The broad cultural agreement in the first half of the 20th century that sex outside of marriage was both wrong and dangerous, that intimate marriages needed a good sex life for both spouses to bind them together, and that young people needed help in learning how to prepare for their own future families began to unravel in the second half of the 20th century for a variety of reasons. Many will point to cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s that we now call the “sexual revolution.” The sexual revolution asserted that sex could be enjoyed between any consenting adult partners. It did not require marriage, or commitment of any sort, or even love.

Although the sexual revolution is generally seen as a phenomenon of the 60s and 70s, the seeds were really sown in the 40s and 50s with the publication of Kinsey’s bombshell books. As we have seen, his statistics appeared to document a much looser sexual ethic for both men and women than anyone had supposed. We have offered evidence that Kinsey’s  work was deeply flawed and distorted by bias from the start. Widely praised by an uncritical media, however, it provided the foundation and impetus for an approach to sexuality––shaping education and AIDS policy––that has led to policy recommendations, such as reliance on condoms instead of partner reduction and other sexual restraint, that have resulted in needless suffering and deaths both in the U.S. and around the world.

©2009 All Rights Reserved - Center for Relationship Intelligence LLC

Chapter 12

While the media have been preoccupied covering Kinseyan bogus science regarding human sexuality, important scientific advances in understanding healthy child development have received much less media attention. And, unlikely as it may seem, this research is very relevant to sex education.

Consider research on the origins of conscience. In her empirical study of the development of conscience, Barbara Stilwell of the Indiana University School of Medicine describes the child’s quest for parental approval as the foundation for the emergence of conscience. She found that a child’s development of a sense of morality, ability to regulate impulses and emotions, and capacity for empathy with others is based on the child’s attachment to its parents, especially in the early years to its mother. 

Stilwell and other researchers, though unaware of one another’s work, had unanimously found the same symptoms in children who’d been deprived of their mothers: superficial relationships, poverty of feeling for others, inaccessibility, lack of emotional response, often pointless deceitfulness and theft, and inability to concentrate in school.