students talk about the messages from SBSE

that reflect adults’ perceptions of risk, the third chapter focuses more closely on students’

perceptions of risk. Teens’ perceptions of sex-related risks differed in meaningful ways from

what they saw as adults’ perceptions of risk. In Chapter Three I explore students’ reflections on

SBSE that point to concerns about issues other than STI and pregnancy. When considering sex

education, students perceived risks pertaining to both the SBSE classroom and to sexual

relationships. For example, interviewees’ risk perceptions were shaped by gendered expectations

surrounding emotion. Some students, more often at the disadvantaged school, saw girls as at risk

11
of severe emotional trauma as a consequence of having sex. Additionally, with important

variations across school context, girls and boys simultaneously perceived risks associated with

sexual violence and reflected limited knowledge about consent.

In Chapter Four, I present analyses of how high school students tackle the boundaries

between adolescent and adult, how they perceive adults’ attitudes about teens’ sex lives, and how

teens use adulthood as a framework for understanding SBSE. For example, across schools, most

interviewees recognized that adults understand adolescents as hypersexual. In this chapter, I

unpack differences across gender and school context in the ways that students both resisted and

accepted that construction. Thinking and talking about SBSE moved interviewees in this study to

critically examine the attitudes of adults in their lives as well as their own anticipations about

adulthood. Students saw themselves through the lens of their own anticipated adulthoods, of

which sex was an important part, but they did so with some difference across school context. I

argue that these differences reflect class-based differences in pathways to adulthood.

Finally, in Chapter Five, I demonstrate that my analyses contribute broadly to literature

on stigma and risk communication. Additionally, I explore the implications my research has for

critical feminist studies of SBSE and for studies of socialization to sex and sexualities, with

specific attention to the way those socialization processes reinforce social constructions of

adolescence and adulthood. I conclude by addressing some of the limitations of this study,

followed by a discussion of the implications of my findings for future theory and research on the

precise relationships between lessons in SBSE, students’ attitudes about sex and sexualities, and

lived experience.

12
 CHAPTER TWO: “THEY DID A REALLY GOOD JOB OF SCARING YOU”: FEAR,

TOLERANCE, AND STIGMA IN SEX ED

Sociologists and education researchers have long argued that schools play important roles

in organizing and reproducing dominant meanings and values across social fields in ways that

legitimize structural inequalities (e.g., Anyon 2006, 1980; Bourdieu and Passerson 1977; Giroux

1983; Lareau 2003; Milner 2004; Willis 1981; Bowles and Gintis 2001). School based sex

education, in particular, is an important institutional arbiter in the teaching and learning of both

official language and unwritten social rules surrounding sex and sexualities. For instance,

Carlson (2012) argues that the persistent social construction of adolescent sexuality as a problem

in SBSE, and in American culture more generally, is an obstacle to the development of healthy

sexual selves. Carlson illustrates how the history of SBSE in the United States relied on

stigmatization of pregnant teen girls, teen girls of color, individuals living with HIV, and

LGBTQQ individuals to bolster moral panics about adolescent sexuality.

Others point out that the educational system in the United States is a key institutional

engine that drives reproduction of stigma surrounding STIs, pregnancy, and sexual identity (Fine

and Fine and McClelland 2006, 2007; Fisher 2009; Herek, Saha, and Burack 2013; Luschen

2011; Mattiauda 2011; Ward and Taylor 1994). Similarly, Walters (2014) describes an attitude

of exclusion regarding LGBTQQ identities permeating all social institutions, including family

and education. In particular, Walters argues that tolerance, when treated as an end in itself,

prevents full and real inclusion, or what she calls robust integration of LGBTQQ identities into

social structures and mainstream cultures. There are at least two gaps in the literature, however.

First, with few exceptions (these include Doan and Williams 2010; Fields 2008; Garcia

2012), the bulk of this literature pays insufficient attention to the ways in which the meanings

13
internalized by students vary thematically as well as across different identities and inequalities.

Second, SBSE literature focusing on associations between curriculum and outcomes (Coyle et al.

2004; Kirby, Laris, and Rolleri 2007; Kohler et al. 2007) does not account for the relative agency

or passivity of adolescents, and leaves the impression that students internalize lessons from

SBSE uncritically.

This raises important questions that I explore in this chapter: What lessons do students

take away from sex education? How, if at all, do factors such as gender and school context

matter for students’ perceptions? I found that, while students encounter lessons about tolerance

in varying ways, the high school students I interviewed also linked fear to those messages in

ways that invoke stigma. Moreover, students varied by school in their characterizations of

SBSE’s lessons about bodies and bumps (STI, pregnancy, and childbirth) as well as its lessons

about identities and desires (gendered sexual preferences for partner and gender identities). On

the question of STIs and teen pregnancy, teens varied across school in how they associated

messages in SBSE with the ability to tolerate and manage those risks. Regarding discussions

about same-sex attraction in SBSE, messages about tolerance differed across schools in nuanced

ways.

Below I provide a review of relevant literature contextualizing the role of SBSE in stigma

processes that impede full inclusion of a range of different bodies and identities. I also situate

this chapter in literature that examines the ways in which tolerance sustains stigma processes. I

then detail my research design and methods before discussing my analyses and conclusions.

Sexuality, Schools, and Robust Integration

In a recent consideration of English literature curriculum as a potential site for SBSE,

author and educator Andrew Simmons considers the promise and pitfalls of allowing teenagers a

14
space in their classrooms for discussions about sex and sexualities. He argues that texts such as

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, which are often politically targeted with bans by parent and

faith-based groups, can offer valuable opportunities for critical thinking among students by

opening them up to topics that will resonate in their lives. He argues,

High school students have sex lives. They throw themselves into relationships like
lemmings. They cling to one another before and after classes and exchange
wistful looks from across a divide of desks and plastic chairs. When relationships
implode, they sometimes lose motivation and drink vodka before school. High
school students are sometimes beaten up by the people who claim they love them.
They are sometimes sexually abused by family members and acquaintances. They
see loved ones experience the same hardships. Sometimes they hate their bodies,
their hair, their eyes, and their voices. Sometimes they’re attracted to their friends
and they don’t know why (2015:1).

Simmons is arguing that in order for students to learn lessons, not only about sex, relationships,

ethics, and wellness, but also about literature and language, schools and curricula need to be

more inclusive of topics to which teens can and/or want to relate. Simmons is also illustrating the

range of relatable topics, a range that reaches beyond STI and pregnancy to include topics like

desire, including same-sex desire.

In confronting the roles that school curricula play in heteronormativity and homophobia,

Walters (2014) defines real inclusion, or what she calls robust integration, most concretely as

efforts to provide reading materials, use examples in classes, and assign writing activities across

all school curricula that do not “assume a heterosexual norm” (2014:262). Not only would such

actions acknowledge and represent LGBTQQ students, but engagement with curricula that

recognize gay, trans, and queer identities would simultaneously challenge straight and cis-gender

students’ assumptions about norms.

Where Walters’ use of the term is limited to inclusion of LGBTQQ identities, an

intersectional perspective suggests that robust integration involves the full inclusion of much

15
more than one’s location in a field of gendered sexual identities. Robust integration, as I define

it, builds on Walters’ notions of full inclusion in curricula and discussion. Robust integration is

not only full inclusion but also de-stigmatization of statuses targeted by stigma, including but not

limited to statuses such as LGBTQQ, low income, adolescent, racially oppressed, pregnant,

infected, teen parent, and sexually active. Robust integration involves keen awareness that

individuals are always situated in social structures depending on the intersections of their various

statuses. As Walters points out, robust integration is important for all students and to social

order. I argue that by broadening the application of robust integration beyond LGBTQQ

students, such representation and discussion could allow all students—including parenting,

pregnant, and/or teens affected by STI—to not only feel “more welcome, less likely to suffer

from self-hatred and fear, but the ground of what is “normal” will itself begin to shift” (262).

SBSE and Stigmatization: Bodies and Bumps, Identities and Desires

The ground of what is normal, while fraught and dynamic, achieves continuity through

processes of stigma at both the interactional and institutional levels (Foucault 1966; Goffman

1963; Link and Phelan 2001). I use the term stigma to include both affective dimensions (felt

normative stigma) and behavioral dimensions (enacted stigma) that rely on culture, power, and

structured social positions (Herek, Saha, and Burack 2013; Scambler 2009; Steward et al. 2008).

Both STI-related stigma (Parker and Aggleton 2003; Ott and Pfeffer 2009) and stigmatization of

LGBTQQ individuals (Birkett, Espelage, and Koenig 2009; Friedman et al 2011; Kosciw,

Greytak, and Diaz 2009; McGuire et al 2010) hinge on other status hierarchies in ways that can

threaten further status loss for individuals.

Researchers have argued that, through a combination of a restrictive language of

individual choice and the provision of insufficient information about how to negotiate safe sex,

16
schools stigmatize pregnant teens as “bad choosers” who have willingly made poor choices that

ruin lives (Bay-Cheng, Livingston, and Fava 2011; Edin and Kefalas 2005; Kelly 2000). Similar

language is often deliberately paired with acute emphasis on the negative consequences of sex

through the use of graphic and sensational images of both STI symptoms and narratives of teen

pregnancy, marrying morality to undesirable consequences of sex (Bay-Cheng 2003; Daillard

2001; Kantor 1993).

Ostensibly, such pedagogies are intended to discourage sexual activity. However, some

scholars suggest fear surrounding such messages does not influence decisions about sexual

activity as much as it influences attitudes about unwanted outcomes of sex. In fact, evidence

suggests that teens’ decisions about seeking STI testing and treatment are negatively impacted by

their perceptions of STI-related stigma (Cunningham et al. 2009, 2002; Fortenberry 1997). Even

if fear and shame may be successful in the short term for some teens as motivation to use

condoms or remain abstinent (Crosby et al 2003; Sales et al 2007), researchers argue that this felt

normative stigma “may also perpetuate the perception that testing positive for an STD carries

social risks, thereby decreasing some individuals’ likelihood of being screened,” (Cunningham et

al 2009: 229).

Examinations of how adult perspectives influence organizational decisions about SBSE

curricula illustrate that stigmatizing messages about STI and teen pregnancy are further steeped

in classed and racialized language, regardless of the approach that is advanced (i.e.,

comprehensive or abstinence). Specifically, Fields’ (2008) ethnography in three North Carolina

schools illustrates how parents, teachers, and school administrators simultaneously stigmatize

pregnant teens and reduce sexual health to reproductive outcomes by ignoring socio-emotional

and relational dimensions of sexual health and wellness. Fields’ interviews in a racially divided

17
cultural context revealed that, in debates about SBSE, abstinence education proponents and

comprehensive education proponents alike used an ostensibly race-neutral language that was,

nonetheless, informed by racial inequalities and racial stereotypes, a form of color-blind racism

(Apple 2000; Bonilla-Silva 2002; Gillborn 2005). In many of Fields’ (2008) interviews, adults,

muted systemic and structural conditions (e.g., constraints on access to resources, services, and

information), reducing them to individual choices and behaviors by both youth and adults. One

interviewee, a comprehensive SBSE advocate told Fields about her daughter’s classmates, “I can

pick out girls in her class who are going to be pregnant before they graduate from high

school…They dress suggestively. They are mature beyond their years. They know more

information because they have seen it” (60). Another interviewee echoes this, using coded

language to talk about non-white and poor families, attributing teen pregnancy among girls of

color to parental failure, “…many times they’re not pregnant by children of their own age, [but]

by older men. I’m talking about mothers who allow men to come into their homes and

impregnate their children. I’m talking about mothers who are basically not role models” (61).

Fields argues that controlling images of low-income African American mothers and their

daughters are at the center of such comments. Fields’ analysis shows that even when the focus is

on institutional practices, the failures of those institutions are reduced to the behaviors of

individuals who are marked as members of stigmatized groups.

Similarly, in interviews with Puerto Rican and Mexican mothers of teen girls, Garcia

(2012) found that mothers’ attitudes about teaching norms surrounding sex and sexuality were

often framed through ethnic stigma. For example, Mexican mothers tended to negatively view

Puerto Rican mothers as too permissive, while Puerto Rican women perceived Mexican mothers

as too conservative, failing to educate their daughters about sex. However, white mothers (and

18
their daughters) were discreditable, considered far too permissive in terms of sexual

socialization, to both Mexican and Puerto Rican mothers. Interviews with their daughters

revealed that the girls read these attitudes against other lessons from SBSE. These girls saw

themselves represented as Other in classes predominantly led by white women teachers and

taught through a framework of controlling images of black and Latina/o teens as excessively

reproductive. Garcia’s interviewees resented this depiction of them as hypersexual and

recognized a racialized double standard in media like Girls Gone Wild and popular films that

focus on white girls. One interviewee remarked that, unlike their peers of color, white girls and

women “can do whatever they want, hook-up with all kinds of guys, but they ain’t hos?! Yeah,

right” (Garcia 2012:101).

Such cultural and interactional scripts operate concurrently with systemic conditions such

as disproportionately limited access to consistent and quality health care among people in

poverty and communities of color (Adler and Stewart 2010; Gant et al 2012; Phelan, Link, and

Tehranifar 2010). In spite of evidence suggesting such social forces act on teens, narratives of

personal responsibility contingent on fear and shame are the favored tradition in institutional

practices aimed at reducing rates of HIV/AIDS (Brandt and Rozin 1997). Traditional SBSE

curricula, which appear to dominate states’ preferred approaches to sex education in public

schools in the United States (National Conference of State Legislatures 2015), use the narratives

described above. Such findings suggest that, far from cultivating robust integration, SBSE relies

on stigma as a mechanism of normative social pressure.

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Tolerance as Stigma

In a critical review of recent trends toward teaching tolerance, Suzanna Danuta Walters

argues that even benevolent attitudes of tolerance can operate to further structure social positions

for gays and lesbians (2014a), pointing out in a recent essay (2014b: 89) that

[t]o tolerate something indicates that we think that it’s wrong in some way. To say
that you “tolerate” homosexuality is to say that you think homosexuality is bad or
immoral…You are willing to put up with this nastiness, but the toleration proves
the thing (the person, the sexuality, the food) to be irredeemably nasty to begin
with.

When positioned as an end in itself, rather than explicitly understood as one part of a

multifaceted process of de-stigmatization, tolerance is merely a “benevolent act of

dominance toward its other,” (Walters 2014a: 262), a stigmatized Other.

Tolerance involves passive indifference and in its more benevolent forms, tepid

acceptance, as Danuta Walters describes it. Tolerance does not challenge nor change the

structural conditions under which certain marks on bodies and certain identities are

constructed as the spoiled Other. Tolerance continues to demand conformity to

heteronormative standards of sexual health and wellbeing, reproducing the dynamic that

Goffman identified as “the normal deviant” (1963). As such, tolerance can be understood

as a mechanism in processes of stigma. Tolerance cannot effectively contend with

homophobia or with fears of pregnant teens or people afflicted with STI because

tolerance preserves the righteousness of loathing at the core of those fears, preserving the

boundary between normal and deviant. Fear, then, is a crucial component of both

tolerance and stigma.

In stark contrast to robust integration, analyses of SBSE curricula find that same-

sex and/or same-gender relationships and other forms of sexual diversity are largely

20
omitted from SBSE curricula in favor of lessons that reproduce a gender binary and

heteronormative (if not explicitly homophobic) narratives of love, sex, and romantic

relationships (Carlson and Roseboro 2011; Doan and Williams 2010; Fisher 2009;

Hendricks 2011; Schnidel-Dimick and Apple 2005; Weis and Carbonell-Medina 2000).

Additionally, teens confronted with STI and pregnancy are also denied full inclusion

through SBSE. Through messages that pathologize pregnancy and treat infection as

deviance, the young people who incur these statuses are treated as Other.

For teens facing STI, pregnant teens, and LGBTQQ teens, adults in positions of power

(e.g., parents, school administrators, teachers) often construct individual teens as having made

deliberate and individual-level decisions to be “at-risk” by displaying sexuality. This takes the

focus away from institutions and systems and places it on individuals in ways that deny the

influence of schools as agents of socialization. However, researchers find that factors associated

with school context including school locale, high levels of participation in football, and

aggregate levels of religiosity of student population are organizational-level factors that predict

experiences with depression, diminished self-esteem, fighting, and failure among same-sex

attracted youth (Wilkinson and Pearson 2009). This research explores teens’ perceptions of

SBSE’s efforts among students in two distinctly different school contexts.

The students I interviewed demonstrated similarities and differences in perceptions of

SBSE across school context. In recounting their experiences of sex ed, students at both schools

told me that messages about STI and pregnancy stood out. At both schools students took away

the normative lesson that talk about sex and sexualities is and should be characterized by feelings

of fear and discomfort. I suggest that variations in representation of infection and LGBTQQ

people at each school play a role in how differences in fear and stigma were invoked across

21
school context. Further, I argue that these differences are evidence of schools’ role in

constructing dominant meanings and how values are reproduced across social fields to legitimize

structural inequalities and act as barriers to robust integration.

Methods and Data

Interviews with students open up a space to see and hear teens’ as they engage in the

process of making sense of their experiences with SBSE. By asking such questions of teens in

two different school contexts, I am able to address questions about possible patterned variations

in the associations between teens’ perceptions of SBSE and factors like gender, socioeconomic

status, and racial demographics. As such, I interviewed two sub-samples of students recruited

according to quota and convenience sampling strategies. To allow for the emergence of patterns,

yet still keep the data manageable, I interviewed at least 15 girls and 15 boys at each school.

I conducted 63 interviews with high school students sampled according to gender and

school context at two distinctly different schools, Area Accolades High (AAH) and Partition

High (PHS). Both schools were within the Addleton City Public School district (APSD).

Pseudonyms are used for all organizations, places, and individual participants. In my interviews,

as part of the assent process and in attempt to give teens some ownership over how they are

represented, I gave interviewees the opportunity to select their own pseudonym. Ten students

took advantage of this and in Appendix A the names of students who selected their own

pseudonym are marked with an asterisk.

I determined school context based on Department of Education data about academic

performance and socio-economic status of the student body at each school. AAH is a

consistently highly ranked, low-poverty school and, on multiple indicators (see Figure 2.1),

starkly contrasts PHS. For example, scores on standardized English Language Arts (ELA) tests

22
which are meant to assess students’ literacy and ability to interpret and apply written

information. Higher ELA scores indicate not only higher student performance, but are also

interpreted as indicators of teacher performance. Students in schools with high aggregate ELA

scores may enjoy the advantage of being surrounded by peers and educators who encourage

mastery of standard formal English, which is highly valued by gatekeepers in positions to

evaluate students aiming to advance academically and socioeconomically.

Figure 2.1 School Context Indicators: Partition and Area Accolades High Schools Relative to
District and State

Similarly, on-time four year graduation rates signal that a school is successfully

educating students to advance according to institutionalized age-grade expectations. Higher on-

time graduation rates also reflect lower drop-out rates, which speak to the relative worth school

may have for students in each context; PHS students may not find that school is a pathway to

socioeconomic mobility, whereas AAH students do. The proportion of students at each school

23
receiving free or reduced lunches is an indicator of overall socioeconomic status of the student

body at each school.

However, these dimensions to not represent the full conceptualization of school context.

To fully understand school context and its importance to this study, it is crucial to acknowledge

that Addleton is one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States. I designed this

study to compare across school context as a means for gaining insights into the ways that

racialization and stratification influence what students learn about their bodies and about

sexualities. By limiting the levels of institutional difference to within district (as opposed to

across district, which would be a proxy measure for comparing across urban versus suburban

and/or rural differences), I sought to gain purchase on intra-organizational patterns in students’

perceptions of SBSE.

All participants in this study were public high school students between the ages of 14 and

18 who had taken the high school SBSE curricula (see Appendix C for sample characteristics).

While sexual socialization begins in early childhood (Martin and Kazyak 2009; Martin and Luke

2010; Martin, Luke, and Verduzco-Baker 2007), the range of messages conveyed by SBSE is

likely to have increasingly overt salience as youth navigate their ways through puberty into their

teens, accumulating experience and observation along the way. Further, in the United States

among those who engage in male-female vaginal intercourse, their first time is on average

around age 17 (Chandra et al. 2005; Martinez et al. 2006). This is a conservative estimate of the

age at which youth become sexually active because it does not refer to any sexual encounters that

precede genital sex and it excludes those that involve same-sex partners. Interviewing students as

closely as possible to their reception of the curricula optimizes their ability for recall. According

to contacts at each of the two sites, grades nine and ten are when most students receive the high

24
school SBSE curricula. While I did not have insight into exactly what curricula were used or

how they were delivered to students, my sense (from speaking with administrators and attending

committee meetings) was that each school used a comprehensive curriculum in that they did

teach students about contraception and condoms.

Throughout the data collection process I kept in daily contact with faculty assigned by

administrators to assist me. Upon voluntarily responding to recruitment efforts within each

school, interviewees at each school received parental consent documents from the faculty. Once

students returned signed parental consent forms, teachers scheduled meetings for me to interview

students. In interviews, I asked questions intended to discover how teens describe their

experiences and perceptions of SBSE, and how they make SBSE meaningful in context of

messages about sex and sexuality from other sources. In most cases, the teachers escorted

students to the interview location. At that point, the teacher left, I received and reviewed the

signed parental consent forms, and the student and I went through assent procedures. I entered

each interview with scripted questions in hand, but approached each as a guided conversation,

prepared to abandon scripted questions in favor of working with interviewees’ narratives,

probing their stories about SBSE (Bogdan and Bilken 1998).

In order to gain insights into the lessons students received in and took away from SBSE, I

asked each interviewee to tell me their strongest memory of the class. In the few cases where

interviewees struggled to recall anything about the class, I probed by asking questions such as

“what sticks out in your mind when you think about sex ed,” or by asking them to think about

how the teacher introduced sex ed, or what topics were discussed. In this way, I was able to elicit

some remarks from every student on what they experienced in SBSE.

25
 Unlike students’ recollections of curricular focus on STI and reproduction, it was more

difficult to elicit insights into SBSE’s coverage of other possible topics, including

communication in romantic relationships, same-sex relationships, and/or identities and

experiences that did not conform to cis-gender (e.g., gender conforms to dominant expectations

based on anatomical sex), heteronormative scenarios. Anticipating this would be the case, I

included direct questions in interviews asking girls and boys whether or not SBSE included

information and/or discussion of LGTQQ issues, in most cases asking specifically about same-

sex relationships.

As an adult stranger to the students I interviewed, I had some concern about establishing

rapport. However, given my background work at a drop-in center for youth, through which I

gained experience interacting with teens on terms largely set by them, I did not sense that rapport

was difficult to establish in most interviews. Of course, I recognize that even within the

situational contexts of our interviews, evident and/or perceived lack of correspondence across

dimensions such as age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status existed and as such, are

influences for consideration. While such boundaries likely shaped what students presented,

hindering disclosures, I perceived this to be most evident in a few interviews with boys. Rather

than undermining the validity of my findings, I see this as strengthening them as it bears on what

was salient and tolerable for these students in the context of a conversation about SBSE across

boundaries such as age, race, and gender.

In an effort to establish rapport, during assent procedures I described the purpose of the

interviews, explaining to students that I wanted to learn what they thought about adults’ efforts to

teach them about sex and sexuality. In most interviews, students introduced the reality of unease

and awkwardness surrounding cross-generational talk about sex. This was typically something

26
that emerged when I asked students to imagine what they would tell another student who was

about to take sex ed who was inquiring what the class was like. Further, when asking boys and

girls to reflect on adults’ beliefs about teens and sex, I often made statements about “the talk”

and framed it as something that is often experienced as “weird.” Through exchanges like this, I

found that interviewees tended to relax their postures and even laugh. When appropriate within

the context of conversations, I commented on my own memories of SBSE or the experiences of

teens in my own family. Through such interactional strategies, I aimed to present myself as open

to hearing teens’ more critical impressions about SBSE.

