7
psychological health instead of morals. Sexual activity among consenting individuals (gay or
straight, married or single) is removed from the traditionalist paradigm of guilt, shame,
disapproval, and restraint.
However, both traditionalists and anti-traditionalists forward moralized visions of
sexuality. While traditionalist sexual ideology rests on a religious/restrictive morality, anti-
traditionalist sexual ideology is also clearly reliant on morality, albeit of a particularly liberal
egalitarian kind – one that emphasizes a particularly individualist view of freedom and equality.
Often it is infused with the moral hopes of the sexual revolution and the feminist underpinnings
that bolstered it. When anti-traditionalists talk about what constitutes acceptable sexual behavior,
they use terms like fairness and honesty, consent and deliberation, mutual respect, and equality.
Sex is thought to be good or bad to the degree that it is mutually wanted and nonexploitive. Some
anti- traditionalist feminists go further, emphasizing the connection between sex and emotion,
love, intimacy, and even spirituality. While one might have a decided preference for one of the
sexual ideologies described here, it is evident that neither side views sex as an amoral activity.
Acknowledging this has real consequences for those who suggest that sex education ought to be
taught from a value-neutral standpoint.
Sex education cannot and should not be value-free. It cannot be in the sense that values
are always transmitted, knowingly or not, by educators who, after all, are human beings with their
own biographies, beliefs, and decided preferences. The hidden curriculum
22
transmits “messages
which contradict at a preconscious level the intentions publicly avowed”
23
even when mindful
teachers make their best efforts to create value-neutral environments. It should not be value-free
because, as one traditionalist notes, “Even the attempt to teach [sex education] without values
attaches a value to it…The value is that all varieties of sexual and social behavior are of equal
22
The hidden curriculum refers to the way that school structure and classroom routines as well as the
attitudes, behaviors, and interactions of teachers, administrators, and students subtly combine in ways that
are not readily apparent to influence what and how students learn.
23
Szirom, 57.
Convention