A passage in Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationships, a socio-psychological study of at-risk, poor, working-class teenage girls, struck me yesterday:
“Michelle Fine points out that girls’ sexual desire is frequently missing from discourse about adolescent sexuality and sex education is schools. As Deborah Tolman observes, when sexual desire is reinterpreted as girls’ desire for relationship, which sexual intimacy will enhance and strengthen, girls then have no language – and no safe space – to speak about sexuality as such, and they may consequently become disconnected from their "bodily knowledge.” This disconnection, in the form of dissociation, puts girls in serious danger, as they can be mistreated and abused without acknowledging to themselves the extent of their hurt and loss through violation.“ (emphasis mine)
Taylor, Jill McLean. Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationship. Harvard University Press, 1997. p. 101
Granted, the study was published in ‘97, but I think it is still a valid argument today, not only in the United States but also here in in Germany. The passage struck me especially yesterday, as I spent a large part of the day reading about the terrible petition against an inclusion of education about and acceptance of homosexuality in the 2015 educational plan (#idpet) in Baden-Württemberg, the state I live in. The petition has 60,000+ signatures, mainly through mobilization of the far ("Christian”) right. The petitions’ pro comment section is a cess pool of homophobic, transphobic, inhuman statements. (I wrote about it on my German blog
klarheiten)I’d have to look more into it, and others are more qualitfied to comment on this than I am, but it appears to me that a similar argument as the one quoted above could be made about LGBTQIA-teenagers in school today. Which is why a more inclusive sex ed is so very important, the 2015 educational plan by the Green Party-SPD state government a step in the right direction and the #idpet so heinous.
Thoughts?