To supplement interview data, I also took field notes and made memos throughout the

data collection process (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995). However, the data analyzed in this

manuscript are from interviews. I analyzed transcripts and field notes first by open-coding each

one, once with pen and paper, and then again in Atlas.ti. I then conducted multiple rounds of

focused coding until themes and patterns began to emerge. I developed a coding scheme through

an iterative and collaborative process, beginning with the initial round of open coding by myself,

then working with a team of undergraduate students on a sub-sample of 20 transcripts. After

establishing key concepts and themes in the team work, I used those insights to finalize a coding

scheme. Between transcription and reporting of interview data, I aimed to preserve as closely as

possible all speech patterns, grammar, and pronunciation while simultaneously maximizing

readability. For example, I edited students’ statements to establish enunciation and to remove

some, but not all, fillers such as “like” and “y’know” and “stuff like dat.”

My analysis does not provide records of respondents’ “own stories,” rather, the analysis

is based on the collaborative work of meaning-making. Rather than a straight forward report of

interviewees’ responses, these analyses are the result of balancing face value against the reality

27
that my situated identity bears on the questions I asked, and how my presentation of self as an

adult white woman passing as middle-class bears on the responses interviewees’ were willing to

give. Each of the former bears on the subsequent analysis I report here for readers. It is such a

collaborative process through which meaning “is constructed at the confluence of sites of

narrative production and the work of situated storytellers, listeners, and readers” (Gubrium and

Holstein 2009: 197).

These strategies allowed me to gain insights into the overarching inquiry of this

dissertation that explores students’ perspectives on formal sex education in school. Through this

particular design and the aforementioned data collection methods, I was able to address the more

specific guiding questions for this chapter: What do students take away from SBSE, particularly

where STI, pregnancy, and LGBTQQ identities are concerned? Do such lessons differ across

factors such as school context and gender? What might account for these differences or

similarities?

Fear and Tolerance: Official and Hidden Dimensions of SBSE’s Curriculum

Interviewees in this study illustrated that feelings of fear and apprehension are significant

to teens as they make SBSE meaningful. I analyze interviewees’ accounts regarding two distinct

yet overlapping categories of sexuality: undesirable outcomes of sex that mark the body and

gendered categories of identity and desire. In teens’ accounts, what emerged was a theme

surrounding what is and is not tolerable. Through students’ comments that reflect both

acceptance and resistance of such messages, I show how these lessons were both similar and

different across schools. I conclude this chapter by arguing that lessons about tolerance may act

as obstacles to the de-stigmatization of a range of statuses.

28
Bodies and Bumps

Sixty-two percent (n=39) of the sample told me that their strongest memories of SBSE

centered on STI and pregnancy as threats about which students should feel fearful. Of those

students, 70 percent did not directly associate methods of prevention with those memories.

Sparky, a 14 year old boy at AAH, recalled that SBSE was about “the STDs because…it was

pretty disgusting.” Erica Johnson, at PHS, echoed Sparky’s reaction, telling me of images shown

in her sex education class of “…gonorrhea and chlamydia and stuff like dat. They were nasty!”

Similarly, Izzy at AAH explained her primary reason for remembering the unit on sex from her

health class was because “…it was so gross! That one…it was so gross, so it was just, I just

remember it a lot more than anything else.”

Fear also surrounded what students learned about pregnancy in SBSE. While he framed

his perception in terms of the ability to prevent it, Marlon at AAH suggested that SBSE’s lessons

teach about pregnancy as something that will “mess up” or “ruin” a person’s life in adolescence.

Rosie was one of the few students at PHS who seemed critical of SBSE’s efforts to use fear as a

deterrent, rolling her eyes as she described, with a tone of annoyance, a strategy involving guest

speakers’ stories about how they “ended up being pregnant at 16 and had to deal with everything

that brings with it.” Charlotte at PHS suggested that pregnant teens face a climate in which they

“are scared to say something,” and that pregnant teens feel they “have to be so secretive about it”

as a means of self-preservation. Rachel at AAH also characterized teen pregnancy in terms of

fear, but emphasized the potential for devastating social impacts, telling me that “it’d be really

sad if…pregnancy went way up just because people are uneducated. I know it’s really bad now,

but just imagining all of the uneducated people, it would be even worse.” Rachel told me later in

our interview that she understood her responsibility regarding sex was to “be smart about it.

29
Don’t be like, getting STDs and getting pregnant and all that.” Such reflections on sex ed and its

relevance to their lives invoke tropes of the teen parent that simultaneously magnify teen

pregnancy as a social problem and reduce it to a matter of personal decision-making.

Marlon’s comments provide an example of how students at AAH differed from PHS

students in perceptions of SBSE’s messages about individual agency. For him, the message

seems to be that if “you take the right decision” and “have protected sex” then one can avoid, in

his words, “messing up your high school life and…all that stress and difficulties.” Indya at PHS

also perceived SBSE as endorsing the message that a pregnancy during adolescence is life

ruining. For her, the lesson from SBSE was “just don’t have sex ‘cause you gonna get pregnant.

Basically if you’re in high school and you have a baby, it’s gonna ruin your life. Just wait ‘til

you get older. That’s all.” Waiting until one was “older” was a common refrain among boys and

girls at both schools, one that I explore below and in more detail in Chapter Four. However,

Indya was among the few students at PHS who criticized fear-based strategies in SBSE. She

resented this message, challenging it as a lie aimed at scaring teens away from doing what they

want to do. She framed sex ed’s effort to scare her away from sex as similar to misleading

messages in children’s literature, saying “It’s like them fairy tales. Don’t tell me I’m gonna grow

up to be a princess. I’m not gonna grow up to be a princess. Don’t tell me if I have sex, I’m

gonna get pregnant. ‘Cause if I use protection, I’m not.” Indya simultaneously perceives and

challenges this message, telling me that

A baby is not gonna ruin your life. As long as you take care of the baby and you.
You still go to school. And you just push yourself harder then. I think they just
sayin’ that ‘cause they don’t want you to do it. Or they don’t want you to go
through what they went through, yeah, when they was younger.

30
An outlier across both schools and across gender, Indya’s statement stands up against schools’

efforts to cast teen pregnancy as something life threatening. Her stance is critical and resistant to

constructions of teen mothers that can be especially damaging for teen mothers of color.

Ethnographic research finds that, in schools, pregnant teens and young mothers face

enacted stigma that inaccurately constructs them as unintelligent and promiscuous; as threats to

the power of their own parents; as developmentally less mature than peers; as desperate and self-

loathing; as perennial “welfare moms;” and as neglectful and abusive (Edin and Kefalas 2005;

Kelly 2000). Indya’s and Marlon’s comments show how, across school contexts and gender,

whether students accept or resist the message, teen parenthood is represented in SBSE as a

catastrophic hazard.

While PHS and AAH students shared the perception that SBSE’s message is that

pregnancy is undesirable until later in life, Marlon’s comments suggest that, unlike students at

PHS, AAH students perceived that lesson as secondary to the message that they have agency and

the ability to reduce such risk. AAH students, while still encouraged to view teen pregnancy as

life ruining, were more equipped to talk about that as a tolerable threat, one that was inherently

distasteful but also easily avoided. While this may have the positive effect of bolstering AAH

students’ sense of agency, it may also have implications for their attitudes about pregnant teens.

Personally, they can tolerate the threat of viruses, bacteria, sperm and eggs but there is an

implicit message about tolerance: whether or not one can protect Self from them, teens who are

pregnant or afflicted by STI are inherently objectionable, discredited, and/or discreditable.

Compared to their peers at PHS, students at AAH more often questioned or criticized the

emphasis on fear in lessons about STI and pregnancy. Tyra, shrugging, described the class’s

focus on STI as “I think it was mostly, like, trying to scare us away from [sex].” Her schoolmate

31
Kurt shared that perception, saying with a tone of sarcasm in his voice, “…they did a really good

job of scaring you with all the STDs.” This recognition of fear of STI as a rhetorical device at

AAH may be a function of increased access to health services and health-related information

outside of school. However, it may also be a related to AAH students’ tendency to explicitly

challenge adults’ perceptions of teens as stereotypes, a trend that I explore in detail in Chapter

Four.

In contrast to their peers at PHS, a greater proportion of AAH students saw threats of STI

and pregnancy as manageable or tolerable. Where most PHS students associated the lessons of

sex ed primarily with hazards and not with lessons about protection, most AAH students

emphasized the ability to manage and tolerate those possibilities as SBSE’s lesson. Some AAH

students described strongest memories as “use protection…condoms,” and “[our teacher] talking

about…using condoms and stuff like that,” while others described lessons about prevention

and/or protection in conjunction with the hazards of STI and pregnancy. For instance, Jessica’s

primary take-away was “…condom use…was…the main stressor of the whole, everything,

which was…STDs and make sure you use a condom every time.”

Amaya had a very similar perception, telling me “[he] just gave us, like, straight

up…what you could get if you ever are at risk with non-protected sex. And he gave us…places

you could go and…I really remember that ‘cause he tried to cement it in our minds [that] you

have options, and I really liked that about it.” Students at Accolades integrated information about

infection and pregnancy with information about protection. This may normalize both prevention

and treatment in ways that allowed students to discuss realities and responsibilities surrounding

sexual health. AAH students acknowledged that hazards such as viruses, bacteria, and gametes

exist and are sexually transmittable, but they also spoke with confidence that there are strategies

32
they can practice to limit their exposure. AAH students’ responses suggest they explicitly

recognize SBSE as related to their ability to tolerate risks involved in exposure to those hazards

through sexual activity.

In contrast, most students at Partition High framed their strongest memories of SBSE

narrowly in terms of threats of infection and pregnancy. Mentions of protection and prevention

emerged later in some PHS interviews, but in most cases it was presented as knowledge from

other sources beyond the SBSE classroom. Fifteen year old Martina told me that what she

remembered most from sex ed was a “…sexually transmitted [disease] project …where we had

to make posters and like actual pictures of hands and eyelids,” ostensibly afflicted with

symptoms of infection. “That was really memorable ‘cause it was,” she cringed as she recalled

the images, “…yeah,” shaking her head “no” as if to shake the images out.

Figure 2.2 Strongest Memories of SBSE’s Lessons by School

Partition students pointed to curricula and/or instruction, especially the use of

photographic images, as an influence on their perceptions that threat of disease or pregnancy was

33
the main lesson SBSE. Ronnie explained to me that the use of images in his sex ed class left an

indelible impression, telling me “I still remember them diseases. The visuals…I’ll never forget

them. Like, I can close my eyes and see them right now.” This use of images also left a strong

impression on Frankenstein2, who spoke at length about them:

The posters! In the cafeteria! It was so disgustin’, so disgustin’!! People are eatin’
and there’s people’s private parts with bumps and stuff. It was just nasty…In the
cafeteria. Like, how bold are you people?!? It’s disgustin’!!

In addition to infection, PHS students spoke about the impacts of pregnancy. Some

responses involved exclusive focus on how pregnancy threatens the body, as with Joey, a 15 year

old boy at Partition whose most powerful memory of SBSE was “the baby video,” and

particularly this video’s depiction of “when the baby came out and how painful it was for her to

go through.” Sandra at PHS, highlighting a rare phenomenon of human reproduction, told me

that her strongest memory of sex ed was “when the babies is in her and sometimes how, when

twins can get…I don’t know the word…stuck together.” In Sandra’s memory, rather than

normalizing sex, SBSE focused on sensational imagery that hovers at the boundary between

normal pregnancy and abnormalities that may be perceived as horrifying.

Visual representations emerged as salient factors in the lessons interviewees learned in

sex ed. Students’ descriptions of images used in SBSE differed across school context. Like

Rachel, who recalled a lesson that “had a whole bunch of diagrams,” when students at Area

Accolades spoke of images they talked about diagrams and drawings of reproductive systems. In

contrast, Partition students described photographs. This distinction may bear on what SBSE

means for students exposed to different types of images. The realism of photographed symptoms

of infection and video footage of childbirth amplify the message that pain and physical

symptoms (i.e., visible stigma symbols) should be feared as likely consequences of sex for teens.
2
Pseudonym chosen by student.

34
 When linked with other elements of classroom instruction, the images used in SBSE

make what some scholars would describe as a spectacle (Hall 1997) of infected and/or pregnant

Others. Images are used to evoke particular affective responses in the audience. Rather than

trading on fear with sensationalized photos that induce horror and disgust, the representative

quality of drawings depicting organs and systems of the body emphasizes what is considered the

normative ideal and natural state of human bodies (no students mentioned images or curriculum

illustrating intersexed bodies). This distinction in representation, in conjunction with other

contextual factors, may play a differentiating role in what students take away from sex education.

While bodies and bumps populate the explicit, official lessons that interviewees take

away from sex education, teens also learn lessons about the identities and desires that inhabit

those bodies. Students’ accounts of sex education also invoked stigma to make sense of gender

identities, sexualities, and sexual desire.

Identities and Desires

As I noted above and explore further in Chapter Four, several students indicated that sex

and reproduction were important parts of the adulthoods they desired for themselves. However,

neither girls nor boys at either school suggested that they had learned from SBSE how they

would discern when acting on sexual desire was appropriate. The vagueness of such indicators

was reflected in phrases used by boys and girls at each school that echoed Indya’s remarks (see

page 30) about sex ed’s instruction to wait “‘til you’re older.” The closest any student came to

naming such indicators was Shay at PHS, who told me that in her experience “it’s like a

boy…we just be makin’ out and stuuuuff [giggling] and then it just be like, clothes come off and

I knew what’s about to happen, so we just went with the flow. And flow is nice.”

35
 Shay was an outlier in this regard because among those students who did talk about it,

readiness was not treated as something concrete. Readiness seemed to exist in the minds of the

students I interviewed as something that was simultaneously mysterious and obvious. As Kate

explained, rather than a focus on sex in the context of relationships, her SBSE curriculum “was

more about like the physical sense,” something she seemed to recognize as lacking “we know

that it’s a very intimate thing but we didn’t really learn about like, when you should or like ‘is

there a time or a place,’ really?” Sparky also hinted at this question, saying he wished SBSE had

confronted the question of “how do you know when you’re ready?” Shay’s remarks about “flow”

and Sparky’s question suggest that teens expect or believe there is a discrete and discernable

moment at which fear of STI and/or pregnancy no longer outweigh desire. Further, Shay

suggests that knowing one’s readiness is only possible through experience, where Sparky

suggests that his question could have been asked and possibly answered in SBSE. Very few

students suggested SBSE addressed or allowed them to ask about sexual desire in any direct or

explicit way.

In fact, roughly three-quarters of all interviewees indicated that very little, if any,

attention was given to gender identities or issues related to desire and/or sexual identities in

SBSE. At AAH, some students, primarily those in ninth grade, had the advantage of a peer

education module in their SBSE class. Thirteen students at AAH mentioned an experience in

which two students (not interviewed), who were at least one year ahead of those in the class,

presented information about gender identities. Kate described the lesson as focused on “the

difference between sex and gender and…the things to call them...what they define themselves as

and…that you should ask them, like, what their name is and you refer to them with their name.”

Kyle recalled “it was like ‘ohhhh, call them zhim.’ And I was like, ‘mmm, I don’t think I wanna

36
be called zhim, mm-mnn’.” When I asked Kyle if and how same-sex attraction was discussed in

the class, he told me that he did not recall and, if it was talked about, it was not memorable.

Kyle’s and Kate’s accounts show cognizance of the distinction between sexual preference

and gender identity. However, some students did not make this distinction and equated gay and

lesbian experiences with transgender and transsexual experiences. When I asked Robert how his

sex ed class, if at all, covered same-sex relationships, he told me about the peer educator lesson

in which “we learned about, like, transsexuals and stuff like that.” Rachel similarly conflated her

peers’ presentation on transgender identities with “the gay sexuality.” Similarly, Tony told me

that “two students who are, I think, lesbians in our school…they had a whole presentation, slide

show.” Tony also remarked that he liked the opportunity to have peers who “completely

understood” the topic educating him and helping him to better understand gender and sexual

diversity. However, Tony indicated not so much that he understands same-sex attraction or

transgender experiences, but that he understands the expectation to save face and demonstrate

what Brian saw as the lesson about same-sex attraction. Brian described SBSE’s content about

same-sex relationships as “not really, like, the issues involved with it. Just, like…acceptance of

it, I guess. Y’know, being tolerant.”

At AAH, same-sex relationships were considered, as Jim Kirk3 described, “a touchy

subject, in terms of our society.” Some interviewees at AAH appeared uneasy when I asked if

SBSE covered topics like same-sex relationships. Alisia’s posture hardened when I asked and

she said flatly, “no. We did not talk about that at all.” Kevin accounted for this missing or evaded

curriculum in terms of necessity, abruptly telling me that he did not “think there was…much of a

3
A reminder to readers: I provided students the option to choose their own pseudonym. It is not an accident nor an
oversight that this student’s pseudonym is also the name of a character from Star Trek.

37
need to teach about it,” his words, tone, and body language all suggesting that he was uneasy

with hearing this question.

In part, Samantha echoed Alisia and Kevin, saying that “the main focus when they talked

about sex ed was not so much gay relationships [but] more of um, a heterosexual type of

relationship.” However, Samantha’s perspective was more critical than her peers, telling me

We actually didn’t get too much into that…and it probably would’ve been helpful
at the time because that’s, I think, a time in a person’s life when it’s really hard to
express your feelings towards someone…and it’s confusing at times because you
don’t know what’s going on. So, I think that would’ve been a really helpful thing
to learn during that time, but there wasn’t really a lot of focus on that.

Samantha appeared to be considering SBSE’s relative silence on same-sex relationships and

LGB identities as detrimental to experiences of adolescence. Echoing Walters’ (2014)

concerns about tepid acceptance and benevolent expressions of sympathy, Amaya at AAH

pointed to tolerance in how she made SBSE’s coverage of sexual diversity meaningful. She told

me that she learned “things that I had no idea that went on and I kinda like sympathized with like

transgenders and, like, gays and stuff because of everything that was said that they went through,

mentally and physically.” Jessica described similar feelings when telling me about SBSE’s

directive to tolerance of LGBTQQ teens:

We talked about how like, it’s acceptable if you like a boy and you’re a boy, or if
you’re homosexual or heterosexual or transgendered or anything else, like, um,
that you’re not alone. [The teacher] gave us websites to go on if you thought that
you might be, like, even bi-curious or something, that you could go and just figure
out, help yourself figure out who you were…if you didn’t feel comfortable talking
to someone else about it.

The teacher’s directive appears to be that LGBTQQ are personally responsible for seeking

information and support through a website but not in school, at least not in SBSE. Another

student at AAH, Sparky, reiterated this rather remote attitude of enduring or indulging LGB

identities, but associated it more explicitly with school context “I mean, it’s a pretty liberal

38
school, so they weren’t like, ‘gay is bad and it’s not right!’” Still, for many AAH students, it

seemed important they to convey to me that there was no outright condemnation of same-sex

relationships.

Kurt at AAH laughed nervously as he explained that same-sex relationships were the

“crown and glory of awkward topics, and…while it was covered…and time was made

for…questions [or] to talk about it…none of the students really wanted to talk about it, because

it’s so touchy.” Kurt went on to characterize the lesson as “these kind of people are out there…

it’s not like they’re not people. You still have to treat them like real people, y’know. And they

can’t necessarily control it.” Kurt’s take-home was that “you gotta be able to” tolerate sexual

diversity. A peer, Eric, gave me more insight into this, saying that even though “there wasn’t

really much of an uproar or any sort of disdain,” when same-sex relationships came up in class

“it caught me off guard at first.” Eric did not expect it to be part of the curricula. He went on to

explain that, out of discomfort, he and his classmates did not talk openly about it in class, but

quietly received the lesson that “it’s okay to be who you are.” It is meaningful that discomfort

prevented further discussion, because for Eric, this is “totally how I think it should be in today’s

society considering that people are pretty accepting nowadays.” Eric appears to be learning that

acceptance manifests in uncomfortable silence rather than discussion.

Several students at AAH reflected awareness that there were larger forces at work beyond

those within the sex ed classroom, beyond dynamics between peers or between teacher and

student, that structured the content of sex ed. Kyra explained, resonating with her AAH

schoolmates’ accounts of why LGB relationships did not come up in SBSE,

just because, I feel, like, that’s a really sensitive topic with people. So I feel like if
they brought it up…it woulda struck a nerve with some people and, I don’t know,
probably would’ve blown up into something really ridiculous, so like, really
dramatic.

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“Blowing up” or “uproar” were two reactions feared by AAH students, suggesting that

talk about gender and sexual non-conformity in a heteronormative context was a threat to

the order and authority of school context.

Among all interviewees, Hannah most explicitly articulated the influence that school

context may have had on curricula and instruction in sex ed at AAH. Hanna explains,

I think that, right now, homosexuality is still a very controversial issue. Not that
it’s…not talked about in my school, ‘cause my school is very liberal so it’s very
open. Not a lot of bullying goes on in our school at all. And I don’t think there’s
any [bullying of] openly gay people at my school. But it’s kind of still a moral
issue where if a teacher explains things about homosexuality and that there’s
transgendered people, then [the kids] go home and talk to their parents about it
[and] the parents don’t agree with it…they could sue to the school or something. I
think that has a lot to do with it.

Hannah’s comments reflect organizational and institutional efforts to contend with

cultural divisions. As a girl who identifies as bisexual, Hannah’s own access to discussion and

information from SBSE that focuses on her lived experiences is limited, constraints that she sees

emanating from social forces beyond the SBSE classroom. This stands in contrast to the parallel

perception at PHS, where the concern was more focused on peer relationships across individual

identities.

Like Hannah’s comments above, her AAH schoolmate Sparky’s response, when I asked

him to reflect on SBSE’s treatment of sexual diversity, suggested that his class and his school

promoted an attitude of tolerance,

basically, don’t treat them any different… treat ‘em, that’s just who they are, so,
be accepting. You may not agree with it. But still, you don’t go harassing them
and calling them names. Be accepting of them. And make sure they feel like
they’re welcome, and don’t ostracize them, basically.

Recall that Sparky also indicated AAH was “a pretty liberal school.” Implicit in Sparky’s

argument is that there are, seemingly outside the liberal school he attends, inclinations to be

40
something other than accepting and to ostracize LGBTQQ identified students. The message

Sparky describes involves the lesson to be tolerant, which constituted the entirety of his

comments on the matter. This is meaningful given that Sparky identified as bisexual, suggesting

that he may be facing messages about tolerance that apply to his subjective experience of Self.

Sparky may be facing lessons that he is to be tolerant of Self. His comments here also suggest

that, through SBSE in his particular school’s context, he may learning some of the interactional

equipment required for playing the roles of both normal and deviant (Goffman 1959:130-131).

The language of tolerance and avoidance of LGB sexualities was used more frequently

among respondents at AAH than at PHS. While most students at PHS did not indicate that same-

sex relationships came up in their SBSE class, those who did talk about it suggested that while it

was controversial, controversy was not deliberately avoided in the way that AAH students’

described. In Sam Jenkins’ memory, same-sex relationships emerged in SBSE as something, at

least in the classroom, open to controversy in a way that was safe to engage. Sam described a girl

in his class who “liked both genders” engaging in a debate with “someone who was

straight…bein’ rude against the same sex that she liked.” He described his bisexual classmate’s

response to the rudeness, telling me that with support from the teacher, she stood up for herself

by saying (according to Sam’s recollection), “y’all can’t judge me. I like what I like. Y’all like

what you like. Everybody’s entitled to be happy at some point.” Sam said he felt supportive of

his bisexual classmate.

