What would sex-positive sex education look like?
In which I suggest we look toward anthropology for answers.
Hey Folks,
As you know, I’m very into political anthropology.
It’s not just me, by the way. There seems to have been quite a revival in interest in the subject lately, which I take as a sign that people are realizing that our entire civilization is profoundly fucked-up somehow.
Anarchists have been saying this for decades, by the way.
If you want to get yourself caught up with the latest and hottest trends in political philosophy, I suggest checking out the What is Politics? YouTube channel.
Anyway, one of the reasons to study anthropology is to get ideas about how human societies might organize themselves differently. Another is to gain another perspective on our own society. Comparative anthropology can help us to understand how profoundly abnormal our own society is.
One of the ways that our society is abnormal is its attitude towards sex and marriage. Part of the problem is that young people nowadays are learning about sex through porn. Another part of the problem is that it has become normal for women to wait until they are thirty before deciding they want to have children, at which point about most of their years of fertility are behind them. Simply put, many women are waiting until it’s too late to decide that they want to have children.
This is by no means true for everyone, but it is true for many people, according to my mom.
My mom is now semi-retired, but she is a nurse who specializes in lactation. She has spent most of her career working in pre- and post-natal healthcare, meaning that she is in a very good position to understand female psychology as it relates to this issue. According to her, this is a big societal problem, but no one is talking about it.
A lot of people have come to the same conclusions, but there has yet to be any sort of movement to explore the roots of this problem, let alone to suggest solutions. This is matter of sex education.
Conservatives seem to want to go back to “the way things used to be”, but I don’t think that they’ve thought things all the way through. Sex education has been horrible for decades.
As my friend Kit Colt put it, the basic message of sex education in the 90’s was:
“You could get AIDS, you could get herpes, you could get gonorrhoea or chlamydia… you could get all these sexually-transmitted diseases, or worse… you could get a girl pregnant.”
Think about that. The government taught us all that getting pregnant was worse than getting a deadly disease. We were brainwashed to think that babies were at best a burden, at worst a curse.
Girls were taught that having a baby was a great way to “ruin your life”. Thirty years later, here we are.
Anyway, I just finished reading a very interesting ethnography called The Forest People, written by Colin Turnbull in 1962.
It is about a forest-dwelling Central African tribe of pygmies known as the BaMbuti. Their culture may be among the most ancient in the world, and they live in stateless societies without money. In short, they are anarcho-communists.
Furthermore, they are regarded by anthropologists as hyper-egalitarian, which is to say that they have full gender egalitarianism. Anthropologists nowadays are a bit reluctant to point out that many societies they used to call egalitarian are only really egalitarian between adult males. Truly egalitarian societies, in which men and women have equal decision-making power over decisions that affect them, are much less common. However, they do exist, and the NaBmuti are one example of such a society.
At the time when Colin Turnbull wrote The Forest People, the NaMbmuti lived alongside a tribe called the BaBira, who lived on plantations and belonged to a different ethnic group which was originally from somewhere else.
The following passage describes the attitudes towards sexuality of the two tribes, which could hardly have been more different. I would say the attitude of the villagers “sex-negative”, and the attitude of pygmies “sex-positive”. I would expect to find that hyper-egalitarian societies would be characterized by an attitude of sex-positivity.
Anyway, I thought that it would be very interesting for some of you out there. If this sounds like a topic you’d be interested in learning about, you can access the rest of this article by becoming a paid subscriber.
Enjoy!
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