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Victoria Woodhull, Conservatives, and Sex
The Daily Shot here on Ricochet informed anyone who didn’t already know that Hillary Clinton isn’t making history. Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to be nominated for the presidency, albeit not by a major party. What caught my attention was the reminder of her platform back in 1872, which included the radical suggestion that women should have freedom from governmental interference in their choices on marriage, divorce, and bearing children. It is more than a little depressing to think that these matters are not necessarily settled to this day, given the partisan fascination with forcing governmental involvement in at least two out of three of those matters.
In my generally non-partisan neck of the woods, my general goal is to extricate the personal lives of individuals from the mire of governmental regulation. In other words, I am generally opposed to any laws which happen to invade anyone’s bedroom, and in that sense, Woodhull and I probably would have quite a bit in common. She is remembered today in the form of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, which is dedicated to promoting sexual freedom. That organization may or may not be appreciated by many readers here, since its work includes encouraging comprehensive sex education in public schools, promoting rights of LGBT persons, and protecting the rights of sex workers. It also makes me odd person out around here, since I support the Woodhull Foundation’s work, and have been known to speak out in support of legalizing prostitution as well as radically increasing sex education in public schools.
That latter issue is one that has been bothering me more than a little lately, particularly in context with conservatives. Currently, I am working on a couple larger projects that involve sex education, and have been running a survey on the topic of what should be included in curricula for children from K-12. I’ve had no major problems getting people from the left side of the aisle to take a few moments to answer my handful of multiple answer checkbox questions. The right side of the aisle has been less than willing.
This is not surprising, and I’d been warned about it by many people who have been involved in research on sexual behavior. I was also warned about the apparently inevitable backlash I should get when I actually start compiling data, and writing on it. Yes, I should be prepared for complaints about the bias of my results, that will undoubtedly reflect only the thoughts and feelings of individuals from the left side of the aisle. Apparently it won’t matter if I humbly point out that I can’t include results from people who refuse to take the survey in the first place.
I know that the immediate response for many conservatives when they are asked to take a survey on what should be included in sex education in public schools is that schools should not be providing this education. Thanks to the ongoing research that I’ve been doing, I also know that as a general rule, people who did not have meaningful sex education in school (or anywhere) seem to be for children today getting what they didn’t. The handful of people so far who reported that they received no sex education at all make it difficult for me to maintain a purely unemotional distance from what I am trying to do. They make me sad, because even though I do not know who they are, I know that they undoubtedly feel that they have missed some important things in their personal lives simply from lack of education.
As for how I know which side of the aisle these people may be from, that is simply a matter of keeping track of where the survey has recently been shared. Most of the people who follow me on social media are generally conservative, so the initial results I received were from them. Then the survey was shared by some friends with more left-leaning followers. The latter group was much larger, of course. Researchers who warned me about the troubles they’ve had with getting data from the right side of the aisle predicted that, saying that even though I interact with many conservatives, it’s not likely that will help in balancing results. They further predicted that I would likely lose followers over the survey and my current work in general. Of course, that has proven to be true as well.
However, I am not willing to give up entirely, so I will request it here. My current sex education survey is here, and I would appreciate it if at least some of you would consider balancing the data at least a little bit. I can’t promise that the questions would not shock you, but I will say it is important to remember one thing. This is about education for K-12, which means that age appropriate content is what is being suggested. The vast majority of content that has anything to do with various sex acts would not be taught to elementary school children. It would be reserved for when students approach and reach the age of consent for sex in their given states.
I can empathize with Woodhull, and her fight for freedom for women. Obviously, she was opposed by most men, but also by women who were content with the status quo. Right now, I end up in the middle between conservatives who are opposed to various issues I believe in, and leftists who want far too radical changes. In any given day, I may be called perverse, a harlot, and a prude, depending on the source. But, what I do is still worth it, since it is working toward a point where we will hopefully see radical reductions in the number of rapes, less child sexual abuse, less domestic violence, and fewer people victimized by sex trafficking. I can take a little name-calling for that.
Published in General
Can’t resist this stroll down memory lane.