However, Sam was among a relatively small number of students who indicated that gay

and lesbian identities were explored in the SBSE classroom. Most of his peers seemed to share

the view of Erica Johnson, who felt that, even though “I know a lot of people who has come out

sayin’ that they do like” the same sex and/or same gender, this was not discussed in SBSE.

41
James, who identified as male, as more feminine than masculine, and as same-sex attracted,

commented on the role SBSE plays in stigmatization, particularly marginalization by omission.

“They could talk about…same-sex [relationships]. Some people don’t understand about same-

sex, so they should break that down more and not just talk about…well, opposite.” Similarly,

Roxanne at PHS explained that “…not everybody likes the same thing…some girls like girls,

some girls like guys,” but she could not recall how or if this was covered in SBSE.

Among all 63 interviews, Porter at PHS was the only student to talk about her own sexual

identity relative to lessons in SBSE. Porter met me in the classroom dressed all in black except

for a pair of rainbow suspenders and a white and pink button below her left shoulder that read “I

LIKE GIRLS!!!” She told me about her experiences in LGBTQQ activism well before I began

recording, during assent procedures. She was a senior at PHS, cheerful and eager to talk about

her participation in bringing the first Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) to the Addleton school

district. With an attitude of hopeful tolerance toward homophobia, Porter described

discrimination by other students at PHS, behaviors that she attributed to misconceptions about

same-sex attracted people. She told me, “some people don’t even wanna talk to you ‘cause you

gay. Like, ‘cause they think that you’re gonna try to hit on them or somethin’ like that. And

that’s not the case. Like, we all just wanna talk. Just because we gay doesn’t mean we gonna hit

on you.”

Porter also pointed to an important parallel to those fears, an underlying desire among

straight and gay teens to breach boundaries and build friendships across difference. In talking

about her commitment to the GSA she explained, “‘cause people’s so homophobic it’s crazy,”

describing experiences in which some peers considered forgoing friendships with gay and

lesbian peers based entirely on their sexual preference. “[They say] ‘ohhh, noooo! I don’t wanna

42
be ‘round her because she’s gay,’ but in actuality you do want to, but you just doin’ it ‘cause

your friend is like,” here Porter changed her tone, impersonating a homophobic peer issuing

warnings about social contact with gay and lesbian peers at school “’Uh-uh, don’t do that, she

gay,’ or ‘he gay, don’t do that.’”

Through this impersonation, Porter reenacted a scenario of relational aggression in which

one character is threatening social exclusion and enacting stigma. Threats and/or practices of

social exclusion are examples of enacted stigma and have the potential to elicit fear in

individuals. Porter’s accounts of her experiences and observations suggest that she and her peers

contend with both enacted and felt normative stigma, noting that “it’s just, people doin’ stuff just

because they see someone else doin’ it and they not bein’ they self.” In Porter’s narrative, we can

see reflections of the context surrounding relational choices for teens. She is describing pressures

on straight and questioning teens to avoid desired friendships and contact that cross perceived

boundaries between gay and straight. Although Porter explicitly described these pressures as

emanating from beyond the SBSE classroom, she also saw SBSE as an opportunity for her peers

to confront and disarm homophobia. Although Porter showed resistance, she also described a

context in which the normative messages stressed that conformity to heterosexual relationships

was expected by many. In our interview, I learned that Porter had been exposed to many

opportunities to talk about sex and sexualities, which she linked to her commitment to pushing

for conversations and alliances across boundaries like gay/straight.

Porter’s unique experiences may have contributed to her willingness to resist stigma by

being out and by pursuing dialogues about same-sex relationships in the face of fear and unease

surrounding talk about sexual identity. However, another factor may influence this. Porter and

two other students at PHS remarked to me that their SBSE teacher defied heteronormative

43
gender norms. Porter described the teacher as “out,” telling me that “she walked in the pride

parade with us.” Jason (PHS) described his SBSE teacher as unique because “she had like, manly

ways…she coached football, that’s why.” The presence of a teacher who represented LGBTQQ

social identities may be related to the difference across schools in how students viewed talk

about same-sex relationships in SBSE. No students at AAH mentioned having teachers or other

adults in school who were out as bisexual, lesbian, or gay. However, AAH students had

interactions with older peers who delivered a lesson on transgender identities. What I found

remarkable was that students who described this lesson did not describe it as a “touchy subject”

or as controversial. However, some of these same students, when asked about SBSE’s coverage

of same-sex relationships, suggested that this topic was too controversial to be explored in class.

Conclusions

Based on the analysis in this chapter, I suggest that SBSE’s messages about tolerance

relating to both bodies and identities are fear-based and, as such, are mechanisms of stigma. Fear

emerged in interviews as a mechanism of teaching and learning tolerance as a normative

framework in SBSE. This was most evident among students at AAH regarding LGB

relationships, and at PHS regarding STI and pregnancy. In contrast to their peers at PHS, AAH

students enjoyed a school context that included better resources, a reputation for better post-

graduation outcomes among its students, and lower aggregate levels of poverty. In this school

context, SBSE endorsed expectations that students could tolerate threats that sex poses to the

body. In terms of contending with untimely or unwanted pregnancies and STIs, this is potentially

empowering and highly desirable in that it acknowledges realities but may empower students

to—at the very least—discuss means through which they can tolerate those realities and avoid

hazards. Tolerance in this regard, is a strategy of health-preservation.

44
 However, as Walters (2014) argues, tolerance regarding identity norms and desires poses

threats to the individual and political wellbeing of students. Unlike their peers at PHS, who

described same-sex relationships as open to controversies in which they could participate at the

interpersonal level, AAH students described same-sex relationships and LGB identities as

“touchy subjects” that could not be explored but ought to be tolerated. While such lessons may

be well-intended, tolerance relies on fear to preserve the moral righteousness of sexed and

gendered binaries, perpetuating stigma. This suggests that, in spite of their desires and intentions

to find safety and full acceptance in schools, straight and gay teens alike recognize that LGBTQ

teens do not enjoy robust integration and may not necessarily find opportunities in SBSE to

address this.

Further, the advantaged students I interviewed were more apt to acknowledge the

influence of cultural and/or institutional factors when it came to the question of same-sex

relationships. These more privileged students were more inclined to point to fears of political and

organizational level controversies as influences on discussion of these issues in SBSE. However,

this influence went unquestioned and unchallenged in most comments by students at AAH. It

made sense to them that, even at their liberal and accepting school, issues and information

surrounding same-sex relationships were “touchy subjects,” too controversial to talk about and

explore in SBSE. Disruption of social order and/or active engagement in controversy was feared.

Among the students at PHS who spoke about same-sex relationships and sexual diversity,

there was more willingness to engage openly and directly with controversy. Fear and unease

surrounding sexual identities was described as present in sex ed, but those students who spoke

about it at PHS did not characterize it as a “touchy subject” in the way their peers at AAH did.

Controversy was acceptable at PHS where students did not characterize it as something to avoid.

45
This might reflect differences in the relative politicization and normalization of same-sex

relationships across school contexts. Interviewees at PHS also spoke about the presence of an

openly gay teacher who taught SBSE, something that no students at AAH brought up. Instead, at

AAH, students made reference to “this school” and “our school” as one that was liberal,

progressive, and tolerant. Still, in this reportedly tolerant context, discussions about same-sex

relationships were not described as tolerable in SBSE, rather they were described as threatening

to a “veneer of consensus” (Goffman 1959) because the subject is controversial. PHS students’

descriptions suggested that surface agreement was sacrificed in exchange for students’

opportunities to state their positions and to actively participate in that controversy.

These stigma messages act as obstacles to robust integration by preventing de-

stigmatization of a range of statuses. Where Walters limits the application of robust integration

to these categories of identity that bear on sex, gender, and sexualities, I maintain that my

findings suggest there is also room to apply robust integration to lessons about STI and

pregnancy. Based on students’ reflections, infected individuals, pregnant teens, and sexual

agency were all represented in very narrow ways at both AAH and PHS. The level of disgust

associated with STI and the notions of pregnant teens as bad choosers who live ruined lives has

implications to how much support teens might find and/or offer to those who find themselves

facing such circumstances. In communities that face high rates of STI and teen pregnancy,

communities mirrored by the student body at PHS, these attitudes can further marginalize

individuals who face compounded stigma.

I continue my analysis of findings from this study in next two chapters. In Chapter Three,

I examine teens’ perceptions of risk pertaining to both sex and SBSE. In Chapter Four, I consider

46
the ways that adults and adulthood were frameworks through which interviewees made SBSE

meaningful for their own lives.

47
 CHAPTER THREE: INFORMATION, KNOWLEDGE, AND COMPETING
PERCEPTIONS OF RISK IN SBSE

Across disciplines including psychology, public health, education, social work, and

sociology, there is a vast literature on adolescent sexuality. Traditionally, this literature has

framed adolescent sexuality as dangerous and risky. Further, such work is largely constituted by

a focus on adults’ perceptions of sexual risk taking, such as unprotected intercourse and two

primary hazards, teen pregnancy and STI. As I illustrated in the previous chapter, it is those

perceptions of risk that shape students’ perceptions of SBSE’s primary lessons. In response to

this trend, there is a growing body of scholarly work aimed at reframing adolescent sexuality and

romantic relationships. Rather than danger, this new direction of research emphasizes the normal

and positive dimensions of the developmental process, including sexual relationships (e.g., Bay-

Cheng 2010; Carlson 2012; Giordano 2003; Tolman and McClelland 2011).

In the present chapter, I explore how teens balance SBSE’s lessons against their own

perceptions of risk. Specifically, I address the following questions: How do teens describe their

own perceptions of risk related to sex and sexualities, particularly in light of lessons from SBSE?

What, if any, information does SBSE offer students regarding their own risk perceptions? What

lessons do teens learn about sexual violence in SBSE? Are there differences across gender and/or

school context?

In what follows, I review literature on risk perception and discourses of danger in SBSE.

This situates my analysis in organizational and social constructionist studies of risk. I aim to

bridge this work with a body of work on SBSE framed by critical feminist, queer, and

intersectional perspectives by reviewing literature that introduces a distinction between risk and

hazard, particularly as applied to youth risk behavior. My analysis demonstrates that while teens’

perceptions of risks involved in sex overlap with amplified messages about adults’ perceptions of

48
risk, teens saw SBSE as relevant to other threats on wellbeing. Those include judgment from

others in the classroom, and gendered expectations of emotions related to having sex. Further my

findings show that students simultaneously perceive risks associated with sexual violence and

reflect that they derived limited knowledge about consent from SBSE. My analyses show

similarities and differences across gender and school context.

Risk Perceptions, Teens’ Sex Lives, and SBSE

Existing research focusing on how communities and societies manage adolescent health

risks highlights the disjuncture between adult and adolescent perceptions of risk. In particular,

there is substantial evidence that behaviors (e.g., smoking, drug and alcohol use, and sexual

activity) viewed as risk/risky by parents, health professionals, and other adults are actually

sources of identity formation, pleasure, and strengthened peer relationships for young people

(Bay-Cheng, Livingston, and Fava 2011; Denscombe 2001; vanExel et al. 2006; Green, Mitchell

and Bunton 2000; Harrison et al 2011; Hunt, Evans, and Kares 2007; Mitchell et al 2001;

Spencer 2013; Stanley 2005). The same behaviors that adults view as dangerous can contribute

to improved well-being and psycho-social health among teens. For example, in their study of

teens’ romantic relationships, Giordano, Manning, and Longmore (2010) found that there were

significant associations between sexual experiences and socio-emotional rewards, including

feeling cared about by and a deep sense of connection with another person. Additionally,

researchers have found that feelings of entitlement to both sexual pleasure and sexual safety are

shaped not only by what teens learn from family, school, and media, but also by what they

experience and in ways that interact with socio-emotional wellbeing (Impett and Tolman 2006;

Phillips 2000).

49
 Of course, experiences of safety and pleasure are related to perceptions of risk and

danger. Psychometric approaches to risk research indicate that individuals subjectively define

risk based on factors that range from the psychological to the cultural. Personal control over and

severity or dreadfulness of the hazard, concern for future generations, knowledge-related

characteristics such as observability, awareness, and familiarity with a particular danger are all

factors that underlie perceptions of risk (Slovic 1987, 1992; Fischoff et al 1978; Renn and

Rohrmann 2000). Unfortunately for educators and policy makers, psychometric research has

failed—in large part because factors like knowledge, values, feelings, and cultural context are

not static—to produce and reproduce findings that inform the relationship between scholarship

on risk perception and practical responses to risk management (Gooby-Taylor and Zinn 2006), of

which SBSE is one.

Information, Knowledge, and Risk Perception

From a sociological perspective, there may be more to be gained in the way of

explanation through a focus on institutional and organizational efforts to influence risk

perception. The social amplification of risk framework (SARF) emphasizes how images, signs,

and symbols are used by organizations and institutions to magnify particular risks for certain

audiences (Pidgeon, Kasperson, and Slovic 2003). This framework has typically been applied to

studies of disasters and studies of industrial and technical systems (see Pidgeon, Kasperson, and

Slovic 2003 and Slovic 2013 for reviews). Based on studies of radioactive and nuclear waste

management, Roger Kasperson and colleagues (1988) proposed SARF as a framework for

explaining and predicting risk communication and risk perception. The framework begins by

assuming that without observation of and communication about actual or potential threats to

health and safety, individuals and groups will not perceive them as relevant. Through the

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selection and transmission of particular signs and symbols, various “stations of amplification”

transmit signals to society about the seriousness of hazards and risk and, where cultural

controversy is intense, there will be ripple effects that generate stigmatization of various targets

(e.g., places, behaviors, bodies) and extend beyond those directly affected (Kasperson et al 1988;

Kasperson and Kasperson 2005; Slovic 2013). Through this process, certain attributes, marks, or

characteristics simultaneously receive high visibility and are constructed as threatening.

In the preceding chapter, I detailed the messages that are amplified to students in SBSE,

specifically threats of STI and pregnancy to health, and the threat of same-sex relationships to

social order. Risk signals embedded in SBSE predominantly involve images and metaphors of

disease and danger that inform students’ interpretations and mark particular bodies and

communities as locations of risk. Bodies, places, and spaces are important for young people as

they learn and practice boundary making. Previous research suggests that young people’s risk

perceptions are often based on their whether they view such bodies and places as in-group or out-

group territories (Green, Mitchell, and Bunton 2000; Tulloch and Lupton 2003).

In a relatively recent review of research on risk perception, Paul Slovic argues that

although institutions and large organizations set the terms for discourses about risk, there has

been limited attention given to the roles of specific organizations in social processes surrounding

risk (2010: 326). Given their roles as organizations in service of education as a social institution,

schools are important conduits of information about sex and sexualities. School districts select

curricula which are constituted by particular pieces of information and the symbols through

which to communicate specific messages to students. The cultural norms and values of school

districts and individual schools influence the selection of symbols used to convey particular

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messages by amplifying certain pieces of information (Kasperson and Kasperson 2005; Slovic

2013).

Unlike media and peer networks, schools and families amplify the dangers of sex rather

than the appeal of sex (Levine 2002; Shoveller and Johnson 2006). Social amplification of STI

and teen pregnancy occurs against a backdrop of existing social and cultural attitudes about sex

and sexualities. Within this context, the positive and pleasurable aspects of sexual behavior do

not surface within open streams of conversation between teens and their parents and/or teachers.

This results in a structure of relations in which adolescents’ social, emotional, and psychological

experiences surrounding threats to sex and sexual health are effectively marginalized by adults at

school and at home (Austen 2009; Spencer 2013).

Public response to these threats is amenable to application of both SARF and moral

panics literature (Cohen 2002; Murdock, Petts, and Horlick-Jones 2003). Moral panics are

intense social reactions to perceived threats to social order and involve trends of communication

that galvanize public outrage for varying durations and incite deliberate attempts at social

control, often in the form of political action to contain the actual threat and/or perception of

threat (Cohen 2002; Herdt 2009; McRobbie and Thornton 1995). Sociologists have built upon

moral panics literature to analyze public discourse surrounding sex and sexualities, as well as the

construction of social problems. In the ensuing ripple effects of social amplification, responses

include “concern” and “worry” (Best and Bogle 2014), “moral shock” (Irvine 2002; Jasper

1998), and “great fear,” which John Gagnon has defined similarly to moral panics but stipulates

that great fear garners more intense social anxieties that endure over long periods of time

(Gagnon cited in Herdt 2009). Schools are crucial agents or stations of social amplification

because they are trusted sources that inform knowledge creation for young people. Further,

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regarding sex-related risk, information disseminated in sex ed is deliberately selected to induce

particular social responses. Students are expected to leave SBSE knowing that STI and

pregnancy are potential and dreaded consequences of sex.

Efforts at SBSE rest on implicit and explicit assumptions that knowledge is the key to

intervening in the risks that adults’ perceive as threatening to adolescent health. Sociological

explanations of the dynamics between risk and knowledge look first at divisions between lay,

everyday knowledge and expert knowledge. These explanations are critical of the assumption

that expert knowledge emanates from an objective, disinterested standpoint. Risk must be

understood in terms of social, cultural, economic, and political shifts over time. The objective

positivism underlying expert knowledge can be illusory and can preserve the power of the status

quo (Wynne 1982). It can also obscure the importance of situated knowledge, as “[l]aypeople

have specific knowledge and a perspective which draws on their experience of scientific

expertise, but is also linked to local and everyday knowledge and their specific position in

society,” (Gooby Taylor and Zinn 2006: 46). Individuals’ perceptions of risk and their responses

can only be understood through their embeddedness in social groups (Douglas and Wildavsky

1982) because risk is socially constructed, even in spite of sometimes natural origins of hazard.

The forms of social organization in groups influence members’ interpretation of hazards and

consequently their construction of risks. Depending on status and power, some groups and

individuals may face negative sanctions and stigma for engaging in information seeking and/or

information transfer efforts that reveal their situated knowledge (see pages 18-19 for summary of

evidence of this in SBSE from Garcia 2012).

This focus on the social embeddedness of knowledge suggests that people are not

necessarily irrational when they engage in risky behaviors, but pursue specific forms of

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knowledge and experience based on value systems which are culturally distinct from but not

inferior to the knowledge and experience of experts (Lupton and Tulloch 1998). In addition to

barriers to socially relevant information, teens may also encounter other normative pressures that

complicate their access to and use of a variety of measures endorsed by experts and aimed at

preserving sexual and emotional wellbeing. For example, knowledge about how to put on a

condom might not be easy for teen girls to introduce in situations where this is relevant if they

think they may face threatening reactions from partners (Fields 2008; Garcia 2012). Some

evidence suggests that even with knowledge, individuals do not perceive themselves as at risk

(Bay-Cheng, Livingston, and Fava 2011). Such gaps have been attributed to overload of

information presented in ways that are boring to students (Hoppe et al 2004) and to a mismatch

between pedagogies and lived experiences in a world where sexual mores are changing and some

related freedoms are, at least superficially, increasing (Allen 2005; Fetene and Dimitriadis 2010;

Hill et al 2013; McKee, Watson, and Dore 2014).

Teens exist in social worlds of competing normative pressures. Critical feminist research

emphasizes the contradictory and oppressive expectations embedded in messages about gendered

heterosexuality such as the good girl/bad girl dichotomy (e.g. Phillips 2000). Other narratives

privilege masculine meanings and desires and, in spite of knowledge about safe sex practices,

can leave girls and women vulnerable to the threat of and/or the actual experience of unsafe

sexual encounters, including sexual violence (Allen 2006; Hird and Jackson 2001; Holland et al.

1998; Jackson and Scott 2004). For example, based on her school-based ethnographic research

with school boards, educators and students, Fields (2008) finds that teachers’ and parents’

messages about individual decision-making and communication strategies take the form of

ambiguous warnings rather than practical advice. Specifically Fields describes a lesson in which

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a teacher, aiming to inform students’ knowledge of safe sex, advised girls to demand

communication about sexual health in their relationships. However, in this lesson the teacher did

not offer strategies or resources for resolving girls’ concerns about the potential for boys or men

to get mad and respond with anger and/or violence (2008:85-87).

Similar processes have been identified in research on how industrial practices involved in

handling pesticides shift as the product moves from experts at the manufacturing end to lay

workers at the delivery end. In particular, Wynne (1992) showed that experts can be naïve about

their assumptions of process uniformity at various stages from manufacture to use. Fields’

findings are similar to Wynne’s in that they illustrate how expert knowledge is, in many cases, at

odds with other normative pressures exerted on decision-makers at the level of practical, lived-

experience. Such findings help to explain the knowledge-practice gap.

Despite adults’ intentions, it is unclear exactly how information influences adolescent

behavior. While teens prefer to get information about sex from their parents and teachers

(Somers and Surmann 2004), due to adults’ discomfort and misinformation young people do not

get enough information from them (Doan and Williams 2010; Frankham 2006; Guilamo-Ramos

et al. 2008; Hilton 2010; Hoff, Greene, and Davis 2003; Lindberg et al. 2006; Luker 2006;

Martin and Luke 2010; Measor 2004). Studies suggest that, in the absence of sufficient and

relevant information from preferred sources, many teens actually get their information about sex

from media, including the internet, and peers (Bay-Cheng 2001; Brown, Keller and Stern 2009;

Coleman and Testa 2007; Sutton et al. 2002; Zimmerman 2015), where reliable and accurate

facts are available, though not necessarily assured. Schools are in unique positions to provide

young people with information about sex and sexualities because schools have systems in place

to assure that evidence based, peer reviewed curricula constitute the information delivered in

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SBSE. Further, teens value schools as sources of information. Among the teens I interviewed,

while most indicated that there were ways it could be improved, all but one told me that sex

education should be taught in school.

The Playground: An Analogy for Reframing Perspectives on Risk and Adolescent Sexuality

Social constructionist, critical, and feminist perspectives on SBSE intervene in dominant

discourses about adolescent sexuality as dangerous, arguing that narratives of danger coopt

epidemiology’s analytical language of “at risk” and use it as code to talk about African

Americans, youth in disadvantaged schools, and young women in poverty (Best 1990; Ferguson

2001; Fields 2008; Luker 1996; Males 1999). For example, without using explicitly racialized

language, among educators, activists, and parents Fields (2005) observed concerns about the bad

influence of corrupt Others and about children having children. She argues that the language of

innocence as under threat was used to place low-income and African American girls at the center

of debates about both sex education and public welfare. Fields further argues that this plays out

in ways that, regardless of any emancipatory intentions, further oppress young people at the

intersections of race, class, and gender, by reducing their agency to narratives of failed personal

responsibility and/or victimhood.

Rather than an “at risk” view that orients thought around eliminating danger, social

constructionist thinking enables an approach to sex and sexualities as arena for play, pleasure,

and leisure. This opens up a space for analogy between sex and the playground. In fact, there is a

history of both scholarly and popular attention to sexual play, especially among young people

(see Best and Bogle 2014 for a review). For youth at various points in the processes of being and

becoming sexual subjects, adults’ concerns place constraints that influence when, where, and

with whom such play can happen. As Best and Bogle suggest in their analyses of legends about

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elementary school children engaging in sexual play, the playground is a scene that adults

construe with great ambivalence,

On the one hand, people argue that curiosity, roughhousing, and the like are a
normal, natural part of growing up, a way of learning necessary lessons. On the
other, they worry that play is consequential, that it can harm children or lead them
to develop in socially undesirable ways. But there is little agreement about how to
distinguish between “good” and “bad” play (2014:14).

