What We Learned in School About Sexuality

Sex and Aging Biomechanics is fundamentally about sex education. As such, it is appropriate to look at the history of sex education in K-12 schools decades ago and how it has influenced older adults today. Joan Price’s book Naked at Our Age includes a chapter titled “Unlearning Our Upbringing: Women’s Stories” that addresses what many of us learned about human sexuality when we were younger. “As a girl,” she writes, “I was taught everything about how babies are made and nothing about why we choose to have sex – nothing about attraction, desire, satisfaction, or lust (except male lust, which was taught as something to avoid triggering) … I was taught nothing about female orgasm, or even that the clitoris exists.” The chapter features long quotes from older adults about what they learned – and didn’t learn – about sex when they were younger. She writes, “Many of the people who shared their stories for this chapter were stuck in their upbringings for many decades … Some are bitter about the lack of information and misinformation they received in their youth.” Her book also includes a companion chapter about men’s stories. The overall message of the two chapters is that many people carry knowledge of – and attitudes about – sex that may not serve them well as older adults. This knowledge came from parents, friends, movies, books, magazines, music, as well as formal sex education in school. 

To learn more about what people over 50 years of age in 2026 learned in formal school-based sex education, I decided to read Jonathan Zimmerman’s Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education (Princeton University Press). Dr. Zimmerman is not a sex educator; he is a professional historian who teaches at New York University. Although the book covers the history of sex education on multiple continents, my thoughts here are based on the sections relevant to the United States. This is because 81% of visits to this website are from the United States.

The only sex education I remember from school was in my eighth-grade physical education class. It was purely anatomical, focusing on the biology of human reproduction. I got the highest score on the test, and the scores were posted in the locker room. As a result, I earned the nickname “The Doctor.” Ironic? Or prescient, given that I went on to earn a PhD, teach at a medical school, and now do sex education for older adults. For this discussion, I am going to assume the reader had a similar formal sex education experience at the same age, i.e., 13 years old. Thus, the year at which people aged 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90 in 2026 received sex education in school was 1989, 1979, 1969, 1959, and 1949, respectively.

Let’s consider what was going on with sex education in schools from 1949 to 1989, based on Too Hot to Handle. First of all, the United States has a very decentralized education system. Unlike many other countries, curricular decisions are made at the local level. Therefore, any generalizations about sex education as a whole in the United States almost certainly do not apply universally. With that said, the focus of sex education in the 1940s was on preventing STIs, which were termed “venereal disease” or VD. This was driven by the spread of VD among soldiers and displaced populations during World War II. Education focused on reducing the number of sexual partners (“preventing promiscuity”) through shame and by increasing fear of contracting an STI. 

As the Cold War accelerated in the 1950s, it shaped sex education as part of the anti-Communist program in the United States. “Most of all,” Dr. Zimmerman writes, “sex educators said they were defending the modern family from a host of internal and external threats. As the bedrock of a civilized society, the family was also a bulwark against Communism. Indeed, its most devout believers said, sex education would help defeat the Communist menace and unite a polarized world into the ‘Family of Man.’” Thus, sex education in 1955 was framed in terms of family life. In fact, one reason for the rebranding to “family” was to remove the socially challenging word “sex.” As a result, discussion of sex was de-emphasized. The topic morphed into “Family Life Education.” 

By 1969, when a 70-year-old in 2026 might have received sex education, the “sexual revolution” in the United States had begun. In 1965, the sex education advocate Mary Calderone quoted Bob Dylan in a speech: “Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, / And don’t criticize what you can’t understand, / You sons and your daughters are beyond your command / The times they are a-changing.” I think these lyrics encapsulate what was happening in the United States in 1969. This was also a period when “culture wars” over sex education intensified, with strong anti-sex education voices emerging at the local level. The focus of sex education was on birth control, especially because oral contraceptives (“The Pill”) had recently been invented and were becoming widely available and used. 

According to Dr. Zimmerman, at least 90 percent of American schools provided sex education in some form by 1979. Perhaps because of this, the culture wars over what should be taught in schools about human sexuality raged in the 1970s. In Europe, the court case Kjeldsen, Busk Madsen and Pedersen v. Denmark argued that mandatory sex education in schools violated parental rights. This same argument gained traction in the United States, with opponents of sex education in public schools citing the 1945 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.” They also argued that children have a right to be protected from sexual information. They pointed to the 1959 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which states: “The child shall enjoy special protection … to enable him to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, and socially.” They viewed exposure to sex education in schools as violating this principle of human rights. Moreover, much of the pushback was grounded in religious teachings about sex. References to the Bible and God were often invoked. By the end of the decade, nine states allowed parents to exempt their children from sex education in public schools, and five more required written parental consent for students to participate in that education. Teachers were caught in the middle of the culture war, and some lost their jobs or were suspended for teaching sex education.

The next decade, which affected the sex education of the younger target group of readers of this blog, saw the identification of HIV/AIDS in the United States. In 1986, the Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. C. Everett Koop, released a report on the disease. Although there was conservative backlash against sex education in public schools, many states responded by promoting sex education as a means of preventing the spread of the deadly disease. By 1992, all but four states required or recommended teaching sex education in the schools. “Safe sex” became a concept, with heavy emphasis on condom use. Thus, in many ways, sex education had come full circle from the immediate post-World War II era, when it was motivated by preventing the spread of STIs, to a different set of them. In the 1940s, the focus was on reducing the number of sex partners; in the 1990s, the emphasis shifted to practicing “safe sex.” A key component of that was condom use.

The relevance of this history to sex and aging biomechanics is that it informs the discussion about condom use among seniors today. Older adults living in 2026 have had a wide range of sex education in their K-12 schooling. Many had none at all; others – like me – had education that focused solely on the biology of reproduction. Only younger readers, those in their 50s, were exposed to the concept of “safe sex” in schools, mostly focusing on condom use. Yet masturbation as a component of safe sex was still very controversial and often not discussed. In 1994, United States Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders was forced to resign after saying at a United Nations conference on AIDS that masturbation “perhaps should be taught” as a way of preventing young people from engaging in high-risk behavior. It is unlikely that older adults in America were taught about masturbation positively. Discussion of sex and aging biomechanics needs to acknowledge what people were – or were not – taught about sex in school. I began this post with quotes from a book by Joan Price. Ms. Price notes the positive role masturbation can play in the lives of older couples, either because someone has been widowed and doesn’t want to find a new partner or because the partner has a chronic illness that prevents partnered sexual activity. As Ms. Price’s books are secular in nature, it is not surprising they take a sex-positive view of masturbation. Rosenau and co-authors’ book, A Celebration of Sex After 50, is an explicitly Christian take on aging sexuality. Surprisingly, it takes a positive view of the practice in some circumstances and gives an example of how it can fit into partnered sex. Despite the differences between Ms. Price and Dr. Rosenau’s framing of sex and religion, they appear to agree that early learning about sex practices such as masturbation can be re-evaluated later in life. For full reviews of these books, see my blog post reviewing ten books on sex and aging.

In summary, U.S. readers of this blog likely received widely varying information about human sexuality in their K-12 education. This variation occurred because curriculum decisions are largely local in the U.S., and the national emphasis changed over the decades. Some of what was taught in school sex education may not serve people well now that they are 50 or older. In fact, some of it may impair older adults. For example, the emphasis on shaming young women for having sex may have prevented unwanted pregnancies when they were young, but that residual psychological shame will not serve the same women well when they are 70-year-old widows trying to find a romantic connection. There may be great benefit in “Unlearning Our Upbringing,” as Ms. Price titled her chapters.