The Woodhull Foundation is a bit more radical than Liz lets on in the OP. A quick visit to the website shows that they’re working with an attorney in Connecticut defending the idea that 8 consenting adults and 3 children living together are a family in the same sense that the traditional monogamous family is a family. If you take a quick gander at the recommended resources page, you’ll find books advocating for fluid sexual identity, and another on “Boys on their Contacts with Men: A Study in Sexually Expressed Friendships”.
I am surprised that you are surprised by a general conservative rejection of more government intrusion into family life. If sex is to be private, why on earth should we give the Department of Education free rein on “teaching” it? Have you looked at sex ed curricula? I’ve had reason to, as we will soon be moving back to the States, and I may have to put my homeschoolers in school, at least temporarily. “Identification and discussion of diverse family structures” starts in 1st grade. Appropriate?
I had pretty extensive sex ex, despite my parents’ having requested exemptions for some grades. It was misery from start to finish and I promise you, we learned nothing we didn’t know already. Despite all that learning, there were still enough pregnant students in my high school that a parallel, separate program had to be initiated for them so they could also learn parenting skills. I don’t know if they were taught remedial sex ed.
My almost 11-year old twins know about puberty and development because I taught them. I am thankful that I was able to do it in a way that was not polluted by the politically-correct indoctrination of government schools.
For the record, one learns the real facts of life in AP Bio, which is actually a science, and worth studying.
So you say, and I’m willing to credit you with good intentions and motives. But that is not how it’s going to work out. The steady leftward ratchet of the Left’s program of Gleichshaltung demands that at some soon point kindergartners will be taught about safe anal sex, man-boy love, and the glories of polyamory.
“Oh no, that’s not what we want at all” will claim advocates of kindergarten sex education. Just like “We don’t want anyone forced to serve same sex marriage” was proclaimed by SSM advocates, until SSM was legalized. Now refusing to photograph a SSM will cost you your business, and get you fined and sent to reeducation.
They will definitely be taught that same sex marriage is an acceptable choice, setting children of religious parents against their parents, and making pariahs of any child who takes a stand for traditional marriage. This won’t be limited to the sex education classes themselves, it will permeate the entire school environment.
This may be what you want for your children. Fine. Teach your children how you believe is right. Don’t force it down onto every child while making the taxpayers pay for it. How is it you can be so sure that what you think is right for your child is right for mine?
I am not blind however to the fact that this is the direction our culture is headed. Which is one of the reasons I maintain that whoever you are (religious, irreligious; Left, Right; gay, straight; black, white, brown, red, green; rich or poor) you need to get your children out of the public schools, and fight any tax increase like Leonidas at Thermopylae. As enrollments drop, fight to roll back school taxes to starve the beast by defunding.
So…. what you are saying is that there was a large body of people who failed the lab session?
Yeah, but it’s probably not cost effective to have MDs teaching in a public high school.
I absolutely believe that.
I heard about a person who went around to schools to teach kindergarteners about sex ed.
Basically at that age all they teach kids is that nobody except a doctor or nurse should be touching them in their bathing suit area and that adults should be asking them to keep secrets. ( A secret defined as different from surprise, the latter being a good thing.) It was no more explicit than that
And every year, going from school to school, this lady would get a handful disclosures. Kids who were being sexually abused and didn’t known it because nobody told them.
THAT is what happens when children are left ignorant. I wish it weren’t that way, but children need to be equipped to defend themselves or barring that, at least know to ask for help.
You should tell the vines story. Because it demonstrates what happens when children are left uneducated about their bodies.
Fred, that is not sex ed. That’s just pointing out what are acceptable boundaries without disclosing anything at all about sex.
“Okay, kids. In this class We’ll learn that it’s acceptable for lil’ girls to grow up to be prostitutes and lil’ boys to put Their weewee in another boy. Any questions?
“Oh, no, no, no, lil’ Johnny. You can’t see an ad for tobacco. It might influence Yer young fertile mind and think it’s okay to smoke and possibly die of cancer in 57 years.
“Now, Our first lesson is about oral…..”