The playground itself is a site for risk perception and risk-taking, making it an apt

analogy for thinking about adolescent sexuality. Here I focus on a specific iteration of the

playground. Child development scholars and practitioners in Europe have, since the World War

II era, dedicated attention to adventure playgrounds. In contrast to what North Americans might

think of when imagining a playground (e.g., swings, slides, see-saw) constructed by adults to

meet multiple safety codes, adventure playgrounds are relatively unstructured outdoor play

spaces. While designated, equipped, and supervised by adults, these spaces operate to encourage

child-directed play (Brown 2007; Chilton 2003; Frost 2006; Staempli 2009). Children can use

tools such as hammers and saws with materials like wood, plastic, cardboard, and metal to

reconfigure the spaces as forts or obstacles courses. Some adventure playgrounds include

opportunities to care for animals and tend to gardens. Others equip staff with matches and

lighters which children can request to start fires which they can then use for cooking or as

lessons in how to build and control a small fire. Following provision of instructions and rules

about how to use equipment, adult supervisors called “play workers” encourage risky play by

observing at a distance and intervening only when they see children violating rules, exceeding

their ability to manage risk, and/or in distress (von Baldegg 2014). Perceptions of high degrees

of freedom and choice in adventure playgrounds are key features of their appeal to children

(Brown 2007; Frost 2006; Jenkins 2006).

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 An apparent difference between European and North American approaches to risk and

uncertainty involves the former’s more nuanced interpretation of risk. Like play-workers, health

and safety commissions across Europe operationally distinguish between two key concepts—risk

and hazard—that shape interpretations of threats to health and safety (Lofstedt 2011; von

Baldegg 2014). In the United States, risk and hazard do not appear to be conceptually distinct in

discourses of public health and safety, including adolescent sexual health. Adventure

playgrounds operate on the principle that hazards need to be either physically removed or

carefully constructed as hazards through adult provision of information, instruction about how to

safely manage those hazards, and rules about behavior. Through a combination of instruction and

hands-on experience, risks become important components of learning and knowledge creation.

Unlike most efforts at SBSE, adventure playgrounds operate on the assumption that risk-

taking in play is a sign of positive and healthy development (Ball 2004) and offers opportunities

for knowledge-building (Mitchell, Cavanagh, and Eager 2006). Adults who supervise them

encourage risk-taking. Studies of children at play suggest that, through risk-taking, children learn

and cultivate competencies in risk assessment, risk tolerance, and risk management (Aldis 1975;

Ball 2002; Boyesen 1997). For example, in research on “play fighting” Aldis (1975) showed

that, rather than ignorantly and irrationally, children approach play deemed dangerous by adults

gradually and with caution, deliberately and progressively encountering hazards as they learn

how to assess and ensure safe practices. At the same time, there is compelling sociological

evidence that young people also learn gendered, raced, and classed lessons about power and

inequality through play (Pugh 2009; Thorne 1993).

Given their capacity for bringing pleasure and enjoyment, romantic and sexual

relationships can be viewed as a form of play. Intimate and sexual relationships can be important

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contexts in which adolescents strengthen their capacities for emotional engagement and caring

for others (Giordano, Manning, and Longmore 2010). Building upon these distinctions between

risk and hazard, reward and danger, I suggest a reconsideration of how the notion of risk is

applied to SBSE’s framework of adolescent sexual activity. I define risk as the experience in

which teens can perceive and make decisions about how to manage challenges or obstacles

(including hazards). A hazard is something that may or may not be obvious or perceived, and can

result in injury, illness, or other undesired impacts on physical or socio-emotional wellbeing,

including diminished status.

By considering sex and sexuality akin to playgrounds, sources of pleasure and fun that

introduce opportunities for teens to build skills in risk evaluation and risk management, I am able

to address new questions, using my data, surrounding what is gained and lost in SBSE’s

amplification of STI and pregnancy. Specifically, I ask: How does SBSE inform teens’

evaluation of the risks and hazards related to sex? How, if at all, do teens relate SBSE to their

perceptions of challenges, obstacles, and hazards that interfere with pleasure and enjoyment? In

what follows, I detail the design and methods I used to gain purchase on how school contexts and

gender influence students’ perceptions of risk vis-à-vis SBSE.

Methods and Data

By comparing narratives from students at two different schools in the same district, I am

able to add to literature that addresses structural influences on SBSE. Whereas much scholarship

focuses on the ways that cultural variations drive macro-level forces at the level of national,

state, and district policies surrounding the relationships between risk discourses and sex

education, my design allows me to gather insights on within district patterns.

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 My initial questions in interviews asking students to tell me their strongest memories

from sex ed yielded insights into the messages about risk sent and received through SBSE.

However, throughout interviews and regardless of the aim of specific questions, themes related

to risk emerged in students’ responses. Where students spoke about the imperative to be cautious

or careful, when they spoke about protection and prevention, I interpreted this as indicative of

risk perceptions.

In order to gain further insights into students’ perceptions of risk and how these were

meaningful in light of SBSE, I asked each interviewee questions inviting them to be critical of

SBSE. First, I asked students what they thought about adults’ concerns. Second, I asked students

whether or not they thought SBSE should be provided in schools, why they thought it should or

should not, and what (if anything) about SBSE they thought could be improved. Lastly, I asked

students questions about specific topics, including same-sex relationships, emotional aspects of

sex and relationships, and sexual violence. Initial interview questions about students’ strongest

memories informed the emergent themes related to risk perceptions. Similarly, interview

questions about adults’ attitudes about teens and sex also revealed students’ own concerns about

what might be at risk in cross-generation conversations about sex.

While I had not originally intended to ask interview questions about gender dynamics in

the SBSE classroom, it became evident early on in interviews with girls at PHS that this was a

point of relevance for students. By asking subsequent interviewees about the gender composition

in their classrooms in conjunction with the questions about what advice they might give other

students about the class, I was able to gain insights into how gender shaped students’ experiences

in SBSE. Further, I did not introduce the notion of gender differences related to emotions or

teens’ attitudes about sex. Without my prompting, both girls and boys pointed to gender as an

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important influence on teens’ attitudes about sex. This was particularly so when I inquired about

SBSE’s coverage of the emotional dimensions of sex and relationships, which yielded insights

into risk perceptions at PHS.

These strategies allowed me to gain insights into the overarching inquiry of this

dissertation that explores students’ perspectives on sex education in school. Through this

particular design and the aforementioned data collection methods, I was able to address an

additional guiding question for this chapter: how, if at all, are school context and gender

associated with differences in students’ perceptions of risk vis-à-vis SBSE? In what follows I

present analyses of interviewees’ perspectives on SBSE, tracing connections between students as

perceivers of risk and schools as stations of risk amplification.

Making Sense of Others’ Risk Perceptions

Across both school context and gender students conveyed to me that information in

SBSE curricula are largely disconnected from their realities. Not only did students’ strongest

memories of SBSE cluster around threats to the body (as illustrated in Chapter Two), they did so

through a scientific and academic lens. Eric at AAH explained that “around the time we were

doing sex ed…we were learning about reproduction in biology. So you kinda had more of the

sciences aspect of it, and that was, I feel…easier to learn because you link it to each other.” Eric

suggested that a scientific approach reduces unease in the classroom. However, this emphasis on

an academic and impersonal view separates sex from the emotional experiences of students. An

example of such perspectives on SBSE is one of the few interviewees who disclosed personal

experience with sex. Lucy at PHS explained to me that:

I think sex ed is really like the concrete facts about it. Like, if you do have
unprotected sex with someone who has HIV, then you risk. [And] the risks and
reproduction…I know exactly how a baby is gonna be born from sex ed. I know
the first, second, third trimester. I know like, all those facts. But I didn’t learn the

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 whole picture. I just learned a couple, like concrete…straight answers…the things
that have answers, that’s what I learned. But the things that I really had to think
about when I was doing it, I didn’t learn that.

Lucy characterizes talk about sex in school as informative and educational, but as if there was

not actually discussion about sex itself in sex ed. As Indya at PHS says, SBSE was about disease

and pregnancy, and “we didn’t really learn about the rest of it.” Eric at AAH told me that he

didn’t think SBSE was “really teaching you about it,” but instead about what could go wrong.

Frankenstein (PHS) explained that sex ed did not teach about “how you do it…‘cause that comes

naturally.” Italics in these quotes indicate shifts in tone or other verbal emphasis in each

interviewee’s speech.

In fact, the type of information Lucy, Indya, Eric, and Frankenstein are hinting at is more

likely to reach students through media and peers than via messages endorsed by parents and/or

schools. As Hannah at AAH explained, “online is a really good resource…you’ve got all this

information on the net at your hands. I learned a lot about it from my friends and stuff too, like,

before I had health.” When I asked him how SBSE compared with other sources of information

in terms of what he knew about sex and sexuality, Kyle at AAH explained, “I think that sex ed is

much more like, you’re taking science class or something. And then the movies are more like,

the actual sex of it.” Kyle’s response suggests that popular media—which audiences consume

because they find it engaging, vibrant, and meaningful for its relation to lived experience—is a

more powerful source of knowledge about sex for these reasons. Mentions of more practical and

situationally relevant knowledge about sex suggest teens are aware that some dimensions of sex

are missing from SBSE. It may be that these missing dimensions of sex are also the non-rational

and non-scientific things that make sex appealing and offer opportunities for pleasure and

enjoyment.

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 While my data cannot answer them, these findings raise questions about previous

findings suggesting that teens prefer parents and schools as sources of information about sex. It

may be that teens know parents and teachers are more reliable or trustworthy sources of factual

information, but that the elements of sex and sexuality the cannot be taught (e.g., sensations,

affections, personal preferences) are better informed through sources through popular media.

However, while no students in my study indicated that it did so, SBSE may have the potential to

serve as a space in which teens could critically reflect on what they see in media, seeking

clarification and/or exploring attitudes about norms and values.

Situations in which SBSE would be most relevant personally for teens are also situations

that can be highly emotional and passionate. Physical intimacy is bound up with psychological

and emotional intimacy to the extent that reproductive functions and STIs are not always salient

in the experience. Unlike the clear logic of SBSE, experiences in which contraception and/or

abstinence would become relevant do not always proceed in such controlled and linear ways.

Learning facts in classes can be much easier, or at least more straight forward, than learning

preferences related to relationships and sex, including but not limited to preferences for specific

acts, particular ways of interacting, and both gender and sex of partner. Learning that viruses can

be sexually transmitted and how long they can survive in a human body may be easier than

learning how to talk with a partner about STI testing. Even learning vocabulary may be far less

complex than learning to express and interpret feelings, how to communicate expectations and

desire, or how to access resources when needed. Curricula, vocabulary, and scientific processes

often come with specific formulas for teaching and learning. Romantic and sexual relationships

proceed according to social and cultural scripts. In a climate where institutional and pedagogical

practices construct the latter as outside the realm of teaching and learning, students may struggle

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to incorporate SBSE’s lessons into practice within their relationships, either because those

relationships are not yet a part of their experience, or because the lessons do not adequately

represent their relationships.

The students I interviewed did not generally describe SBSE as an exchange in which they

were either able to represent their lived realities or feel like they were listened to by adults. In

fact, Frankenstein told me about teachers, “they don’t ever ask us [if] we wanna know more or

do we know enough.” Rather, the impression I came away with was that, for girls and boys at

both schools, SBSE was largely a passive encounter in which teachers presented information and

students were expected to quietly receive it. This passivity and the generally unidirectional

character of SBSE may result in young people’s disengagement, limiting the ability of teachers

and curricula to provide adequate support and advice. This may explain some of the knowledge-

practice gap, or why teens struggle to map lessons about risk-reduction onto practice.

While interviewees acknowledged that STI and pregnancy were real hazards, this

recollection of curricular focus on those dangers does not automatically lead to practices that

reduce risk. Evidence of this exact point emerged in a few interviews with girls at PHS. For

example, Porter at PHS pointed out that even though students learn that they should use

protection, “it just slip your mind sometimes.” Latisha at PHS emphasized that, while teens

might get messages that they should protect themselves by abstaining, in the context of their real

experiences with sex and relationships, “when you’re in a relationship with somebody…it’s hard,

you know, to try to think and say ‘hey, I don’t wanna do this,’ [when] at the same time, y’know,

I have a feelin’.” At PHS, Rosie explicitly told me, “I don’t think that if they learn about what

could happen from unprotected sex…that’s gonna stop them from what they’re doing. It might

scare them for a second, but it’s not gonna stop them.”

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 Further, amplification of STI and pregnancy did not necessarily limit teens’ to the same

primary set of risk perceptions held by adult stakeholders. The teens I spoke with identified

hazards in addition to infection and pregnancy, constitutive of what they perceived as risk.

Interviewees’ perceived hazards, including: stigmatization in SBSE classrooms, girls’ emotional

responses to sexual encounters, sexual violence, and adults’ attitudes about teens’ sex lives. I

discuss the first three categories of hazard below. The fourth is covered in more depth in Chapter

Four.

Stigma as Hazard, Knowledge as Risky in SBSE

On the one hand, most students—like many adults—experience discomfort in cross-

generational and public conversations about sex, preferring to avoid it. On the other hand, teens

experience a need to know, as Sandra at PHS and 16 other interviewees across both schools

emphasized, “I dunno. I just think it’s somethin’ you need to know about.” However, others’

judgments in SBSE classrooms were important to interviewees and surfaced in ways suggesting

that the need to know could introduce hazard for some students in SBSE. Sandra told me what

happened when she asked her teacher questions like “…what parts of your body will make you

wanna have…will make you get the feelin’ like you wantin’ to do it? And…how does the boy

get the, produce the stuff to put in the girl?” When I asked how her teacher responded, Sandra

told me all the teacher would say was, “Hormones.” Sandra elaborated, “If you asked her that

question, she would look at you like...” mimicking her teacher, Sandra narrowed her eyes and

raised her head back, making a suspicious and judgmental expression, “‘is you doin’ like that?’

And I be like ‘I’m just aksin’, I just wanna know.’” Sandra’s experience, in which she had to

defend her pursuit of answers, resonates with Garcia’s (2009) findings with Latina girls whose

sex educators judged as hypersexual when they sought information about sex and sexuality,

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responding with incredulity to girls’ efforts to seek information. Sandra, like many teens in this

study, reflects how stigma is perceived as a hazard in SBSE. Seeking information and/or

knowledge involves risk-taking for Sandra, because it exposes her to the hazard of stigma.

I learned from interviewees that presenting oneself as clearly on one side or the other, as

knowledgeable about sex or as ignorant about sex, is an act of risk for teens. Teens face

judgment from adults if they present themselves as knowing or wanting to know about sex.

Teens also face judgment from peers, whether they know or not. Rosie at PHS told me she found

SBSE “chaotic” and did not like it because “people asked stupid questions.” When I asked for an

example she laughed as she exclaimed, “Yeah! Someone asked if a girl gives a guy oral sex and

he ejaculates in her mouth, will she still get pregnant ‘cause it’s gonna travel down to her

stomach and past her uterus, can she still get pregnant? That’s the most stupidest question I ever

heard.”

Rosie’s judgement about her classmate’s question suggests that teens in SBSE confront

social dynamics in which exposing a lack of knowledge may leave them vulnerable to insults

from peers. Rosie did not say to me that she actually told her classmate that she thought this

question was stupid. Still, the charge of stupidity is indicates disdain for peers whose lack of

sexual knowledge is discrediting in Rosie’s estimation. It also suggests that Rosie held

assumptions about norms surrounding sexual socialization, as if there is a standard age by which

everyone knows what fellatio is and that it does not result in pregnancy.

Gender also emerged as a factor in some students’ concerns about being judged in SBSE.

At both schools, boys pointed to gender as a factor in this dynamic. Sean (PHS) suggested that,

when it comes to talking about sex and sexualities, boys were “more comfortable to be around all

boys…‘cause people was able to like be honest without havin’ a girl look at ‘em later in that

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day.” Sean told me his concern was that girls would look at boys with suspicion and judgment,

explaining that, in a mixed-gender classroom, “people woulda held back their answers

sometimes because peop- guys don’t wanna be judged so much by females.” Sean’s sentiments

about fear of girls’ judgments were echoed nearly verbatim by Michael and Kurt at AAH and

Marvin at PHS. Eric at AAH elaborated on how mixed-gender classrooms could inhibit

information seeking and asking “questions [about] something you’ve seen in a movie or

something.” Eric suggested that boys worry their questions, in the presence of girls, could lead to

instances in which “a girl gets a picture in her head, like, ‘well, he’s rapey’…even if it’s a

misconception, even if you were just asking. You’re trying to educate yourself, but you don’t

want it to hurt, like, people’s image of you.” Eric is concerned that venturing a sincere question

may jeopardize peers’ views of the person asking it. In Chapter Four I further explore how boys’

concerns are, to some extent, justified.

Where boys’ concerns about judgment were focused on girls’ perceptions, girls at both

schools expressed concerns about judgment from adults rather than peers. Amaya and Alisia at

AAH, and Shay and Charlotte at PHS all worried about being judged by adults. According to

Alisia, “a teenager’s not gonna go up to an adult and be like ‘oh, well, I think I have an STD,

because I’ve been having sex.’ Like I just know that a 15 year old, 16 year old is not gonna come

up to adult and say that.” Alisia went on to explain, “I think that discomfort that teenagers have

comes from judgment. I mean, I don’t think that anyone wants to get judged right off the bat. So,

I think it’s just the whole ‘if I do come out, then they’re gonna judge me and I’m gonna look like

the bad person.’” When I asked Naomi what she thought adults believed about teens and sex, she

became visibly upset and, on the verge of tears, said “I just don’t want to disappoint my mom.”

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 This does not mean that girls at each school are unconcerned with peers’ judgments.

Rather, it suggests the more pressing threat to girls is the potential for the loss of approval or

status in the eyes of adults. As Garcia (2012) shows, adults’ evaluations about teen girls’

sexualities are especially meaningful for girls’ academic aspirations and success. For boys

however, the more immediate concern was with judgments (especially from girls) that targeted

their status through potentially diminishing opportunities for relationships with girls. It may be

that boys are less concerned with adults’ judgments because they are not targeted as heavily with

adults’ messages about personal responsibility in sexual relationships (Cohen 2010; Doan and

Williams 2010; Saewyck 2011).

Boys and girls at both schools showed me that both knowledge and lacking knowledge

can be hazards for students in SBSE. Revealing themselves as knowing, unknowing, or wishing

to know about specific topics exposed students to judgment from teachers and/or peers. Such

judgments and the fear of them constitute stigma, which I contend is construed as a hazard to the

students I interviewed. Further, I argue that given this hazard, the act of asking questions that

reveal one’s state of knowledge is a form of risk-taking by students in SBSE.

Gendered Dimensions of Emotion as Hazards

Talking with students illuminated how simultaneously important and cryptic gender can

be for youth when learning about sex and sexualities, and how it shapes perceptions of risk. I

ascertained not only an emphasis on gender, but also a persistent trope of presumed gendered

antagonisms, a normativity surrounding the notion that there are always natural tensions between

boys and girls, men and women. In fact, the peer education lesson at AAH about trans identities

(see pages 35-36) was the only evidence of deliberate and critical discussion in SBSE about

gender.

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 Interviews at PHS reflected a trend in perceptions of heteronormative and cis normative

sexual encounters as emotionally and psychologically risky. At PHS, there was acceptance of the

stereotype that girls are emotional and “clingy” when relationships and feelings are brought up.

Indya, Kesi, Charlotte, Sam Jenkins, Sean, TaneshaTanisha, Ronnie, and Cedric all talked about

romantic relationships as volatile and potentially destructive for girls and young women. Indya,

Kesi, Sam, and Cedric were all concerned about the potential for girls to become suicidal or

violent as a result of boys hurting them, either physically or emotionally. According to Sam, a

primary reason that boys should refrain from having multiple sexual partners is the potential to

“get her feelin’s all caught up and attached. And then you just go off and be with the next girl

and she try to commit suicide or try to hurt somebody.” Similarly, Cedric described of his

lessons in SBSE, “he told us, basically, just don’t sleep around. Not only because of the possible

risk of becoming infected, but also because it messes up a woman’s psyche.” Whether or not

Cedric’s SBSE teachers and/or curricula stated this explicitly as a hazard to students, it is

meaningful that students at PHS connected a conversation about SBSE to such emotional

circumstance. The potential for sex to generate emotional distress for girls but not boys is

occurring in the imaginations and/or the lived experiences of some teens, and they frame this as

relevant to what they do and do not learn in SBSE.

Girls and boys at AAH and PHS expressed that while their SBSE classes did not spend

much time explicitly covering emotions and relationships, they wanted such an opportunity. A

few boys, like Sparky and Eric at AAH, and Jason and DeShawn at PHS, showed interest in

learning about emotional aspects of relationships. Sparky at AAH wished SBSE had gone “a

little bit more in-depth about emotions around sex, because there wasn’t too much around that,”

explicitly pointing to a need to learn about desire and communication (see pages 36 for further

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analysis of Sparky’s remarks). Similarly, DeShawn at PHS said that “it’d be a lot better…if

they,” instead of only talking about hazards of disease and pregnancy, spent some time “breakin’

down everything that comes along with [sex].” Similarly Jason suggested that he would have

liked the chance to talk about the implication of having “feelings for another person…and not

just want ‘em to have sex.”

While both boys and girls at each school indicated a desire for SBSE to allow for

discussions of the emotional dimensions of sex, students at PHS expressed a gendered

perspective of emotional hazards more often and more explicitly than their peers at AAH. Boys

at AAH did not have much to say about emotional differences between boys and girls. Girls at

AAH, articulated such differences, but in terms that were far less dire than PHS students. Jessica

explained, “I feel that girls take it a little more seriously their first time than boys do.” Where

students at PHS described the potential for sexual relationships to impose severe emotional

trauma on girls, Rachel at AAH hinted at less severe risks, describing it not in dire terms like

“suicide,” but in more normalized terms of “heartbreak and stuff.” Rachel brought this up when

describing a film shown in the class about a 13 year old girl with a 24 year old boyfriend. To

Rachel, this was not so much as factual information about the emotional distinctions between

boys and girls, but more an effort to “scare us away from doing anything.” Also through a

language of danger, Brianne at AAH suggested that SBSE’s only lessons about emotions were

that they might “lead you to do things that you won’t, you might not, shouldn’t necessarily do”

and that students should not “let emotions dictate what you do,” they should “not [have]

emotions,” and instead should “fight against them.”

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SBSE’s Lessons about Violence and Consent

When thinking about sex and risk, one primary hazard is sexual violence. This topic did

not generally emerge on its own in students’ responses to generic questions about SBSE

curricula. Anticipating this would be the case, I asked interviewees specifically if they recalled

discussion of sexual violence in their classes. In general, interviewees either did not remember it

at all or the details of what they remembered were vague and limited. As Michael at AAH

explained,

I don’t know if we covered…sexually related crimes. We mighta skimmed over it,

but I feel…everybody was probably on the same page. Everybody thought it was
like, not good, and…it’s wrong to do. ‘Cause, I think that like, just the general
consensus of the class is…everybody knows that, sort of. That’s wrong. So I
really don’t think it needed to be…brought up I guess.

Across the sample, this is representative of the general level of detail in students’

memories the topic. Still, there was some difference across gender and school context in

the frequency with which students recalled any curricular coverage of sexual violence.

Five girls and four boys at PHS said they recalled any mention of sexual violence in

SBSE, whereas at AAH, 10 boys and 16 girls had such memories.

Still, there was some difference in how students framed sexual violence at each

school. At PHS, girls tended to talk about sexual violence from the standpoint of victim,

and boys spoke from the standpoint of potential violator. In fact, across all interviews,

among those students who said that sexual violence was a topic relevant in SBSE, only

five (Sam Jenkins, Ronnie, Porter, Jason, and Rachel) framed sexual violence as

something that can happen to boys and/or men, most others indicating that girls were

targets.

