Where did I come from?
And where did all the good sex-ed lit for kids go?

By Heather Smith

I SPENT MY early years as the daughter of a Pentecostal minister, frilly socks and all, so the presence in our household of a well-worn copy of Where Did I Come From? was somewhat mysterious. However it got there, the book – first published in 1973 and written, in a shocking twist, by Peter Mayle of My Year in Provence fame – was roughly the size of an LP, and lifting the plain white hardcover revealed endpapers of a blissful carmine red, dotted with hundreds of rosy-cheeked cartoon sperm with top hats. Half the fun of the book lay in sitting on the mustard-colored living room carpet, opening and closing it. Sperm. No sperm. Sperm. No sperm. It was my Most Favorite Book Ever. And after a disastrous show-and-tell session at Christian day care, it was also mandated to be my Most Favorite Book Ever That Was Never to Be Taken Out of the House Ever Again.

In retrospect, top-hatted sperm notwithstanding, I see I received what would be termed an "abstinence-based" education. I glided straight from Christian grade school into Catholic high school, and the only STD information I got was from a health teacher who told us that we should make sure the dentist used an autoclave to clean the equipment, or else we might catch AIDS and die. No other possible venues of HIV transmission were discussed. Our class was also visited by a pert, blond woman wearing a blouse with a floppy bow in front. She made us say the word abstinence in unison, cupping one hand to her ear and yelling, "I can't heeeeeeeaar you!" through several iterations, and went on to inform us that 1 in every 10 condoms has a hole in it. She said it with such glee that we could only assume it was because she had put them there.

Partly out of a petty sense of vengeance, I spent many collegiate hours volunteering at Planned Parenthood. I changed the wax tissues on the examining room table, replenished the K-Y, and handed out juice to the recently abortified. I also worked in the education department, putting together stacks of pamphlets and books for people who needed to learn about the act of love and those who hoped to teach them. Meanwhile, one of the things I was learning was that while I was out there getting no sex education at all, sex education itself had dramatically de-rowdified.

The '70s, in some ways, was a golden era for sex-ed literature in general, much of which can be seen as a reaction to the omnipresent tyranny of the 1950s "expert" (usually white, male, holding a cigar, and photographed from a führer-like angle). All the great sex-ed books and pamphlets of the '70s, by contrast, were written by passionate amateurs. The first edition of The Joy of Sex, for example, had a list of copulatory variations in the back that the authors thought sounded nifty but hadn't got around to trying. Many of them were also written by now-distinguished authors, such as Mayle and novelist Edmund White, who wrote the first edition of The Joy of Gay Sex in 1977. Sherri S. Tepper, now a respected author of feminist science fiction, penned an amazingly lively and snarky series of pamphlets for Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood that, as far as I can tell, survive only on anti-choice Web sites as "examples of what the enemy is teaching your children."

Well, for quite some time the enemy hasn't been handing them out to your fundamentalist teenage daughter when she comes in seeking the pill. Granted, Planned Parenthood – despite its satanic reputation among fundamentalist groups – long ago settled down to playing the good cop to other, more radical organizations. But the puberty- and reproduction-oriented pamphlets you'll run across there have lost their sense of humor, as well as their ability to carry on a conversation, opting for a fifth-grade-health-textbook recounting of the reproductive system and its wonders. Female Facts, a 2002 pamphlet I picked up at Planned Parenthood Golden Gate in San Francisco, offered the following intelligence: "The vagina does 3 things: It provides a way for menstrual fluid to leave the body. It receives the man's penis during intercourse. It provides a way for the baby to leave the body." Underneath this rather deterministic statement hovered an illustration of a disembodied vagina so spooky and brackish-looking that I can only hope there was some sort of printer error involved.

The inquisitive will have to look elsewhere for anything beyond the standard "visible woman"-style illustrations and repeated exhortations that puberty is "normal." Dispassionate science writing has become such a shield against potential criticism that we've forgotten how 30 years ago vast swaths of literature managed to be both scientifically well-grounded and boisterously personal and opinionated (the Boston Women's Health Collective's Our Bodies, Ourselves is a classic example).