Two things:
Fred Cole will have us back on the subject of where responsibility for rearing children should rest – looks as of he is advocating public schools which is government. I’m not there but I’m also not sure where most Ricochet members are either. Our society has not figured out how to prevent criminal acts by individuals and this applies to the crime of sexual abuse of children. I put this in the same category with the Left’s position on gun control.
How does one get to be a ‘Contributor’ at Ricochet. Going to the Main Feed automatically certainly can be used to stir the pot on issues where there is political division and perhaps can be used to advantage.
Sex education should be the mechanics of how reproduction works, and the physical changes of puberty, the end. Can’t wait till AP Bio which is a little late and you know, not everyone takes AP.
There is no valid reason to discuss masturbation, oral or anal sex, or birth control. Those involve moral judgment above the teacher’s pay grade.
Warnings against abuse and sex trafficking are not sex education -they are crime education and should be taught in that context.
A child should have freedom from adults’ fascination with sex. A teenager should have freedom from knowledge of every exotic form of sexual stimulation known to man. The Internet may not respect that but the school should.
Applying your idea of sexual freedom to food freedom would lead to a diet of ice cream and donuts and as long as they did not have salmonella calling it “safe.”
I don’t think you have any idea what sort of sexual freedom actually enhances human happiness. Listen to Merina.
Merina is correct. This is general teaching on safety.
Ignorance in children is pretty widespread — epidemic, one might say. There’s a whole heck of a lot they don’t know, most of which schools never bother to teach. Babies don’t know not to swallow batteries. Toddlers don’t understand the dangers of curtain and blind cords. Plenty of kids die in swimming pools each year because they don’t know how to swim. If I had to guess, I would say that the number of pool victims greatly surpasses the number sexual abuse victims. Yet schools do not require swimming lessons for the very young.
Having said all that, I don’t have an issue with teaching about “stranger danger” and “good and bad touching” as long as it is done in a straightforward manner. This is not sex ed and it should not become sex ed.
That was hilarious! When I was a sophomore in high school (back when the Earth’s crust was still cooling), they showed us a movie that had to have been made in the late 1950s. It had some clean-cut athlete-looking guys in a convertible cruising. Standing in front of the movie theater were a group of girls in tight sweaters, and you could tell they were “fast girls.” The guys picked them up and they drove off. Then the screen says “ONE WEEK LATER” and one of the guys is at the doctor telling him “It burns. Down there.” The lesson was that girls are the source of the world’s evils.
Or tight sweaters are.
Pretty much.
Umm… @lizharrison, I tried, I really did, but didn’t get past this question:
We are told to choose more than one, meaning all that apply, and I see that neither private schools nor even “other” is an option.
Just because I don’t think it’s realistic for parents and churches to shoulder all the burden here (personally, I learned a lot about human and nonhuman reproduction from biology classes) doesn’t mean I should have to endorse public schooling.
So I stopped taking the survey.
Oh… Umm….
Oh…
Agreed.
While most questions seemed pretty straight-forward, this one struck me as incredibly loaded and flat out bizarre:
Really? I can choose more than one response from only four provided, the first two of which are not only astoundingly specific but already include the word “ONLY” (in which case, the ONLY way I could truthfully and accurately be capable of choosing more than one response is to choose the latter two, for which you went the complete opposite direction, leaving out the word “ONLY” and instead, weighing them both down, first with a wide-open qualifier that would require respondents to jump on the “gender fluidity” bandwagon and second, with a strangely specific group of “informed and consenting” partners of a very young age).
Where’s the simple and straight-forward, “two consenting adults” response?
That one question above, combined with its bizarro-world limited list of possible responses is precisely the sort of thing that leads survey-takers to believe that your simple “information-gathering” actually has a very specific agenda behind it.
Not only less disease and unmarried pregnancy, but also less emotional manipulation and heartbreak.
We set many goals for ourselves knowing we might not perfectly achieve them and we’ll have to find a way to muddle through and live with ourselves if we fall short. We treat kids as if they’re smart enough to understand both that physical fitness is a healthy goal and that they’re not pathetic worthless trash undeserving of life if they fall short of that goal by being, say, overweight.