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 When considering risk communication and risk perceptions related to sexual violence, I

found some evidence that SBSE perpetuates (or at least does very little to intervene in) the

mythology constructing rape as solely a spontaneous attack by a stranger that happens outside of

victim’s social networks. This was evident among a few girls at both PHS and AAH. For

example, when I asked Sandra (PHS), whose class was all girls, if sexual violence was addressed

in sex ed, she explained, “Oh yeah. She told us to scream. You gotta scream or somethin’ like

that and tell them to get away from you. Or if somebody keep comin’ by you, tell somebody

close to you so they could tell somebody.” Similarly, Lucy at AAH told me that rape or sexual

assault was

…briefly talked about, um, clearly, like what sexual violence is, but not, not um,
not every kind of sexual violence. Because there’s obviously, like, rape from a
stranger. But there’s other kinds of sexual violence. Like, if you’re like with a
person and they’re pressuring you into doing something, that’s also sexual
violence. But we didn’t cover that, like, it didn’t go over that specifically. But I
think that’s also…important…to recognize what that is.

Lucy’s comments suggest that, like many other students at both schools, what constitutes

sexual violence, assault, and/or rape was not made entirely clear in SBSE. There was not

much clear pattern by school or gender in responses on SBSE’s coverage of sexual

violence. Some students at each school, like Lucy, suggested that they left sex ed with the

impression that rape was limited to scenarios like one described by Roxanne in which a

person is “walkin’ home and someone just snuck up on ‘em and they could be sexually

assaulted.” However, other students, like Joey at PHS, indicated that SBSE did

acknowledge that rape is not limited to instances of an attack by a stranger by remarking,

“if she says stop and you don’t, then that’s pretty much rape…well, that is rape.”

However, Joey was the only boy at PHS who raised such a point.

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 Some students at AAH suggested that SBSE addressed this by embedding lessons

about sexual assault in lessons about drug and alcohol consumption, whereas no students

at PHS indicated that sex ed made this connection. For example, Tyra at AAH vaguely

recalled that “I don’t remember talking about it that much. If we did, maybe like, date

rape and when we talked about…alcohol [and how] some people like, make you do it

when they’re drunk or under the influence of some sort of drug.” Byron at AAH also

recalled this particular context in which sexual assault came up in curriculum about

“alcohol and how that can influence certain actions and…to be wary of things like that.”

Approaching inquiry about SBSE’s coverage of sexual violence from a different angle, I

asked students if they recalled talking about consent in SBSE. In many cases, students told me

that either they did not recall or that it simply was not covered in their class, but others showed

confusion about my question. In fact, 20 students at PHS and 14 at AAH indicated that they did

not know what consent was. Some showed this nonverbally by tilting and/or shaking their heads

and furrowing brows inquisitively. Some indicated it verbally by telling me outright like Kesi

(PHS), “no, I’ve never heard of that kind of consent,” or by asking, like Izzy at AAH “Umm,

consent?” And like Erica Johnson at PHS, “Consent? What is consent? What does that mean?” In

either case, students did not indicate to me that they had learned clear and memorable lessons

about consent, let alone affirmative consent. Figure 3.1 below illustrates the distinctions across

categories of students who knew about consent versus students who did not know what consent

meant. Within each of those categories, the dispersion of students shows that those who knew

were from an advantaged school, and those who did not know what consent meant were from a

disadvantaged school. Still, regardless of school context, less than half of the students I

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interviewed showed a clear understanding of what consent means. This could have implications

for how, in their lived experiences, students understand the phenomenon of consent.

Figure 3.1 Students Knowledge of Consent by School and by Gender

40

35

30

25
PHS Girls

20 PHS Boys
AAH Girls
15
AAH Boys
10

0
Knew Did not know

Across the entire sample, the number of students who did not understand what I meant

when I asked if they had learned about consent was roughly double the number of those who did.

Most of those who did recall consent as topic covered in sex education told me that the emphasis

was on how “no means no,” absolutely. This is a negative lesson, one focused on how to

ascertain the absence of consent. Beyond that, however, most students did not tell me they

learned anything remarkable about communicating with partners or being explicit with how they

feel. This reflects a general ambivalence and sense of cultural unease surrounding sex-positive

talk, or how to say “yes” to sex. This reluctance to teach and learn about affirmative consent is

not something that begins with individual students. Rather it is learned in institutions like

families and schools, and as I explore below, may be a direct consequence of schools’

amplification of particular sex-related risks.

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Conclusions

This study points out the hazards that teens themselves identify in both the lessons of

SBSE and the experience of SBSE. Those hazards include others’ perceptions of risks, stigma in

the SBSE classroom, gendered dimensions of emotions, and sexual violence. Students are tasked

with the responsibility of managing adults’ risk perceptions while simultaneously trying to gather

information and build knowledge that is relevant to their lived experiences. In this process,

students receive amplified messages about STI and pregnancy, messages that are informed,

shaped, and delivered by adults at various standpoints in culturally scripted sex panics. Lost to

the amplified messages detailed in Chapter One is information about the hazards students’

perceive as important, including stigmatization in SBSE, emotional consequences of

relationships, and sexual violence. As such, my data suggest that teens in SBSE contend with and

have to manage adults’ perceptions of risk and their efforts to amplify specific risks associated

with moral panics about STI and teen pregnancy. Further, this is a hazard in itself because it

interferes with teens’ ability to get the information that they are seeking and consider significant

for their realities.

My findings highlight the ways that teens can actually feel at risk in the sex education

classroom where scrutiny and judgments of Others are potential hazards. Extending existing

research that finds girls in the United States perceive risk of stigmatization in SBSE that further

compounds racial and ethnic stigma (Garcia 2009), my data shows that this may be the case for

boys as well. Girls and boys at both schools had concerns about what their peers and teachers

might think of them based on discussions in SBSE. On the one hand, the threat of stigmatization

is one that should be taken seriously as a potential obstacle to knowledge creation among

students as they learn about sexuality and sexual health. On the other hand, parallel to the

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benefits of adventure playgrounds, the experiences students described in which they contend

with Others’ judgments and responses in mixed gender environments may present students with

necessary conditions for improving skills such as risk assessment and managing risk situations.

These skills are likely most useful in contexts where gender and sex differences pose threats to

status.

Gender and emotions in relation to risk surfaced in different ways at each school. Girls at

AAH made some mention of the differences in the importance of emotions across gender, mainly

endorsing gendered stereotypes that girls attach more emotional significance to sex than boys.

Aside from a few who suggested they wished there had been more discussion of this dimension

of sexual relationships, boys at AAH had little to say about gender and emotions at all. In

contrast, boys and girls at PHS perceived specific risks associated with gendered dimensions of

emotions surrounding sexual relationships. In particular, PHS students described emotional

trauma and suicide as potential consequences for girls in sexual relationships but not for boys.

There was not a clear pattern across gender, suggesting that at the intersections of economic

disadvantage, low academic performance, and racial homogeny, boys and girls both learn that

girls’ emotions are a hazard of sex.

Rape and sexual assault were perceived as risks by students at both schools. Across

school context and gender however, sexual violence was described as largely unexplored in

SBSE. While consent did not appear to be well understood at either school, this was especially

pronounced at PHS. Only three of the students asked at PHS indicated that they understood this

term compared to 16 at AAH. Of the entire sample, approximately one third showed an

understanding of consent while over one half indicated they did not know what it meant. Not

only does this suggest that students are not learning how to identify and/or possibly avoid

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violence in relationships, it also suggests that there may be little opportunity in SBSE for

students to learn a language for communicating about their sexual desires, whether the desire is

to abstain or to engage. Further, it raises more questions about what SBSE teaches students about

accountability for consent and violence.

The lessons students took away from SBSE at both schools were primarily focused on

sex and sexuality as functions of the body and as such, the location of risk and hazard was

centered within the body. However, lost to those amplified messages about risk were lessons

about what students themselves perceived as risk, where hazards threaten not only bodies, but

also threaten identities, relationships, and emotions. Girls and boys at both schools told me that

they, although they wanted to, they did not learn about things like attraction, pleasure, and

communication with partners. This may tell students that their language, their knowledge, and

their experiences with sex are invalid, unwelcome, and may be subject to stigma. Further, it has

the potential to impact the attitudes and practices that teens carry into adulthood.

Additionally, by talking only about the scientific aspects of sex, even in interviews with

me, protected themselves from a range of social risks (e.g., unease, embarrassment) involved in

cross-generational talk about sex. Focusing on sex only as the biological and anatomical

functions of human bodies reinforces that the subjective dimensions of sex should not be

discussed in SBSE, not by teens or adults. Such perspectives characterize sex education in ways

that echo Lesko’s (2010) suggestion that SBSE capitalizes on scientific truth and accuracy. Such

objectivity aims to encourage students to “train the brain” (Lesko 2010: 286) and think their way

to protective behaviors. However, these well-intentioned efforts run the risk of distancing

knowledge from the practical experiences of teens in their everyday lives.

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 Sex and sexuality are arena for play and exploration as much as they are arena for risk

and hazard. Sexual relationships with same-age peers do not pose novel or unique hazards to

adolescents as compared to adults. Rather, teens are experiencing transitions into new social

contexts in which their sexual activity is assigned specific meaning because of their age. This is

happening in the context of a global culture (or playground) which is undergoing shifts in sexual

mores, changes in how information about sex can be accessed, and increasing freedom in the

ways people can socially experience sexual identities. It is the social meaning, and in some cases

the severity, of the hazards of sex that are unique during adolescence.

In the following chapter, I consider the ways that adulthood surfaced in interviews with

students. I show that interviewees perceived both adults and adulthood as crucial for shaping the

meaning they made from SBSE. Specifically, girls and boys at both schools understood sex as a

likely dimension of their adult lives and as such, used adulthood as a framework for

understanding SBSE.

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 CHAPTER FOUR: ADULTS AND ADULTHOOD AS FRAMEWORKS FOR MAKING

SBSE MEANINGFUL DURING ADOLESCENCE

In the summer of 2014 parents in the San Francisco Bay Area spoke out against the use

of the textbook titled Your Health Today: Choices in a Changing Society (Teague, MacKenzie,

and Rosenthal 2012). After teachers reviewed and recommended the book’s adoption to the

superintendent, the school board decided to incorporate it into the high school health curriculum

to replace an outdated textbook. Approximating the standards recommended by scholars like

Walters (2014) and Lamb (2010), the new text, which is advertised as a “truly inclusive and

socially responsible perspective” on personal health, covers a range of topics including mental

health and spiritual wellness, stress and sleep, nutrition and fitness, drugs and alcohol, infectious

diseases, cancer, and heart disease. The book includes a full chapter dedicated to interpersonal

and sexual violence. A section dedicated to relationships and sexuality is composed of three

chapters focusing respectively on: connection and communication; biology, society, and culture;

and contraception, pregnancy, and childbirth.

Your Health Today did not find a warm welcome in one of the most progressive and

liberal metropolitan regions of the United States. Thousands of parents signed a petition

delineating their grievances about the book, including that it was not age appropriate because it

discusses topics including sexual bondage, sex games and role play, sexual toys and vibrator

devices, as well as social activities oriented around alcohol including bar crawls and keg parties.

At a school board meeting, one parent took the microphone and read a line from the text, “Ever

wonder how the sex drive actually works?” She argued this question is inappropriate for high

school freshman, saying “These are things I discussed with my future spouse a few months

before we got married, not something that high-schoolers should be discussing” (Fernandez and

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Hurd 2014). Some supporters of the textbook pointed out that popular media depictions of these

same acts are widely available and consumed by their children. Still, the board voted in favor of

the petition, made a request to the publisher to remove the objectionable material, and instructed

teachers to use the old textbook until revisions were made.

Like this Bay Area case most public debate about SBSE takes place among adults

(reporters noted that there were no student voices represented at this board meeting). However,

there have been recent efforts to include youth voices in this debate. Sites like Sex Etc., which

boasts that it is “by teens, for teens,” provide web resources for teens seeking information.

Organizations like Advocates for Youth and Answer offer curricular resources for peer education

programs like the Health Oakland Teens Project and New Jersey Teen Prevention Education

Program. Early in 2015, two 13-year old girls in Toronto gained media attention in the United

States for starting an online petition to change the sex education curricula in their schools to

include focus on consent. “Our society is scared to teach teens and young people about safe sex,

and most important, consent,” reads their petition (Bielski 2015). Such reluctance stems from

concern that introducing them to ideas will inspire them to act on those ideas. Assumed in that

logic are premises, described as adultist by SBSE researchers, that teens cannot be trusted with

knowledge about sex or their own bodies, that adolescents’ desires and emotions are trivial and

less serious than those of adults (Fields 2008), and that young people will act irresponsibly and

without caution (Luker 2006). This logic appears to inform policy and practice surrounding

SBSE, even though studies do not bear it out as fact (Kirby, Laris, and Rolleri 2007; Mueller,

Gavin, and Kulkarni 2008).

If adults view adolescents as impulsive and hypersexual, this view is certainly not

surprising. Academic and popular constructions of adolescence are invested in projects that

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reinforce this normative view. This perspective posits the categories of adulthood and youth as

mutually exclusive, constructing an antagonistic relation between adult Self and adolescent

Other. In her recent book Sexuality in Schools, Jen Gilbert challenges researchers and

practitioners to reconsider this boundary. In an analysis of how movements for LGBTQQ rights

play out in schools, Gilbert exhorts readers to see how narratives of sexual development read

both backward and forward across the life span. Gilbert asks “[w]ho is the subject of sex

education? Whose sexuality is in need of education? To put the question differently: Who is the

adolescent in need of sex education, and who is the adult distinguished from the adolescent, in

part, by not needing sex education?” (2014:25). Gilbert argues that adolescence and adulthood

are “psychical relations” (27), and as such the boundaries between them are rather permeable.

In this chapter, I analyze how high school students consciously grapple with adults’

efforts in processes of socialization to sexualities. In what follows, I explore the ways that

thinking and talking about SBSE moved students in my sample to scrutinize both adults and

adulthood. Specifically, I ask: what messages does SBSE send teens about the way adults see

them? What messages does SBSE send about sex and sexuality in adulthood? How do teens

make sense of these messages? First, I ground my methods and findings in theories that consider

dynamics between adolescence and adulthood.

Between Adolescent/s/-ence and Adult/s/-hood

Socialization to adult society involves a process of learning how to form and preserve

social bonds and ties, how to navigate relationships, including sexual relationships. Children and

adolescents rely on adults in this process. However, research on socialization to sex and

sexualities confirms popular opinion that this terrain is clouded with unease and ambivalence for

both adults and youth (Elliot 2012; Martin 1996; Luker 2006). Under pressures to preserve

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norms that prohibit sexual contact between adults and adolescents, cross generational talk about

sex and sexualities can leave adults feeling at risk because talk can be misinterpreted as a sexual

act that violates childhood innocence (Gilbert 2014; Irvine 2000; Levine 2002).

In the face of public reactions like the Bay Area case above, educators are compelled to

protect themselves against accusations that teaching youth about sex and sexuality is equivalent

to promoting those behaviors. Protection is achieved by avoiding such talk (Elliot 2010a, 2010b)

or in the refuge of facts that maintain focus on biology and a medical discourse of sex and

sexualities. However, even this scientific framework is not always protective for teachers (Silin

1992). In 2012, Idaho sex education teacher Tim McDaniel was investigated and reprimanded by

administrators for using the words “vagina” and “orgasm” during lessons on reproduction

indicates (HuffPost Live 2013). With the threat of sanctions, teachers and parents are reluctant to

talk with young people about sex and sexuality (Frankham 2006; Guilamo-Ramos et al. 2008;

Martin and Luke 2010).

Much of the ambivalence and fear surrounding boundaries between adult and adolescent

can be attributed to the fact that adolescence is treated as deficient, volatile, and in need of adult

authority. Teens are often thought to have unique culture that shapes and is shaped by a common

experience of storm and stress, emotional turmoil manifesting in behaviors that mark teens as

not-child and not-adult (Erikson 1968; Marcia 1965). More recent views challenge this

perspective as a myth (Offer and Schonert-Reichl 1992) that reinforces an essentialist view of

adolescence and undermines the profoundly constructed dimension of this social category (Aries

1965; Corsaro 2010). Some contemporary scholars of sexual development view the storm and

stress perspective as troubling because, when applied to pedagogical and socialization practices,

this view of adolescence is rarely divorced from what Bay-Cheng describes as a drive-reduction

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model of sexuality that is “biologically deterministic…and presents sexuality as an intense,

instinctual drive that is overpowering if left unchecked by civilizing social mediators such as

laws and morality” (2003:63). Psychoanalytic frameworks tend to rely on such drive-reduction

theories, positing that the powerful human sexual drive poses a threat to all other normative and

moral sensibilities. The resulting framework for understanding adolescence and policing

adolescents rests on a fundamental adult assumption that teens are uniquely sexually motivated

(as opposed to adults), that their beings and their becomings are wholly motivated by impulse,

arousal, and sexual appetites explained primarily by biological perspectives of pubertal

development (Bay-Cheng 2003; Lesko 1996).

Existing models of sex education reinforce the notion that genders are as naturalized as

sex organs themselves, a notion which is supported by other messages about sex and gender that

permeate teens’ experiences in schools (Pascoe 2007; Schalet 2000, 2004). In this model,

masculinity and sexual obsession remain fused. The responsibility for dealing with this condition

has traditionally fallen upon girls and women, rather than equally across genders to mutually

articulate wants and limits (Lamb 2011). Extending across gender divisions, traditional

perspectives of adolescent development reinforce a particular controlling image that Sinikka

Elliot (2012) calls “the hypersexual teen,” operationalized as depictions and ideologies of

adolescents as “irresponsible, controlled by their hormones and sexually vulnerable,” in ways

that “promote the belief that young people need protection from themselves, other teenagers, and

adults, and cannot be trusted with sexual knowledge and citizenship” (66). This controlling

image colludes with persistent racialized images of black men as wanton and predatory, and

women of color as excessively reproductive (Benedict 1992; Collins 2005; hooks 2004; Nagel

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2003; Moorti 2001) in ways that have perpetuated centuries of institutionalized devastation on

the black family in America, particularly through assaults on black masculinity and fatherhood.

Through her comparative research on American and Dutch parents’ attitudes about their

adolescent children’s sex lives, Amy Schalet (2012) argues that American adult attitudes towards

adolescent sexuality are characterized by dramatization. In families and in schools, American

adults highlight the dangers of sexuality first by locating control of sexual impulse in “raging

hormones” which are both internal and overpowering to individual will, and second by

essentializing gendered heterosexual archetypes of boys as pursuant of sex and girls as pursuant

of love. Schalet contrasts dramatization to a cultural process of normalization among Dutch

adults, a process in which teens’ sexual relationships are approached as goals for which parents

and teachers prepare youth to be “ready.” Schalet found that Dutch parents, unlike their

American counterparts, legitimize teens’ relationships and experiences of love, and are relatively

silent about antagonisms across gender.

A social constructionist perspective tells us that, in addition to practical requisites of

socialization, childhood and adolescence require adults and adulthood in order to exist as

meaningful social categories. However, we are not accustomed to thinking about the

contrapositive: if children/childhood and adolescents/adolescence do not exist, then

adults/adulthood cannot exist (Gilbert 2014). Jen Gilbert argues that adults are inclined, in their

effort to preserve and protect the status accorded to adulthood, to actively reject that notion. She

calls this “a relation of non-relation” (2007:47), referring to the tendency of adults to construe

their status and experience of adulthood as contingent upon the repudiation of childhood and,

especially, of adolescence. Gilbert makes the case that SBSE “risks a relation” (2007) for adults

because it illuminates what is shared between adolescence and adulthood, particularly the

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similarities in experiences related to sexuality including love, desire, frustration, disappointment,

and institutional constraints.

Gilbert (2007) also contends that this repudiation of adolescence by adults is at the core

of SBSE’s “pedagogical authority” (47) through which adults and organizations falsely present

themselves as experts on sex. However, this claim on expertise is questionable (Jerman and

Constantine 2010). For instance, studies have found that American adults lack accurate

knowledge about reproductive facts (e.g., how long sperm remain viable in the female

reproductive tract), STI transmission issues specific to LGB identified people, and links between

HPV and cervical cancer (Clark, Baldwin, and Tanner 2007). One nationally representative study

evaluated American adults’ knowledge of statistical norms related to sexual practices (e.g.,

same-sex relationships among men, masturbation among women), sexual and reproductive health

(e.g., relationship between menopause and sex drive, effectiveness of spermicide), and social

perceptions of sexuality (e.g., attitudes and beliefs about penis size, ability to determine sexual

preference by appearance). This study found that American adults generally have erroneous

beliefs about sex and sexuality, with 55 percent answering at least half of the questions on the

instrument incorrectly and only five percent scoring high enough to be considered an A or B

grade by the researchers (Reinisch and Beasley 1990). Yet, database searches for current

research on adults’ lack of sexual knowledge show that, rather than the general adult public, it is

particular categories of adults that are suspected of and interrogated for such deficiencies, such

as older adults (65 years and above) and adults with learning and/or other emotional and

cognitive disabilities.

I share an underlying assumption of Gilbert’s, that because it is constituted by social and

psychical relations, the status of adult is intermittent. Through various interactions with different

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aged (read: different status) Others, people are never absolutely adult or adolescent all the time.

Although she draws on psychoanalytic theory, Gilbert makes a distinctly social and relational

argument that adolescence and adulthood are effects of structured social relations, arguing that

development and transitions to adulthood pose threats or risks to the self. Despite connotations

that something is won, the Eriksonian assumption that developmental phases are achievements

hinges on the notion of loss. Growing up, in a strictly phasic model, requires giving up childish

selves in exchange for adult status. Traditional developmental theories, charges Gilbert, cast this

loss as appealing because they simultaneously place high value on adult status and render the

child and/or adolescent as deficient, not fully human, and innocent. What developmental

explanations of adolescent experience often ignore is that, as adults, “we cannot feel secure in

our grownupness and feel that we have arrived at adulthood without the figure of the dependent

and helpless child” (Gilbert 2014: 31). Yet, in light of the findings by Reinisch and Beasley

(1990), there is not enough evidence to suggest that this helpless, dependent, and deficient child

experiences sexual development in a world where adult sentry of socialization are themselves

self-reliant sexual agents.

On the contrary; while concern about rates of STI among adolescents is warranted, recent

estimates reveal that it is people over 20 years old who bear the largest proportion of the burden

for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis (CDC 2013b) and for HIV (CDC 2013a). Books,

magazines, therapeutic/self-help industries, and a public erotic terrain that is at once thriving and

fraught (see current/recent controversies surrounding the popularity of the 50 Shades of Grey

book series and film) all attest to the reality that adults are hardly self-reliant, perfect, or expert

on sexuality and sexual health. These examples reflect that, embedded in its Protestant roots,

adult American culture contends with a deep sense of conflict surrounding sex (Elliot 2012;

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Irvine 2002; Stein 2006). This shapes what American adults know and believe about their own

sex lives and the sex lives of their children.

Studies of parents’ attitudes towards teaching their children about sex also reveal the

falseness of such expertise, leading one researcher to conclude that

as long as sexual fear and shame permeate Americans’ feelings about sexuality,
young people as well as adults will find it difficult to access positive information
about their bodies and sexual desires. The adolescent/adult binary ultimately
prevents adults from offering youth information and skills to help them…to forge
sexually agentic and empowered lives, perhaps because many adults cannot
easily do this themselves (Elliot 2012, 82; italics added for emphasis).