This style, found in kid sex-ed books as well as adult ones, can be traced to an educational theory then in vogue that emphasized engaging kids on a peer-to-peer level. The notion of viewing and treating children and teenagers as autonomous individuals seems to have largely fell by the wayside in the early '80s. The political ascendancy of the religious right played a part, no doubt, introducing a preoccupation with the "family values" of the heartily idealized 1950s. The country was also in the grip of a remarkable sex panic involving children. It was the era of "recovered memory," the public was obsessed with kidnapping and sexual abuse, and children were transformed into avatars of idealized innocence and helplessness. The idea that self-reliant kids aware of their own sexual agency are better equipped to fend off the advances of authority figures received sporadic notice. But it was somewhat trumped by weekly front-page articles about winsome 14-year-old girls who'd recently revealed under hypnosis that they'd spent two unpleasant years in a dirty kennel cage serving as Satan's broodmares.

Then there was the actual crisis of the mid-'80s: AIDS. According to Toni Hurley, community educator at Planned Parenthood Golden Gate, the AIDS crisis revolutionized sex education for teenagers and adults, giving it a moral urgency that previously had been harder to defend. On the list of Things That Could Go Horribly Wrong If the Children Receive Shoddy Information Regarding Groin-Related Urges, AIDS was pretty bad. Residents of the heartland might think frisky youngsters who went beyond heavy petting deserved a nasty, itchy disease or an opportunity to perpetuate the human race, but few people other than Jerry Falwell seemed to be of the opinion that they deserved to get AIDS.

"We had lousy sex ed in school in the early '70s, but sex books were fairly easy to access in that decade, as they are now," says Carol Queen, a longtime sex educator at Good Vibrations. She says she's seen roughly the same degree of confusion among youngsters from the mid-'80s to the present, alongside a steady growth of both reputable and disreputable information sources, particularly on your friend the Internet. (All the sex educators with whom I spoke reported encountering college-age kids with some rather fantastic misconceptions about reproductive versus excretory apparatuses.)

Now, according to Queen, we're in the era of the "sexpert," a somewhat glossier version of the 1950s expert – minus the cigar, and usually plus a degree in marketing. The take-no-prisoners enthusiasm of the '70s has gradually been returning to sex-ed literature, now finding a place alongside much more (hopefully accurate) scientific information and language. The era of the passionate amateur (or at least the self-admitted amateur) is long over, but hopefully the chaos and humor of actual human sexual behavior is once again seeping in at the edges.

Reading list

Where Did I Come From? (1973), by Peter Mayle Still the most gleefully enjoyable sex-ed book for the pre- or barely literate set. Maybe someday Mayle will get his Francophile ass into gear and write a second edition with Rubenesque queer parents splashing each other in the bathtub.

What's Happening to Me? (1975), by Peter Mayle This preadolescent follow-up to Where Did I Come From? is useful for its reassuring portrayal of the sheer gawkiness of pubertorial changes – and for the completely adorable picture of the little boy on the diving board transfixed by his sudden boner.

The Playbook for Kids about Sex (1978), by Joani Blank Good for kids who (a) like to color and (b) like to color in pictures of different varieties of genitalia. Its slightly cultural-artifact vibe may alarm painfully trendy children.

It's So Amazing! A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families (1999), by Robie H. Harris This book and its companion volume, It's Perfectly Normal, are the primary ones used by Planned Parenthood nationwide in its sex-education program. Harris takes the standard "how babies are made" story and adds nontraditional family structures, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, and a panoply of other long-overdue wonders.

It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health (1994), by Robie H. Harris Note how, as the intended age level rises, the title changes from the exuberant It's So Amazing! to the somewhat world-weary and resigned It's Perfectly Normal. Gone from your lives is the exclamation point, children, but at least your wee hormone-addled selves are normal. Packed with scientific information, plenty of it devoted to abortion, AIDS, various permutations of "queer," and other areas where most other picture-laden storybooks fear to tread.

Changing Bodies, Changing Lives (1998, third edition), by Ruth Bell and members of the Teen Book Project This is pretty much Our Bodies, Ourselves for the adolescent set. Very sympathetic, smart, and comprehensive.

Deal with It! A Whole New Approach to Your Body, Brain, and Life as a Gurl (1999), by Esther Drill, Heather McDonald, and Rebecca Odes Definite props for its suave, matter-of-fact inclusion of queer and bisexual yearnings, as well as a surprisingly detailed rundown of illicit drugs. (Who knew huffing paint made you wet yourself? Not this writer.) Good for the youngster with a short attention span.

H.S.