I don’t know why similar reasoning wouldn’t apply to waiting till marriage. It’s a good goal to shoot for, and even if you don’t make it all the way till your wedding night a virgin, getting part of the way there at least delays sexual activity until you’re more mature and hardened by life, as @docjay points out.
Okay, so there’s two issues here, one is sex ed, one is raising children.
I don’t think the government should raise children. And I’m one of those extreme people who’d doesn’t think we should have government schools. I also think you should be able to raise your children however you damn well please
But if you’re going to have public schools, then they should teach children about biology and health and yes that includes sex. It’s a major part of life, and you can either have a responsible adult teach them, or they can get their questions answered for more dubious sources.
With regards to preventing criminal acts, teaching children will help accomplish that. A person with knowledge is better equipped to deal with the difficulties of life than one without.
When I was in sixth grade (’98 or so, SoCal), we had the “boys have penis, girls have vagina, hair grows down there” lesson, boys and girls separated into different classrooms of course. Judging by the reactions of pretty much everyone, we knew (most of) this already, and knew it was coming. Maybe we had something similar in elementary school? I don’t remember.
In my high school Health class (I took it as a freshman, but there were seniors there too) we learned about how the penis goes into the vagina, that babies are made thusly, how they grow, etc., all the way up to a baby being born. (We saw that last bit in a movie, but not the first part unfortunately). There was also talk about STD’s, and how prophylactics can help prevent them (but that obviously the way not to get a sexually transmitted diseases is to not be transmitting things sexually). That was about the extent of things, nothing about feelings or rape or whatnot.
And I think that’s how it should be. Just stick to the basics. If kids want style, pointers, or morality (or lack thereof), that’s what parents, friends, and the internet are for.
It takes a village pedagogue?
We did. I called my district’s approach “abstinence through boredom” – overload the kiddies with massive amounts of technical information in hopes that they get the idea that sex is very boring!
Ms. Harrison, I wonder if some of you enlightened intellects understand how condescending it sounds to assume you’re going to shock us. I’m so tired of the caricature of Conservatives as a bunch of illiterate snake-handlers who have never left our own zip code. I am a college graduate, I speak four languages, I’ve traveled much of the world, and my IQ is greater than my weight. My generation was inventing sex, drugs, and rock and roll before you were born. Anything you’ve ever done, I’ve done it twice.
Our objection to the misguided and ill-conceived exposure of children to sexual matters before they’re ready has nothing to do with being unsophisticated rubes. It has to do with knowing the damage it does to them. We don’t object to sex education. We object to age-inappropriate indoctrination with a libertine agenda. You guys have a cow if a little boy chews a poptart into the shape of a gun, but it’s okay to read aloud to 7-year-olds from Daddy Has a Roommate, complete with illustrations of two men in bed together. That is exactly backwards. We all grew up playing cowboys and Indians for pete’s sake. But the damage done to a 10-year-old’s psyche by the revolting book It’s Perfectly Normal is incalculable, and it makes me ill just thinking about it. Let them be kids.
This is what prompted me to to ask this in #41:
‘How does one get to be a ‘Contributor’ at Ricochet. Going to the Main Feed automatically certainly can be used to stir the pot on issues where there is political division and perhaps can be used to advantage.’
To the best of my recollection, @lizharrison joined as a Contributor. Contributors often publish regularly elsewhere, and are brought on board as such. Occasionally, a member publishing elsewhere joins and is made a Contributor upon discovery of the person’s external writing career. Promotion from Member to Contributor based on content produced for Ricochet does happen, but is, as far as I know, rarer.
LOL!
That reminds me so much of my mom.
She was annoyed that her mom taught her nothing, so she started early with us, giving us all the clinical basics early on, then laying down only one rule from there on out: “Never, EVER be scared to ask me ANYTHING and I promise I will always answer you truthfully and fully.”
Yeah, occasionally . . . too fully. (“Okay, OKAY!!! MA!!! I get it! I understand! We can stop with the lesson, now! Put that textbook away. Yeesh!”)
I can’t “like” this enough.
This is a hugely important topic, especially as it has a direct impact on the emotional and mental health of young people, and on their future happiness. It is never mentioned in sex ed.