Regardless of adult realities that call into question such expertise, in order to maintain authority,

teachers and parents use a mask of expertise to perform their adulthood. Where Gilbert advances

a psychoanalytical approach to explain this dynamic, I argue that this particular performance of

adulthood is bound up in mutual processes of socialization and social construction.

SBSE as an Agent of Socialization to Adulthood

Youth are actively engaged in “a process through which [they] make meaning from…the

social world, while they simultaneously alter, resist, and manage the many conflicting meanings

of various pieces of culture, discourse, interaction, and social structures around them” (Martin,

Luke, and Verduzco-Baker 2007:232), or what sociologists refer to as socialization. SBSE is

implicated by this definition. Schools are in a unique position among institutions regarding the

sexual socialization of young people. Socialization involves a certain amount of experimentation

and improvisation with various “possible ways of living,” and the selves constructed through

socialization “are produced in relation to the cultural repertoires and institutional conditions of

schooling” (Epstein and Johnson 1998:2). As organizations, schools standardize and codify

expectations for adult roles in adolescents’ socialization, including socialization to sexuality.

Through SBSE and through everyday interactions, adults in schools communicate expectations

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for sexual conduct and sexual expression as they attempt to fulfill their role in supporting

transitions to adult citizenship (Carlson and Roseboro 2011).

Studies of shifts to adulthood shed light on markers of such transitions. Though

contemporary economic and cultural trends contribute more nuances, transitions to adulthood

have traditionally been understood to include an occupational shift from school to work and

domestic shifts out of the parental home into a family of procreation (Modell, Furstenberg, and

Hershberg 1976; Kefalas et al. 2011; Silva 2012). Experiences with stigma in school can shape

these transitions. Though she does not make use of stigma as a conceptual tool in her analysis, in

their processes of redefining adulthood, Silva’s interviewees certainly reflect experiences with

stigma particularly in educational settings. For example, Silva describes one young woman’s

adolescent experiences of stigmatization by a school administrator, concluding that “her coming

of age narrative is colored by her current mood of resentment, and she frames the principal’s

inability to listen to her—to instead see her as disruptive, dangerous, and in need of psychiatry—

as a cutting betrayal” (2013:89). Another of Silva’s interviewees describes similar experiences at

the college level in terms of stigmatization, powerlessness, and discredit “A panel of five people

who were not nice. It’s their jobs to hear all these sob stories, you know I understand that, but

they just had this attitude, like you know what I mean, ‘oh your mom had a breakdown and you

couldn’t turn to anyone?’” (89-90). Other studies confirm that transitions to adulthood are further

complicated by discrimination facing a range of stigmatized identities including racial minorities,

socioeconomically disadvantaged, and sexual minorities (Clarke et al 2012; Osgood et al. 2005;

Settersten, Furstenberg, and Rumbaut 2005; Ueno, Vaghela, and Ritter 2014).

These processes of stigma are modeled and learned, in part through SBSE, which is seen

by many as an institutional effort to supplement what youth learn from their families. The

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occurrence of parent-child conversations about sex is also heavily influenced by stigma, or a

“culture of shame and fear, along with cultural beliefs and structural inequalities around gender,

age, and family life, such as notions that teenagers resist parental input as a characteristic of their

normal development” (Elliot 2012:62). Amy Schalet finds that a uniquely American view of

individualism is at work in the dynamics of cross-generational communication about sex and

sexuality. Schalet maintains that a contributing factor is American parents perceive their

children’s sex lives through a cultural logic of “adversarial individualism,” in which individual

autonomy is achieved by the breaking of social ties between adolescent and parent, a break that

is considered a necessary prerequisite to the formation of new intimate ties. Such disruption

creates a period of anomie, or diminished regulation and integration for teens, for which

American adults compensate by exerting exogenous and adverse authority (e.g., house rules

about curfew and relationships; fear-based practices of SBSE) as means for controlling teens’

sex lives. Adversarial individualism operates to reinforce mutually exclusive categories of adult

and adolescent, it is a mechanism through which these categories are constructed.

A frequent statement among the teens I interviewed was that parents often do not talk

about sex with their kids and when they do, such conversations are rife with discomfort and

ambivalence. Below I explore the meanings of SBSE for high school students in terms of their

relationships with adults. I also look more closely at the ways interviewees anticipated adult

selves’ became frameworks for making SBSE meaningful. My findings suggest that in SBSE,

teens confront two social constructions that influence how they interpret SBSE. First, SBSE

reinforces boundaries between adolescence and adulthood that limit teens’ ability to get

information that could apply to their future adult selves. Second, girls and boys at both schools

faced stereotypes of the hypersexual teen. With some variation, teens perceived this as valid, and

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I illustrate ways in which students accepted and challenged this construction. Lastly, the teens I

interviewed used adults and adulthood as frameworks for making SBSE meaningful to their own

lives. Rather than telling me how SBSE applied to them in their present experiences, with some

variation across schools, students characterized sex as something for adults and that it is only

through and in adulthood that people can actually grasp the importance of sex and sexuality.

Methods and Data

To encourage girls and boys to reflect on age differences in attitudes about sex, I asked

students to share their thoughts on what adults believe about teens and sex. First, I asked students

“what do you think adults believe/think/feel about teens and sex?” Second, I asked students to

tell me what they personally, as teens, thought about those attitudes. In addition to these

questions, many students’ remarks about the reasons for teaching about sex in schools informed

the emergent themes related to adults and adulthood.

I did not ask students directly about their futures. However, this theme emerged through

responses to other questions. For instance, when I asked boys and girls to speculate about why

sex ed was taught in schools, several pointed to its relevance for their futures. When answering

my questions about adults’ attitudes about teens and sex, some students tried putting themselves

in their parents’ and teachers’ positions, telling me how they might feel. Also, when I asked

students what they thought might improve SBSE, many talked about wanting the opportunities to

hear stories about what adults went through and how their experiences as teens impacted their

adult lives. Such responses show a desire for relatable narratives of growth. Further, the

importance of maturity and acting grown-up emerged in a variety of ways via students’

comments about gender composition of classrooms as well as the advice they might give another

student about SBSE.

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 These strategies allowed me to gain insights into the overarching inquiry of this

dissertation that explores students’ perspectives on sex education in school. Through this

particular design and the data collection methods detailed in Chapter Two, I was able to address

the more specific guiding research questions for this chapter: What role does SBSE play in

socialization to adulthood? Are there patterns in the ways teens relate SBSE to their perceptions

of adults and/or adulthood? Do factors such as school context and gender shape the ways that

teens think about their adulthoods? In what follows, I analyze how students’ responses

simultaneously reinforced and disrupted distinctions between adult and adolescent, first through

their reflections on such distinctions. I then delve into one particular mechanism of distinction

identified in the literature and reflected in my own interviews, the notion of the hypersexual teen.

Specifically, I show how this construction targets youth at the intersections of race, class, and

gender. Lastly, I illustrate how distinctions between adult and adolescent were used as a

framework by interviewees for making SBSE meaningful.

Reinforcing and Disrupting Distinctions between Adult and Adolescent

Generally speaking, interviewees voiced perspectives consistent with what Gilbert (2007)

suggests, that learning about sex poses risks to relationships between teens and the adults in their

lives, but also threatens adults’ non-relation to adolescents. As Brianna at AAH explained, she

believed that teachers approached SBSE with the concern that “if I get too personable with my

students, like, it could seem as if I’m crossing a line.” Explicitly relating this to concerns about

what might be considered “inappropriate,” Brianna also speculated that teachers may sense a

threat, speculating that teachers might think, “if I tell them a story of what happened to me

maybe they won’t think of me like as much of a figure of authority.” Brianna’s comments

suggest that adolescents are aware of the risks that adults face in cross generational talk about

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sex and sexualities. For the adults in interviewees’ lives, delivering sex education is an act that

can risk exposure and vulnerability to adolescent scrutiny, and as Brianna describes, particularly

threatens relations of authority, private/public, and propriety.

Teens’ consideration of adults manifested in several interviewees’ suggestions that part

of what informs adults’ beliefs and attitudes about teens’ sex lives comes from adults’ own

experiences when they were teens. This was true for 22 students with no clear patterns of

difference across school or gender. Some were at least partially sympathetic, viewing adults’

concern and attitudes as motivated by their protective role, like Samantha at AAH, who said, “I

think, it, it’s all in the interests of their children. They want them to not make the same mistakes

they did.” Similarly, Tanesha at PHS could see how, for parents and teachers, “it’s way harder

for them I guess, like, to… to know that their kids havin’ sex and to know that they have

consequences.”

Other students were somewhat more critical of adults, like Kyra at AAH who explained

“I don’t, like, ask my parents what they did in high school, but I think that it’s kind of…a

contradiction. Because…[parents] obviously don’t want their children to go out and do that

stuff.” Kyra points out the contradiction that parents, when they were teens, probably did exactly

what they are telling their children not to do and that “they could’ve had something go wrong

and they don’t want their children to do it.” Marty at PHS agreed, pointing specifically to

teachers, telling me that “personally, I think that they think that we be doin’ it too much and

…and have intercourse for no reason. But I think that when our teachers was our age, they was

doin’ the same thing.” William at PHS reflects this recognition, but one step removed, saying

adults’ assumptions about teens’ sex lives are based on “their past, but not from them

[personally], but their past of what [other] people was doing, they take that forward and probably

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how they think of their kids do it. Well, not think of how their kids do it…but, probably that their

kids is out there like the past was and their friends.” In William’s comments, one can see the

unease of walking the fine line between critically thinking about his interactions with adults

regarding sexual socialization and avoiding inappropriate contact.

Among those who made that connection between adults’ own memories and what they

say to teens about sex, some suggested that the conditions and experiences of adolescence may

have been different for adults when they were teens. As Kyle told me, “I think that, since most

adults or parents of kids around my age were raised in the 70s or 80s, they came from a time

when sex was thought of much differently.” Latisha at PHS elaborated on what Kyle suggested,

saying that “It’s not easy the way it used to be back in the day, where back in the day they used

to, y’know, do what they do. But now, in 2012, it’s different. Not everybody thinks like that. So

it’s hard for a kid or teen like that to make a right decision, and to basically say no or whatever.”

Such perceptions of the circumstances faced by their parents and teachers might indicate a

disconnect between historical reality and what today’s teens know about epidemiological trends,

suggesting that neither school nor home is providing a robust picture of the public health

conditions faced by families. These attitudes might also reflect a skewed recollection of the

emphases in curricula on the historical trajectory of HIV/AIDS and how social response to the

disease has shaped sexual mores in the United States.

Interviewees in this study indicate that they are learning a symbolic boundary involving

attitudes about sex and sexual activity separating naivety and adolescence from maturity and

adulthood. First, teens hold one another accountable and speculate about peers’ ability to

perform maturity. Rebecca Bloomwood at PHS explicitly pointed to the importance of maturity

in SBSE, describing classmates’ participation: “Some people would not participate…would be

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immature, like “EWWW!! That’s nasty!’” This observation was made most often and most

explicitly by girls at PHS. Nine students at AAH (four boys and five girls) talked about maturity

as an important element of SBSE, two of whom suggested that freshman were somewhat

immature and only one indicated that there were gender differences in maturity. At AAH,

students saw each other as competent in performing their maturity.

In contrast, among the 12 students at PHS who talked about the importance of maturity in

SBSE, nine described maturity as something that was distinctly gendered. Seven of these

students were girls. Such comments reflect the high value placed on maturity and the desire to be

seen as someone who is becoming adult. Girls at PHS identified their boy peers’ outward

expressions of discomfort in SBSE as a lack of maturity, largely without sympathy and as though

there is a mutually understood norm of acting grown up during such conversations. AAH

students identify the discomfort as exactly that, using terms like “uncomfortable” and

“awkward,” and they do so with sympathy for their younger selves and their younger peers.

While students at each school confronted discomfort, PHS students made that discomfort

meaningful in particularly gendered ways.

The concern for maturity informed broader patterns of responses across gender and

school context. When I asked students to reflect on what adults thought of teens and sex,

overwhelmingly (n=56, 89 percent), responses characterized adult attitudes as negative, where

sex is treated by adults as something teens should not do and is reserved for adulthood. However,

no interviewees described encountering messages that gave them a strong sense of how to

prepare for that. As Calvin at PHS told me about teens, “they shouldn’t do it and stuff. ‘Cause

they might not know the right way,” in contrast to adults who, by virtue of being adults, know

what is right sexually. Talk about sex is guided by adherence to such boundaries between right

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and wrong, the ability to distinguish between adulthood and adolescence.. The ability to

recognize and point to the boundary is treated by interviewees as an indicator of being on the

mature side of that boundary. In this way, the teens I interviewed were performing their maturity,

a constitutive part of their anticipated adulthood.

As Byron at AAH told me, “my teacher, he, uh, advised us teenagers to just stay away

from sex altogether.” As Jessica at AAH explained, “I feel like adults often think that um

children are gonna start doing things earlier than they really do, depending on what kind of child

they are. But…personally...my mom, like she knew that I wasn’t doing anything but she’d still

stress it to me a hundred thousand times…” Even though Jessica’s description of cross

generational communication in her family is an outlier in that she describes both her mother and

her grandmother as very vocal about sex, the tone of these communications is negative, “before I

knew what the word sex meant, I knew that I shouldn’t be doing it.”

In contrast, PHS students tended to tell me, as Roxanne explained, “parents don’t teach it

to their kids.” Where girls and boys at PHS suggested adults avoid and do not talk to their kids

about sex beyond the messages of “don’t do it” or “wrap it up,” my interview with Jessica

suggests that even frequent and consistent communication about sex in families can still

culminate in the same sex-negative message. Jessica’s own attitude about these messages can

best be described as ambivalent. She, like Lucy at AAH and like both boys and girls at PHS,

expressed a mix of understanding and resistance towards adults’ sex-negative attitudes. As Lucy

said,

I understand where adults are coming from when they say ‘wait for marriage to
have sex,’ but I don’t necessarily agree with it. Sex is really important in a
marriage because like, I mean, you can’t stay with someone forever if you don’t,
like, I mean. Honestly. I think it’s important to stay safe, but it’s also important to
gain experience. I’m not saying have sex with whoever you want, but I also
believe that if you’re in a relationship or if you really want…if you have feelings

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 for someone. Because it’s not just…it’s emotions too. It’s not just a physical
activity. I believe that.

Lucy’s perspective is at once sympathetic to adults’ situation and aware of how unrealistic their

messages are in terms of her own values and her own lived reality. This ambivalence was present

in interviews throughout the sample, and mirrors the attitudes found in the adult narratives in

Sinikka Elliot’s research. Elliot (2012) invokes a distinctly sociological understanding of

ambivalence as “contradictory feelings or attitudes…rooted in structured social relations” (121),

explaining that parents are uncertain and conflicted about how to have conversations with their

children about sex and sexuality. One parent told Elliot that she “half-kiddingly” tells her son to

be abstinent until marriage because “you don’t know what else to say,” yet she knows that both

her status as adult and role as parent require her to say something (123).

Teens are not blind to the kinds of things Elliot’s interviewee experienced as a parent, as

Michael told me, “I think adults are sort of uncomfortable talking about it to teenagers…because

they don’t really know what to say.” Far from adult expertise, Michael’s comment suggests that

he clearly perceives the uncertainty that Elliot’s interviewees describe. Michael went on to say

that he thought this lack of certainty, combined with a particular assumption of teens as

“reckless, I guess you could say, [that we] don’t think things through,” had negative effects on

what and how adults communicate to teens about sex.

The Hypersexual Teen: Questioning and Legitimizing Essentialist Stereotypes

An important contradiction emerged in interviews. Even though teens were performing

their maturity by recognizing and navigating the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood

through talk about sex, students generally recognized that the assumptions and attitudes they

perceived adults holding towards them were stereotypes. Through their own words, teens in my

sample reflected the dominant cultural narrative of teens as hypersexual. For example, Latisha at

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PHS told me, “I think that they think that we have sex on the regular,” something she went on to

say is not necessarily true. Latisha was not alone. Robert at AAH told me that he had the

impression adults believed “that [sex is] all that teenagers are really interested in I guess.” Shay

at PHS said adults think “that we havin’ sex all the time,” and TaneshaTanisha at PHS giggled as

she said that adults think that teens are “just horny. The teachers is just like ‘well, when you’re

younger your hormones is high, so…’ I heard a teacher say that before. Because they’re older

and we’re younger, so they say our hormones run faster so we’re horny more, I guess.”

Eric at AAH laughed as he explained that “I don’t really think that teenagers as of late are

as hopped up on hormones and sexually active and, like, sexually crazy as people perceive

teenagers to be. Which is really funny when I hear it sometimes and it’s like ‘no.’” Kevin at

AAH echoed this saying, “I feel like sometimes they believe that teenagers try to act or dress like

overly sexualized.” William at PHS talked about how adults, based on their memories of their

own adolescence, see teens as both hypersexual and recklessly sexually active. William

explained that adults are correct to assume that teens are sexually active, but that they are not

always correct about how active. “They…they’re correct but, like most the people that out here,

they just out there doin’ it. I’m not like that. One person. That’s it.” William appears to share

adults’ attitudes and apply them to everyone but himself, suggesting that “most people” live up

to adult assumptions that teens are having sex “with everybody. With everyone.”

While this perspective was acknowledged by boys and girls at both schools, boys at PHS

were the only respondents to directly point to a particularly gendered narrative of essentialist,

masculine hypersexuality. Sam Jenkins at PHS struggled to reconcile this construct of the

hypersexual teen boy against religious pressures in his family,

I go to church, so it’s like I understand where my godmom is comin’ from

because of what god intended for us. But on the other hand I understand where

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 my dad is comin’ from too because I’m a young man and I’m growin’ up and you
go through your hormone stages and you gonna experience all a that.

Cedric explained to me that “it’s kinda hard for boys not to be sexually active ‘cause…boys

and…men be havin’ hormones and they be havin’ that urge so they might just go on an' do it.”

Ronnie also asserted this view of teen boys, and of himself:

I’m gonna have sex regardless. Especially after the first time I had sex, I knew I
wasn’t goin’ back…I mean, in this school, let me tell you, I could have sex with a
lot of these girls but I choose not to just for my own standard of what I hold
myself to. I have a girlfriend. So there’s really no need for that. I mean, I can
control myself. [But] if my girlfriend wouldn’t have sex with me and I wanted to
have sex, I would have sex with somebody else. Yes I would. ‘Cause it’s just
natural. Like I told her the other day, it would be different if I was a virgin and
you didn’t wanna have sex with me. That would be different and I could
understand that. But you can’t just expect to keep a boyfriend and not have sex
with him. I don’t understand that.

Here Ronnie suggests that he has not only internalized the normative message that boys are

naturally driven by their desire for sex, but he also reflects gendered entitlements and obligations

to engage in sex within a heterosexual romantic relationship. Ronnie’s statement is especially

meaningful given that he spent more time than any other interviewee considering the importance

of sexual violence. He told me that he believed it was something that should be discussed in

SBSE. In our interview, Ronnie told me he knew that both his mother and a former girlfriend had

been raped. He expressed to me that if he had the opportunity to learn about this phenomenon, he

might be better equipped to relate to or understand victims of sexual violence. However, like so

many of his peers, when I asked him about it, Ronnie did not appear to have strong sense of what

consent was or why it might be important to discuss and understand. This is particularly

important in light of Ronnie’s gendered attitudes about sex, as he also seems to accept drive-

reduction notions about boys’ and men’s sexualities. It raises questions about how Ronnie

understands his subjective sexuality in relation to his girlfriend’s. Ronnie says he can control

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himself, yet simultaneously views himself, at the intersection of his age and gender, as

essentially hypersexual. In Ronnie’s narrative, because he is a boy and he is not a virgin it is

natural and normal that that he intends to have sex “regardless.” At the same time, and with a

lack of clarity about what consent means, Ronnie sees it as his girlfriend’s obligation to have sex

with him if she expects to sustain their relationship. While Ronnie was unique in terms of the

depth of his remarks in our interview, he was not alone at PHS in suggesting that boys internalize

or at least agree with cultural scripts of the hypersexual teen.

Figure 4.1 Students’ Attitudes about Stereotypes of The Hypersexual Teen

100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
AAH
40%
PHS
30%
20%
10%
0%
Boys Girls Boys Girls
Accept Resist

It appears that boys at PHS were distinctly vulnerable to messages that essentialize teens,

reducing their desires and practices to effects of animal nature. Such messages are particularly

destructive when considering persistent racialized myths about black men. This is important for

what these youth learn about society’s expectations of them when it comes to sex and sexuality.

Young black men may be learning that society expects them to be sexually driven and to mark

their status in sexual terms. As Ronnie described, “that’s what we call it is ‘accomplishments.’”

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Illustrating some of Collins’ (2005) concerns about the threats that economic pressures pose to

black men, Ronnie explained to me

‘Cause when you’re a boy, that’s really all it’s about really. Like, it’s about
grades, but that’s only if you determined to get high grades really. When we at the
lunch table and we talkin’, all our conversations based off either sports, girls, or
money. Them are really the only type a things we talk about, truthfully. And if
you a dude and you ain’t got no girls, man…you…you kind of outcast. You can’t
really put, can’t say nothin’ about the conversation ‘cause you don’t have no
experience.

That Ronnie made sense of SBSE and other messages about sex through the lens of his own

future adulthood makes his perception that selfhood and status are contingent on economic and

sexual accomplishment even more meaningful.

Anticipating Adulthood: Constructing the Transition from Adolescent to Adult

Interviews with teens in this study also highlight that sex and sexuality are important

sources of not only contemporaneous adolescent identities, bearing on how they relate to adults

in their lives, but are also meaningful for the adulthoods that they anticipate for themselves. Sex-

negativity and the notion that sex is reserved for adulthood were widely recognized by

interviewees. I do not interpret this attitude that sex is for adults, not for teens as an indicator that

teens are thoroughly convinced adults believe that sex is for adulthood, though some teens might

be. I am also careful to not misinterpret this as a sign that teens themselves believe that sex is for

adulthood. Instead, I claim it represents the existence and awareness of a cultural script about

sex that is meaningful for the ways teens interpret SBSE.

Still, such cultural scripts are ambiguous. Ten interviewees at PHS (four boys and six

girls) pointed out that teens are going to do what they want. Sandra at PHS explained about teens

that “some people, you can’t stop them from doin’ what they gon’ do. You can tell ‘em all you

want to, but they not gon’ stop.” Calvin, Ronnie, Sean, and Marvin also expressed this in terms

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nearly verbatim to Erica Johnson at PHS, “teenagers is gon’ do what they wanna do.” At PHS,

interviewees acknowledge that, through sexual activity, teens resist the efforts of adult authority.

In contrast, no students at AAH explicitly pointed to this attitude.

Figure 4.2 Anticipated Adulthood as a Framework for Making SBSE Meaningful

10

5 PHS
AAH
4

0
Boys Girls

In any case, many interviewees made sense of SBSE through a framework that looked

forward to their own adulthoods. For example, Gary at PHS explained that “I think you’d have to

be stupid to have sex with someone that you might not be with later on in life, as in marriage in

the long run.” Other boys at PHS also expressed this forward looking attitude, Sean and Cedric

both mentioned that they saw themselves as one day being fathers who would be concerned

about their own children’s sexual decisions. However, Sean, Gary, and Cedric were also among

the boys at PHS who accepted and agreed with the stereotype of the hypersexual teen. This adds

nuance to notions that acceptance of this stereotype is simply passive internalization of negative

labels. While there is certainly danger of that, boys’ agreement with adults’ perspective on this

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point may signal that they are imagining themselves in the role of adult and of parent to someone

whose wellbeing they wish to protect.

While AAH students agreed that sex is reserved for “when you’re older,” unlike their

counterparts at PHS, fewer AAH students described markers traditionally associated with

adulthood such as parenthood or marriage. In part, this may be explained by school context.

AAH is known and valued for its success in graduating students into college admissions. I have

no verifiable evidence about post-secondary matriculation comparisons between PHS and AAH.

However, based on conversations with administrators, teachers, and parents in the district, AAH

is well-known for sending graduates into higher education, whereas PHS is not. I show that

based on school context, AAH students may perceive their anticipated adult selves as further off

and more distant from their present realities than PHS students’. AAH students may anticipate

spending several years in college, delaying more traditional markers of adulthood such as

marriage, career, and parenthood. Given that five AAH students made mention of college or their

early 20s when talking about how SBSE was meaningful to them, I suggest that AAH students

were likely making SBSE meaningful by anticipating college experiences. Further, this may be

seen as a period when hook-up culture is a more salient frame for making SBSE meaningful, but

one that AAH students were not comfortable applying in our interviews.

Conclusions

Students in this study made SBSE meaningful by looking closely at the boundaries

between adolescent and adult. When attempting to understand adults’ messages and motivation,

the teens I interviewed attempted to take the role(s) of adults in their lives. In so doing, many

students speculated about what their teachers’ and parents’ experiences of adolescence were like,

specifically related to navigating sex and sexuality. With little pattern across gender or school

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context, teens variously resisted and accepted adults’ motivations for to contextualize teen sex in

negative terms that emphasize danger. Further, through these processes of taking the role of

adult, teens in this study illustrated that performances of maturity are highly valued when

learning and talking about sex and sexuality. My findings show that, among students at PHS,

there are particularly gendered perceptions of maturity for low-income girls of color.

Additionally, more students at AAH were inclined to acknowledge and/or criticize the fact that

adults may be misguided and/or ill equipped when talking with teens about sex.

Controlling images shape what youth learn about sex and sexuality and in the case of

interviewees, one of those controlling images is the notion of the hypersexual teen. My data

extend scholarship on intersectional, queer, and feminist studies of socialization to sexuality by

providing empirical evidence that, across gender and school context, teens recognize adults’

perceptions of them as hypersexual. However, intersections of race and SES (as reflected in

school context) bear on how teens contend with this controlling image. My findings suggest that

racial minority teens who are economically and educationally disadvantaged may be more

inclined to accept or internalize the notion that they are, in fact, hypersexual. This is especially

true among boys who attend the low-ranked, high-poverty school in this study. These young men

may have fewer scripts available; where resources are poorer there may be fewer options of

imaginable ways of being.

The overlap in recognition that adults think of teens as “wild rabbits,” as Kurt described,

or as TaneshaTanisha said, “layin’ down with any ol’ body,” suggests that teens at both PHS and

AAH are very aware that adults perceive them as hypersexual. Yet, in contrast to students at

PHS, more interviewees at AAH seemed to share their schoolmate Hannah’s attitude about those

adult views, “I think they’re all a bunch of baloney.” AAH students were less inclined to

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legitimize the stereotype of hypersexual teen, whereas PHS students were more inclined to

accept it and tell me that teens do what they want, suggesting that they might believe that

because teens do what they want, they are in fact uniquely hypersexual as compared to adults. In

neither school did it appear that students were comfortable saying that it is normal and/or

acceptable for teens to have sex.

While in different ways across school context, students resist and accept the perceptions

adults have of teens. At PHS, interviewees were more willing to acknowledge their own

experience and posit that teens do have sex. While they generally did not challenge adult

stereotypes, and in some cases even suggested such perceptions were warranted, they also did

not indicate that these stereotypes influenced their decisions about whether or not to have sex

during adolescence. Similarly, at AAH, students did not indicate that adults’ stereotypes of them

as hypersexual teens influenced their decisions about whether or not be sexually active, though

this may be a function of AAH students relative lack of disclosure on this point compared to

PHS students, more of whom acknowledged their personal experiences. No students at AAH said

anything about their own experiences or even made claims like those of PHS students that teens

are going to do what they want.

While my data cannot discern whether teens’ responses to adult perceptions of the

hypersexual teen are antecedent or consequent to cultural messages, my findings mesh with the

dominant cultural narrative of teens as hypersexual and essentially sex driven. Teens at PHS

might accept that stereotype because, as they acknowledged, they do talk about sex a lot and they

are “too” sexually active. Similarly, teens at AAH might resist the stereotype because they are

not sexually active and resent such assumptions. However, data on trends in behavior and critical

studies of suggest that such dramatic behavioral differences are unlikely. In light of that, what is

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more likely is that in the case of both PHS and AAH, teens are using cultural repertoires

available to them that differ across socioeconomic status and race, but are consistent across age.

In particular, students at each school appear to be engaging in a project of adversarial

individualism that requires them to somehow challenge adult authority. Where students at PHS

were willing to tell me that teens do have sex, exhibiting some measure of critical agency, they

were less inclined to questions the norms that underlie adult/adolescent conflicts. AAH students

were less inclined to lay claim to agency by telling me that teens do what they want, but they

were more willing to question the norms and assumptions endorsed by adults.

In this way, the sex-negative message that sex is not for adolescents/adolescence works in

concert with the construction of the hypersexual teen to shape the meanings that interviewees

made of SBSE. These messages and meanings were framed by interviewees’ beliefs about and

anticipation of adulthood. Being able to maturely discuss sex and sexuality among peers was

considered an important part of the performance of maturity, an indicator of adulthood.

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 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION

Sex education debates, policy, and curricula would have us think that young people’s

concerns about sex ought to narrowly orient around pregnancy and STI. While adults consider

these the most immediate threats to adolescents that warrant coverage in the curriculum, many

critical scholars argue that students could experience far more benefit from SBSE if health

information was just one among many parts of a sexuality curriculum (Lamb 2010). Due to their

political effectiveness and the importance of data for helping SBSE intervene in threatening

epidemiological trends, the questions asked and arguments advanced by public health research

appear to dominate popular conceptions of what is considered good or effective sex education.

However, over the last five years, a growing interest among scholars working within queer,

feminist, and critical frameworks presses for a more nuanced consideration that includes other

dimensions of sexual health and wellness. Such perspectives argue that the narrowness of SBSE

promotes discrimination and reproduces obstacles to both sexual health and sexual pleasure

across the intersections of categories including age, race, class, gender, and sexual identity.

From all those perspectives however, there is little light shed on what students might

define as good or effective sex education. My dissertation contributes broadly to scholarship on

socialization to sexualities by examining high school students’ accounts of their memories of and

experiences with SBSE at a time when sex is becoming a more immediate part of their realities.

Further, my research extends findings in critical scholarship that show how SBSE stigmatizes

and marginalizes girls of color by looking at both girls and boys in two different school contexts.

By interviewing over 60 teens, I am able to shed light on the ways students make sex education

meaningful for their own lives in ways that both reinforce and challenge existing inequalities

across age, gender, race, sexual identity, and SES.

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Implications for Studying Gender and Sexualities

Sociologists who focus on socialization to gender, sex, and sexualities draw on scripting

theory as well as feminist and queer frameworks to argue in favor of using the socialization

framework to understand how different institutional and cultural forces (or agents) factor into the

processes of becoming adult sexual beings (Martin 1996; Martin, Luke, and Verduzco-Baker

2007). In this view of socialization, youth are agents in “a process through which [they] make

meaning from the many pieces of culture they absorb from the social world, while they

simultaneously alter, resist, and manage the many conflicting meanings of various pieces of

culture, discourse, interaction, and social structures around them,” (2007: 232). SBSE is

implicated by this definition. This dissertation contributes to the socialization to gender and

sexualities literature by exploring adolescents’ perspectives on schools’ roles as agents of

socialization and by focusing on the ways teens manage the meanings of various messages about

sex they encounter in school and elsewhere.

By focusing on what SBSE meant to teens, this research contributes empirically to the

literature on SBSE in the United States that lacks rich qualitative data on students’ reception.

Broadly, by looking closely at the ways students at two different schools in the same district

describe their experiences and perspectives surrounding SBSE, this study finds that despite

district-wide policies about curriculum in SBSE that would suggest students are receiving the

same information, school context is related to differences in what students remember about sex

education. These findings demonstrate the importance of looking beyond factors like curriculum

(e.g., abstinence-only versus comprehensive) to ascertain the influence that information about

sex and sexualities can have on teens’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors about sex. Further, the

findings suggest that structural factors such as racial residential segregation and economic

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disadvantage in racially homogenous schools are important factors in the messages students

receive from SBSE about gender, sex, and sexualities.

Additionally, this dissertation complicates the way we conceptualize tolerance where

gender and sexualities are concerned. Tolerance is often treated as positive and a sign of liberal,

progressive attitudes. My research extends Walters (2014) argument that, in the context of

neoliberalism, tolerance is generally treated as an end in itself and this is detrimental to

LGBTQQ individuals and groups. By focusing on the lessons students described about both

bodies and identities, this dissertation suggests that tolerance, because it is contingent on feelings

of fear, is a mechanism of stigma towards not only LGBTQQ identities, but also statuses

including infected and pregnant. In addition to expanding Walters’ application of tolerance as a

mechanism of stigma, this dissertation contributes empirically to Walters’ arguments by showing

how students take away lessons about tolerance from school-based sex education.

By constructing infection and pregnancy among teens as the consequences of rational

choice rather than of untimely and inadequate access to accurate information and resources, such

outcomes are treated as decisions. Such a construction ignores social context and structural

conditions while implicating individuals as “bad choosers” (Kelly 2000) who live—to use the

language of respondents in this study—“ruined” lives excluded from full social acceptance, or in

Goffman’s terms, live with a “spoiled identity” (1963). This location of cause within individual

choice sends a message that such choices and such choosers cannot be tolerated by institutions.

This legitimizes both stigmatization and institutional disinvestment in people who make “wrong

choices” (Luschen 2011). Specifically, I show how adults’ perceptions of risk inform SBSE such

that it invokes controlling images of people with STI and of pregnant teens, shaping students’

assumptions about what a “messed up” life looks like. Further, the amplification of these

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messages colludes with heteronormative and homophobic norms to exclude LGBTQQ identities

and experiences from SBSE.

The findings from my research also contribute to existing perspectives that are critical of

the tendency, in academic work as well as in policy and practice, to view adolescents’ and

women’s sexualities as simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous (Fields 2008; Levine 2002). In

particular, these critical perspectives postulate that fears about risk and danger shut down

discussion and make it “untenable to know, be known, or be curious in the sex education

classroom,” (Fields 2008:139). By voicing their concerns about judgment and the social

consequences of such judgment, students in my study illustrate that such constraints influence

what can be asked in SBSE not only for girls, as Garcia and Fields show, but also for boys.

Further, I add to Schalet’s (2012) argument that this framework of vulnerability and

danger is bound to uniquely American cultural logics of that dramatize adolescent sexuality,

emphasize control of teens, and rely on adversarial notions of individualism. Beyond the

distinctions between American and European cultural logics that Schalet identifies, I suggest that

there may be a uniquely American narrative of risk at work in SBSE, one that ignores the

benefits of sexual relationships and risk-taking, developmental benefits which may be similar to

those of other forms of risky play. This is not to prop up false dichotomies of risk versus reward

with this suggestion. However, by looking more closely at how teens’ grapple with

understandings of risk in SBSE, my research illustrates that part of learning about sex for

students involves distinguishing between panic about danger and realities of danger.

Further, my findings add to scholarship that interrogates normative messages surrounding

violence and abuse in relationships. Critical feminist research has emphasized the influence of

contradictory expectations embedded in messages about gendered heterosexuality such as the

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good girl/bad girl dichotomy (e.g. Phillips 2000) and other narratives that privilege masculine

meanings and desires and can leave others vulnerable to unsafe sexual encounters (Allen 2007;

Hird and Jackson 2001; Jackson and Scott 2004). My findings show that across school context

and gender, in SBSE, students do not learn consistent lessons about sexual violence. While some

students at AAH indicated that lessons about acquaintance rape were embedded in lessons about

alcohol and drug use, no students at PHS made this association. Further, while students at PHS

were more inclined to describe sexual violence as something that happened to girls and women,

inflicted by boys and men, their peers at AAH were more inclined to use gender neutral terms to

talk about sexual violence. This trend adds to evidence suggesting there is a racialized, sexed,

and gendered order to what teens learn and know about sexual violence and abuse in

relationships, and the lessons they learn in SBSE more generally (Martinzez, Abma, and Copen

2010). My findings support Bay-Cheng’s arguments that sexual vulnerability of girls and women

is attributable to systemic inequities based on gender, heteronormativity, class, and race, rather

than to deficiencies at the level of personal decision-making (2010) and/or individual

empowerment (2012).

In addition, this research intervenes in Foucauldian arguments about discourses of

sexuality. Foucault dismissed the notion that social order repressed talk about sex and that,

throughout history, western societies have confronted an explosion in sex-related discourse via

the church and then in science. Institutions such as science, medicine, and religion have, as

Foucault (1978) illustrated, historically intervened in the ways people understand sex and

sexualities by creating spaces and languages through which talk about sex. Not only did

students’ memories of SBSE cluster around the body, they did so through a scientific and

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academic lens. This perspective echoes Lesko’s (2010) suggestion that SBSE capitalizes on

scientific truth and accuracy, as well as Foucault’s arguments about the power of science.

However, Foucault also asserted that the explosion of religious and scientific discourses

of sexuality allowed for rather detailed and, in a sense, open discussion of sex within the contexts

of these institutional spaces and languages. While my findings support Foucault’s ideas about the

medicalization or science-ification of sexuality, interviewees in my study did not indicate that

SBSE provided them with a space or a language through which they could openly and/or in

detail discuss various dimensions of sex, especially sex acts. Nor did they suggest that SBSE’s

had a heavy influence on the ways they talked about sex outside the classroom. As I illustrated in

Chapter Three, students told me that sex education does not address “actual sex” or “the rest of

it.” Students find more replete discourses of sexuality outside of SBSE, discourses that are not

necessarily medicalized or informed by the church or science, but by popular representations of

gendered sexualities. Rather than inciting or drawing upon a flourishing discourse of sexuality,

the power of school and official SBSE curricula constrain discourse and limit talk to reception of

lessons about STI and unwanted pregnancy. Talk about other dimensions of sex is constrained to

the point of prohibition. Students in this study were confronted with generally secular lessons

about morality and responsibility in the face of hazards, but not in ways that engaged them as full

and active participants. The boys and girls I interviewed showed me that they were fluent in a

language of hazard, but they did not show me that they were fluent in a language of sexuality.

Building on Fields’ (2008) and Garcia’s (2012) work on SBSE, this research finds that

curricula are received by and made meaningful by students in the context of existing status

hierarchies. My findings suggest that the amplification of particular information by SBSE

influences the ways that students talk about sex and sexualities. Although in different ways

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depending on school context, SBSE plays important roles in the narratives or scripts that young

people learn for communicating about sex. For example, my findings about the different ways in

which talk about same-sex relationships is characterized across school context contribute to

symbolic interactionist frameworks by showing how schools are arbiters in scripts of tolerance

and stigma surrounding talk about sex and sexualities. While students of color at a disadvantaged

school learn that infected bodies are “disgusting,” their privileged peers learn that infection and

pregnancy are hazards that teens can tolerate. In contrast, disadvantaged students also learn that,

in spite of homophobic social context, they can participate in debates about “touchy subjects”

and engage in dialogue about same-sex relationships, where their advantaged counterparts saw

such controversy as a disruption to social order. The relatively privileged students learned scripts

of tolerance that effectively silenced any conversation about same-sex identities and/or desires. I

argue that these scripts of tolerance are operative in stigma surrounding STI, teen pregnancy, and

LGBTQQ lives.

This dissertation also contributes to theorizing about adolescents’ socialization to

sexuality by bridging Jen Gilbert’s work with Jessica Fields’ argument that SBSE takes an

adultist view of teen sexuality. Adultism is a framework in which youth are treated by

institutions as essentially “less able, less intelligent, and less responsible than adults” (Fields

2008:19) with little regard for the ways such differences are socially and culturally constructed.

My findings suggest that students rely on this framework to make sense of SBSE for their own

lives in ways that do not empower them to apply the information to their contemporaneous

selves. The teens I interviewed suggested that they learned there are constraints on the ways they

can talk about sex and that in order to meet expectations defined by adults, they must imagine

themselves as adults who view teens as essentially irresponsible in order to use what they learn

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in SBSE. Some teens accepted this view of adolescents as incapable of making intelligent and

responsible choices, suggesting another form of stigmatization.

However, my findings also show that teens engage in an anticipatory project of

imagining themselves as adults. The message endorsed by SBSE across school contexts that

students should feel fear about the inevitability of pregnancy, childbearing, and disease

introduces contradiction. On the one hand, these outcomes are not inevitable. In fact, the shared

lesson of comprehensive, abstinence-focused, and abstinence-only approaches is that pregnancy

and infection are entirely preventable, if individuals choose to abstain from sex. On the other

hand, as much as adolescence may be a time of impulsivity and focus on the present, students

confirmed that it is also a time of anticipation, when teens carefully consider their future

adulthoods. Pregnancy, childbearing, and parenthood are very often components of young

people’s constructions of desirable adult lives. Among the students I interviewed, this was

especially true of teens at a low-ranked, high poverty school. This complicates arguments that

suggest teens impulsively and uncritically engage in sex as a means to reap the rewards of risk-

taking behavior. Rather, my findings suggest that teens may be practicing or rehearsing the

adulthoods they anticipate.

However, this study also suggests that youth rely on and collaborate in the reproduction

of adultist narratives of personal responsibility and individualism that obscure structural and

systemic factors contributing to hazard and risk (Bay-Cheng, Livingston, and Fava 2011; Kelly

2001; Fields 2008). Specifically, students at PHS agreed with or accepted narratives of the

hypersexual teen, suggesting that teenagers earned that stereotype and needed to practice self-

control. In contrast, AAH students were more inclined to question the stereotype and point to

that cultural construction as something that perpetuated misunderstanding between generations.

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Intersections of race and socioeconomic status bear on how teens contended with this controlling

image. My findings suggest a gendered and racialized impact on teens who are economically and

educationally disadvantaged. Specifically, black boys in a disadvantaged school context may be

more inclined to accept or internalize the notion that they are hypersexual.

Implications for Studying Risk Communication in Organizations

This research also contributes to organizational studies of risk. Students’ strongest

memories of SBSE suggest that social amplification of risk messages about STI and pregnancy

are received differently across school context. Specifically, while students at both schools tended

to see SBSE as focused on the hazards of STI and pregnancy, students at an economically and

academically advantaged school were more likely to frame those messages as being about

agency where their disadvantaged peers saw an emphasis on vulnerability to hazards. Further,

the students I interviewed identified other hazards and risks associated with both sex and

learning about sex beyond those amplified in SBSE. This is parallel to Wynne’s (1982) findings

and contributes evidence to the argument that, where risk and hazard are concerned, there is not

uniformity in the application of protective or preventative measures because expert knowledge is

at odds with normative pressures for differently situated social actors.

Additionally, by drawing an analogy to adventure play, this contributes to studies of

youth risk behaviors by calling for a more precise conceptual distinction between risk and hazard

when analyzing teens’ perceptions of risk. Students told me that they were, generally speaking,

admonished about sex by adults. Rather than simply the thrill of challenging authority, as a form

of risky play, sexual experiences with partners of equal status can contribute to teens’

development of self-efficacy in handling situations that may or may not threaten their wellbeing.

In addition to formulating positive self-image and competent living skills, romantic and sexual

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relationships offer teens needed opportunities to explore and evaluate hazards. My data suggest

that SBSE places on teens undue burdens of stigma and leaves their own risk perceptions of sex

and talk about sex unaddressed. In so doing, the SBSE described by the students I met amplifies

particular risk messages at the expense of cultivating teens’ cognitive, emotional, and social

skills needed to manage risk as they ethically navigate mutually satisfying relationships.

In the same way that stigma is not merely a particular mark or characteristic, but the

processes that give marks and characteristics meaning, risk and hazard are not merely events or

conditions, but also the processes surrounding how groups and individuals attribute meaning to

them. Stigma and risk amplification in SBSE, for the students in this study, targeted students of

color at a disadvantaged school. Where AAH students received messages that normalized

protection of the body, PHS students received messages that emphasized threats to the body and

marked pregnant and infected bodies as discredited. Unlike AAH students, PHS students

identified protection and precaution as strategies that they discovered or developed on their own,

without the explicit direction via SBSE. While this may reflect differences in real and/or

perceived conditions across schools (e.g., instances of teen pregnancy among peers were

mentioned by three students at PHS, but by none at AAH), it also suggests that students who

may be most in need of de-stigmatization encounter the opposite in SBSE.

Limitation of this Research

Sex research with minors presents limitations in that sex is considered a sensitive topic

and minors are a vulnerable population. Due to restrictions and requirements mandated by the

human subjects review process, there were things I could not ask about in interviews. This

included sexual practices. Additionally, though it was required in this protocol, conducting

interviews in schools may have influenced students’ comfort level and their responses. It is

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possible that students perceived me as an agent of the schools and revised their statements to

meet perceptions of social desirability.

Additionally, because students were relying on memory to tell me what they learned and

discussed in SBSE, details may have been lost. Further, given the very conditions described by

the findings of this dissertation, that there is great unease in talk about sex that crosses status

boundaries like age, gender, and race, students may have consciously omitted and/or skewed

information. While this may limit the details about information in SBSE, I argue that it still

yields support for my findings about tolerance and stigma.

In addition, the design and sampling procedures introduce limitations. Given that the

design did not include means to observe dynamics in classrooms nor access to the exact content

or delivery of curricula, some of my data may be an artifact of that missing information in that I

cannot compare students’ perceptions to the actual content or presentation. The small sample size

also limits the comparative capacity of this research and its ability to generalize to a larger

population of public high school students. Rather than a sweeping characterization of adolescent

socialization to sexualities, these findings should be viewed as indicative of the importance of

organizational contexts for those processes. Additionally, recruiting in schools and via teachers

and/or other school staff introduces the potential for selection bias. Faculty may have,

consciously or subconsciously, recruited students who they perceived as “good” or with whom

they had positive relationships. This introduces the possibility that students targeted by teachers’

judgements did not make it into my sample.

Further, while the sampling procedures I used deliberately aimed at meeting quotas for

gender variation at the level of individuals and variations in race at the level of school context,

the sample cannot account for age-related differences. Early adolescents’ perspectives may be

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different from older adolescents in ways that this study does not illuminate. A related limitation

is the cross-sectional nature of the data. Given that adolescence is a period in which individuals

encounter a variety of transitions in rapid succession, snapshots of teens’ attitudes at one point in

time limit insights into potentially shifting meaning that SBSE might have for young people.

Lastly, my findings are based overwhelmingly on interviews with students. Any contact

and/or conversation I had with faculty, staff, and administrators was in the interests of gaining

access to schools, equipping me with background information, and clarifying my own

assessments of school context. This research was not fully ethnographic in that my meetings and

observations of adult members of each school’s community were not included as data for

analysis.

Implications for Future Research

Existing research on SBSE suggests that schools and curricula shape what teens know

about and practice in terms of sex. Interviews with teens in this study provide needed data on

students’ perceptions of the lessons in SBSE. Future research can further explain how lessons in

schools influence behavior by including questions about students’ experiences in sexual and

romantic relationships. Additionally, including young people in the research design could

improve data collection techniques. For example, all students in this study were recruited by

faculty at their schools, which introduces selection bias. Having input from high school students

to inform recruitment procedures may help to eliminate this bias and identify more appealing

locations and incentives, as well as better ways of asking interview questions.

Future studies of students’ perceptions of SBSE require more focus on attitudes about

sexual behavior and actual sexual experience to explain precise connections between SBSE,

attitudes, and behaviors. Existing studies suggest that curricular differences are associated with

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different outcomes and would predict that more comprehensive curricula lead to more positive

outcomes. Yet, students in this study attended schools in the same district that, ostensibly,

operated according to uniform policies prescribing the same curriculum. Future research would

include interviews with students, but triangulate that data alongside interviews with school staff

and observation of SBSE classrooms. Such design could mitigate the limitations of reliance on

students’ memories of their experiences in sex ed.

Additionally, future research would seek to clarify the relationships between lessons that

students take away from SBSE and pathways to adulthood. For example, this study’s findings

suggest that students who experience advantages of a high-ranked and low-poverty school

context reflect more agency and empowerment regarding contraception and STI prevention than

their peers at a disadvantaged school. Compounding this, boys at the disadvantaged school also

were more inclined to perceive themselves as hypersexual, as well as to use anticipations about

their own parental roles to make SBSE meaningful. This set of messages may have implications

for the expectations young black males have of themselves regarding contraception, sexual

activity, and reproduction. Such messages may collude with racialized academic and

socioeconomic expectations of low-income boys of color to further narrow pathways to social

mobility which are already more constrained than their white and socioeconomically advantaged

peers (Alexander, Entwistle, and Olson 2014). Future research should consider boys’

experiences, as well as the implications these have for the girls in their social circles.

Based on my findings, further research is needed into teens’ knowledge about consent.

Specifically, such research should also focus on identifying whether teens’ confusion is

conceptual or operational. Such research would require careful development of valid and reliable

surveys that evaluate knowledge of vocabulary and meaning of the word “consent,” as well as

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knowledge of what behaviors and acts constitute the experience of consent. Interviews with teens

that focus specifically on communication about sex and sexual desire would also shed light on

this.

Finally, where the exploratory nature of this research suggests that SBSE has detrimental

impacts on already stigmatized groups, particularly economically disadvantaged students of

color, in particular young black men, a more systematic study could shed light on the precise

means through which that happens. Specifically, future research would gather more targeted data

about teens’ attitudes and experiences by conducting surveys, focus groups, and interviews

administered by individuals who correspond with participants on dimensions such as race,

gender, and age. Through more systematic design and by more closely representing the people

whose lives it aims to understand, future study will yield more explanatory findings.

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Appendix A. Partition High School Interviewees’ Characteristics by Gender

Age Grade Sexual Preference Race Family SES

Girls at PHS
Roxanne 16 10 Straight Black Low
Indya 15 10 Bisexual Black Mid
Taylor 17 10 Straight Black Low
Rosie 16 10 Straight Black & Hispanic Low
Kesi* 15 10 Straight Black Mid
Martina 15 10 Straight Black Low
Latisha 16 10 Lesbian Black Mid
Charlotte 16 12 Straight Black Low
Shay 17 12 Straight Black Low
Rebecca Bloomwood* 16 11 Straight Black Low
Sandra 15 9 Straight Black Low
TaneshaTanisha 17 11 Straight Black Low
Porter* 18 12 Lesbian Black Low
Lynn* 17 12 Straight Black Low
Erica Johnson* 17 12 Straight Black Low
Frankenstein* 17 12 Straight Black Low

Boys at PHS
James 16 11 Gay Black & Hispanic Mid
Marcus 17 12 Straight Black Low
Sam Jenkins* 17 12 Straight Black Low
Gary 16 12 Straight White Low
William 15 11 Straight Black Low
Joey 17 12 Straight Black Low
Sean 16 11 Straight Black High
Jason 15 10 Straight Black missing
Ronnie 17 12 Straight Black Low
Marty 16 10 Straight Black Low
Calvin 17 12 Straight Black Low
Cedric 15 10 Straight Black Low
Tay 17 12 Straight Black Mid
DeShawn 18 12 Straight Black Mid
Marvin 16 10 Straight Black Low
*= Student selected pseudonym.

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Appendix B. Area Accolades High School Interviewees’ Characteristics by Gender

Age Grade Sexual Preference Race Family SES

Girls at AAH
Jessica 16 11 Straight White Mid
Kyra 17 11 Straight Black High
Alisia 16 11 Straight Black High
Rachel 16 10 Straight Black & White Low
Samantha 17 11 Straight White Mid
Brianne 17 11 Straight White High
Hannah 17 11 Bisexual White Mid
Lucy 17 11 Straight White Low
Nanner* 14 9 Straight White Mid
Beth 15 9 Straight White High
Amaya 15 9 Straight Black High
Tyra 14 9 Straight Black Mid
Naomi 14 9 Bisexual Black Mid
Kate 15 9 Straight White High
Jenna 14 9 Straight White & Asian High
Izzy 14 9 Straight Black Mid
Mary 14 9 Straight White Low

Boys at AAH
Frank 16 10 Straight Black High
Jim Kirk* 16 11 Straight White Low
Michael 16 11 Straight White Mid
Fred 16 missing Straight White High
Marlon 16 11 Straight White & Asian Low
Kurt 17 11 Straight White Low
Eric 16 11 Straight White Mid
Sparky* 14 9 Bisexual White High
Robert 14 9 Straight White High
Alex 14 9 Straight White Mid
Byron 15 9 Straight Black Low
Tony 15 9 Straight White Low
Kyle 15 9 Straight White & Am.Indian High
David 15 9 Straight White Mid
Kevin 14 9 Straight Black High
*= Student selected pseudonym.

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Appendix C. Sample Characteristics

Partition
Area High
Accolades School
High (AAH) (PHS)
(n=32) (n=31)

Gender % %
Girls 53 52
Boys 47 48

Age
14-16 yrs. 78 55
17-18 yrs. 22 45

Race
Black 28 84
White 56 3
Multi-Race 16 10

SES
Low 22 74
Mid 34 19
High 14 3

Sexual Preference
Lesbian or gay 0 9
Straight 91 90
Bisexual 9 1

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Appendix D. Initial Recruitment Script

I would like to let you know about a study going on for which the researchers would like to
interview you. The study is about what students think about their sex education classes. Would it
be OK for me to give your name and contact information to the researchers? They would visit
you at a mutually agreed upon location, or call you to talk about the study and see if you would
like to participate. Participation is totally voluntary and you could decide either way after you
talk with them. Each participant’s name will be entered into a lottery drawing for an iPod touch
(chances 1 in 60).

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Appendix E. Recruitment Flier

PARTICIPANTS NEEDED FOR

RESEARCH ON SEX EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS

Volunteers needed to take part in a research study of students’ opinions about high school sex
education classes.

REQUIRED FOR PARTICIPATION:

 Must be between 14 and 17 years old.

 Must be in either 9th or 10th grade.
 Must have completed the high school sex ed curriculum within the last
year.

As a participant in this study, you would be asked to participate in a face-to-face interview that
asks you questions about your sex education class. All responses will be kept confidential and
anonymous. Interviews will be recorded. All recordings will be destroyed when the study is
complete.

Your participation would involve one session lasting approximately one hour. In appreciation for
your time, your name will be entered in a drawing for an iPod Touch (most recent generation).

For more information about this study, or to volunteer for this study,
please contact:
Sarah Smith
at
***-***-****4 or
Email: shsmith3@buffalo.edu

4
NOTE TO IRB REVIEWERS: My phone number is not included in this current version, as I
intend to obtain a separate phone to be used solely for communications with participants.

124
Appendix F. Researcher Recruitment/Informational Contact Script

Hello [name of potential participant]. I am a [researcher] working on a study about high school
sex education. [Name of recruiter] met you at [location of initial contact] and gave me your name
and said it would be OK to contact you. Is it OK for us to talk now?

If YES: Provide the following information.

We are interested in learning about how students like you feel and think about their sex
education classes. We would like to interview you. The questions are open-ended, with
no right or wrong answers. We’d like to understand your views in order to eventually
improve the ways that sex education is provided.

After getting your written permission and that of your parent/guardian, we would like to
record the interview so we get an accurate record of your ideas. The recording would be
transcribed and any identifying information removed. Then the recording would be
destroyed.

You would be free to answer or not answer any questions you chose, and could end the
interview at any time by telling us you want to. Additionally, if at any point you choose
to retract or would like to change your answers, you are free to contact me and we can
either remove or change your responses.

If you participate, you would receive the chance to win an iPod touch. Your name would
be put into a lottery with approximately 60 other names. The winning name will be drawn
once all of the interviews are complete. I estimate that this will happen around the end of
June 2012.

What questions do you have?

If interested, schedule the interview.

If not interested, thank the patient.

If NO: If at any point you change your mind and/or would like more information before you
decide whether or not to participate, that’s fine. Just let me know and we can schedule an
informational visit.

If YES, schedule an information visit.

If NO, thank the student and leave/hang up.

125
Appendix G. Informed Assent Document – Student

UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Institutions and Intimacy: School-Based Sex Education as an Agent of Socialization

Informed Assent Document - Student

This assent form explains the research study. We will go over it together. Please read it carefully.
Ask questions about anything you do not understand. If you do not have questions right now, you
should ask them later if any come up.

FOR QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS RESEARCH, CONTACT:

This study is being conducted by Sarah H. Smith, PhD Candidate at the University at Buffalo
Department of Sociology. Any questions, concerns or complaints that you may have about this
study can be answered by Sarah by telephone at (716) ***-****. Sarah may also be reached via
email at: shsmith3@buffalo.edu.

If you have any questions about your rights as a participant in a research project, or questions,
concerns or complaints about the research and wish to speak with someone who is not a member
of the research team, you should contact (anonymously, if you wish) the Social and Behavioral
Sciences Institutional Review Board, 515 Capen, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, e-
mail SBSIRB@research.buffalo.edu, phone 716 / 645-6474.

PURPOSE:

You are invited to participate in a research study to better understand the thoughts and
experiences of students who have recently taken the high school sex education curriculum.
Approximately 60 students will be involved in this study.

PROCEDURES:

If you agree to participate in this study, you will be asked to participate in a face to face
interview with a researcher. You will be asked to talk about your opinions, experiences, and
needs related to sex education. With your permission we will audio record the interviews. The
interview can take place in a location of your choosing, provided it is a place that offers safety
and confidentiality. The length of the interview will depend on what you would like to share. In
our previous pilot studies, most interviews last about 1 hour.

The questions we will ask you are open-ended – we would like to understand your views and
ideas, so there are not right or wrong answers. Following the open-ended questions, we will ask
you to complete a survey with a few brief demographic questions, such as your age, parents’
occupations, and education.

126
RISKS:

Since this study involves talking about your experiences and attitudes about sex education, there
is a possible risk of feeling uncomfortable as you think and talk about these topics. You do not
have to answer any question that you would prefer not to, and you may take a break or end the
interview any time you want. If questions or concerns arise during the interview that you would
like help with, the interviewer can provide you with a list of community-based resources,
hotlines, and websites that you can use at your convenience if you wish.

Additionally, researchers will work very hard to minimize any risk of breach of confidentiality
while recordings are transcribed, the transcript is de-identified, and until the recording is
destroyed. The procedures we follow to protect the confidentiality of your data are explained
below.

BENEFITS:

There is no direct benefit to you from participating in this study, although in previous studies,
participants have appreciated the opportunity to share their views with an interested professional.
By learning about your experiences and views, we expect to eventually contribute to improving
the quality and relevance of sex education offered in schools.

CONFIDENTIALITY:

Identifying information that we use during the course of the study to contact you will be kept in a
separate locked file from the interview transcripts, questionnaires, and demographic data. This
information will be destroyed as soon as we have finished collecting data for the study, not
longer than one year following the interview. This assent form will be the only indication that
you participated in this study; it will not be linked to your study data and will be secured in a
separate locked file. All audio files, transcripts and demographic surveys will only be coded with
a code number, not your name.

At the completion of each interview, the recording will labeled only with your participant
number and the researcher’s name and transferred to a password protected folder on the
transcriptionist’s password protected computer. The audio file will be destroyed as soon as the
transcription has been completed and the accuracy verified, not longer than 2 months following
your interview. Any potential identifiers (e.g. names, cities, businesses, etc.) are removed from
transcripts. You will not be identified or identifiable in any publication or presentation done
using this data.

Only the researchers will have access to master list that links participants with their data. This
list will be destroyed as soon as data collection for the study is completed.

“In order to monitor this research study, representatives from federal agencies such as NIH
(National Institutes of Health) and OHRP (Office of Human Research Protection) or
representatives from the UB Human Research Protections Program may inspect the research
records. This process may reveal your identity.”

127
If you withdraw from this study, all individually identifiable data provided by you will
be destroyed and not used for analysis.

COSTS & COMPENSATION:

There is no cost to you to participate in this study. Each participant will have the chance to win
an 8GB iPod Touch (most recent generation at the time of the drawing; approximate value $199;
odds of winning 1 in 60).

AUDIO RECORDING RELEASE FORM:

I give assent to be audio recorded during this study:

Please initial: ____Yes ____No

JOINING OF YOUR OWN FREE WILL (VOLUNTEERING FOR THE STUDY):

Your participation is voluntary. Your refusal to participate will involve no penalty or loss of
benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. You do not have to answer every question and may
refuse to answer any questions that you do not want to answer. You may withdraw from the
study at any time by contacting the investigator and all data that can still be identifiably
attributed to you will be withdrawn by the investigator.

PARTICIPANT STATEMENT (Please read aloud):

I have read the explanation provided to me. I have had all my questions answered to my
satisfaction, and I voluntarily agree to participate in this study. I have been given a copy of this
assent form for my records.

NAME OF PARTICIPANT (Please Print)

________________________________

SIGNATURE OF PARTICIPANT & DATE

_________________________________ Date: _________________

I certify that I obtained the assent of the participant whose signature is above. I understand that I
must give a signed copy of the informed assent form to the participant, and keep the original
copy on file in the repository location designated on my IRB application files for 3 years after
the completion of the research project.

SIGNATURE OF INTERVIEWER & DATE

________________________________ Date: __________________

128
Appendix H. Informed Consent Document – Parent/Guardian

UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO, STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Institutions and Intimacy: School-Based Sex Education as an Agent of Socialization

Informed Consent Document – Parent/Guardian

This consent form explains the research study. Please read it carefully.

I am happy to arrange a meeting with you—either in person or via phone--to address any
concerns you might have before granting or declining consent. Ask questions about anything you
do not understand. If you do not have questions right now, you should ask them later if any come
up.

FOR QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS RESEARCH, CONTACT:

This study is being conducted by Sarah H. Smith, PhD Candidate at the University at Buffalo
Department of Sociology. Any questions, concerns or complaints that you may have about this
study can be answered by Sarah by telephone at (716) ***-****. Sarah may also be reached via
email at: shsmith3@buffalo.edu.

If you have any questions about your rights as a participant in a research project, or questions,
concerns or complaints about the research and wish to speak with someone who is not a member
of the research team, you should contact (anonymously, if you wish) the Social and Behavioral
Sciences Institutional Review Board, 515 Capen, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260, e-
mail SBSIRB@research.buffalo.edu, phone 716 / 645-6474.

PURPOSE:

Your child has been invited to participate in a research study to better understand the thoughts
and experiences of students who have recently taken the high school sex education curriculum.
Approximately 60 students will be involved in this study.

PROCEDURES:
If you agree to permit your child to participate in this study, she or he will be asked to participate
in a face to face interview with a researcher. Your child will be asked to talk about their
opinions, experiences, and needs related to sex education. With your permission we will audio
record the interviews. The interview can take place in a location of your child’s choosing,
provided it is a place that offers safety and confidentiality. The length of the interview will
depend on what your child would like to share. In our previous pilot studies, most interviews last
about 1 hour.

The questions we will ask are open-ended – we would like to understand your child’s views and
ideas, so there are not right or wrong answers. Following the open-ended questions, we will ask
your child to complete a survey with a few brief demographic questions, such as age, parents’
occupations, and education.
129
RISKS:
Since this study involves talking about experiences and attitudes about sex education, there is a
possible risk of feeling uncomfortable as your child thinks and talks about these topics. He or she
does not have to answer any question that you would prefer not to, and may take a break or end
the interview any time you want. If questions or concerns arise during the interview you’re your
child would like help with, the interviewer can provide them with a list of community-based
resources, hotlines, and websites that they can use at their convenience if they wish.

Additionally, researchers will work very hard to minimize any risk of breach of confidentiality
while recordings are transcribed, the transcript is de-identified, and until the recording is
destroyed. The procedures we follow to protect the confidentiality of your data are explained
below.

BENEFITS:

There is no direct benefit to you or your child from participating in this study, although in
previous studies, participants have appreciated the opportunity to share their views with an
interested professional. By learning about your child’s experiences and views, we expect to
eventually contribute to improving the quality and relevance of sex education offered in schools.

CONFIDENTIALITY:
Information related to your child will be treated in strict confidence to the extent provided by
law. Your child’s identity will be coded and will not be associated with any published results.
Your child’s code number and identity will be kept in a locked file of the Principal Investigator.
In order to monitor this research study, representatives from federal agencies such as NIH
(National Institutes of Health) and OHRP (Office of Human Research Protection) or
representatives from the Health Sciences Institutional Review Board (HSIRB) may inspect the
research records which may reveal your or your child’s identity.

Identifying information that we use during the course of the study to contact your child will be
kept in a separate locked file from the interview transcripts, questionnaires, and demographic
data. This information will be destroyed as soon as we have finished collecting data for the
study, not longer than one year following the interview. This consent form will be the only
indication that you participated in this study; it will not be linked to your study data and will be
secured in a separate locked file. All audio files, transcripts and demographic surveys will only
be coded with a code number, not your child’s name.

At the completion of each interview, the recording will labeled only with your participant
number and the researcher’s name and transferred to a password protected folder on the
transcriptionist’s password protected computer. The audio file will be destroyed as soon as the
transcription has been completed and the accuracy verified, not longer than 2 months following
your interview. Any potential identifiers (e.g. names, cities, businesses, etc.) are removed from
transcripts. You or your child will not be identified or identifiable in any publication or
presentation done using this data. Only the researchers will have access to master list that links
participants with their data. This list will be destroyed as soon as data collection for the study is

130
completed.

“In order to monitor this research study, representatives from federal agencies such as NIH
(National Institutes of Health) and OHRP (Office of Human Research Protection) or
representatives from the UB Human Research Protections Program may inspect the research
records. This process may reveal your identity.”

If your child chooses to withdraw from this study, all individually identifiable data provided by
your child will be destroyed and not used for analysis.

COSTS & COMPENSATION:

There is no cost to you or your child for participation in this study. Each participant will have the
chance to win an iPod Touch (most recent generation at the time of the drawing; approximate
value $199; odds of winning 1 in 60).

AUDIO RECORDING RELEASE:

I give consent for my child to be audio recorded during this study:

Please initial: ____Yes ____No

JOINING OF YOUR OWN FREE WILL (VOLUNTEERING FOR THE STUDY):

Your child’s participation is voluntary. Your child’s refusal to participate will involve no penalty
or loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. Your child does not have to answer every
question, may refuse to answer any questions that she or he does not want to answer, and may
withdraw from the study at any time by contacting the investigator (at which point all data that
can still be identifiably attributed to you or your child will be withdrawn by the investigator).

If you have any questions, please refer to the contact information on the front page of this form.
Further, I would be happy to arrange an informational meeting with you to provide more details
about the study and my research procedures.

PARENT/GUARDIAN STATEMENT:

I have read the explanation provided to me. I have had all my questions answered to my
satisfaction, and I voluntarily agree to participate in this study. I have been given a copy of this
consent form for my records.

NAME OF PARENT/GUARDIAN (Please Print)

________________________________

SIGNATURE OF PARENT & DATE

_________________________________ Date: _________________

131
Appendix I. Demographic Survey

Please respond to the following items with terms that most accurately and best apply to you. For
any of the items below, if you need more space, please use the back of this sheet and indicate
which number you are writing about.

1. Age: _________
2. Grade: ________
3. Please describe your religious or spiritual denomination/affiliation (Ex: Catholic, Jewish,
Methodist, Agnostic, etc.):__________________________________________

4. Please describe your race (Ex: Black, White, Latino and/or Hispanic, Asian,
etc.):_____________________________________________________
5. Please describe your ethnic background (Ex: African, Caribbean, Mexican, Puerto Rican,
Italian, German, etc.)___________________________________________________
6. Sex (circle one): Male Female
7. Of the following, choose which you think best describes your gender:
a) Very masculine
b) Mostly masculine
c) Somewhat more masculine than feminine
d) Neutral
e) Somewhat more feminine than masculine
f) Mostly feminine
g) Very feminine

8. Please identify your parents’ occupations (if known):

Mother: _____________________________________
Father: ______________________________________
9. What is your mother’s highest level of education?
a) Less than high school
b) High school diploma or equivalent
c) Some college
d) Bachelor’s Degree
e) Master’s Degree
f) Professional Degree

10. What is your father’s highest level of education?

a) Less than high school
b) High school diploma or equivalent
c) Some college
d) Bachelor’s Degree
e) Master’s Degree
f) Professional Degree

132
Appendix J. Interview Questions
1. When did you take sex ed in school?
2. What’s your strongest memory of that class (it doesn’t have to be something you learned
– but it could be – it could be anything at all that was going on during that class)?

3. If another student, about to take sex ed, asked you what it was like, what would you say?

4. Based on your class, what are some of the ideas/impressions that adults seem to have
about teens and sex?

Probes:

a. Do you think these affect how sex ed is taught? Like, did you notice these in your
sex ed class?)

5. What do you personally think of those ideas?

6. Why do you think they do teach sex ed in school?

7. Do you think sex ed should be taught in school at all?

If YES:
i. Why?
1. What do you think sex ed should be like in order to be most
effective? This could be things like what is taught, how it’s taught,
who does the teaching… anything at all? For example, do you
think sex ed should include focus on the social and emotional parts
of relationships? What about same-sex relationships?

2. What about sexual violence?

If NO: Why not?

8. Can you tell me a little about how (if at all) your sex ed class influenced your attitudes
and beliefs about sex and sexuality?

9. Are there any questions that you thought I should have asked you, or any thoughts you
have that you think might help me better understand what sex ed is like for students?

133
Appendix K. Referrals to Support Resources Provided During Assent Procedures

Crisis Services
 Crisis Services is there to help individuals in crisis situations including homelessness,
mental health emergencies, suicide, sexual assault, and domestic violence.

 716-834-3131; 2969 Main Street; www.crisiservices.com

Sexual Health Resources:

Planned Parenthood of Buffalo & Erie County
 716-831-2200; 2697 Main Street; www.ppbec.org

Buffalo Women’s Services

 716-835-2510; 2500 Main Street

CDC National HIV & AIDS Hotline

 1(800) 342-AIDS (24 hours)

Sexually Transmitted Disease Information Line

 1(800) 227-8922 (M-F, 8 am-11 pm) Information, referral, education

Go Ask Alice
 Website sponsored by Columbia University dedicated to answering questions about a
wide range of health topics; www.goaskalice.columbia.edu

Sexual & Domestic Violence Resources

Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN)
 1-800-656-HOPE (24 hours); www.rainn.org

New York Domestic Violence Hotline

 1-800-942-6906; Spanish 1-800-942-6908

Child & Family Services Haven House:

 716-884-6002

YWCA Safe-Net
 716-592-5118

Other Resources
Neighborhood Information Center Crime Victims Assistance Program - 716-897-4100
Gay and Lesbian Youth Services of Western New York:
Drop-in services: Mon-Thurs, 3:30-8:30; Fri, 3-6; 371 Delaware Ave
 716-855-0221; www.glyswny.org

Buffalo Prenatal-Perinatal Network; 716-884-6711

NY Child Abuse Hotline; 1-800-342-3720

134
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