Women's Studies Int. Quart., 1978, Vol. 1, pp. 341-352 Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in Great Britain HOW TO MAKE BABIES: SEXISM IN SEX EDUCATION STEVI JACKSON The North East Wales Institute of Higher Education, Cartrefle College, Wrexham, Clwyd, LLI 3 9HL (Received and accepted December 1978) Of all school 'subjects' sex education is perhaps the most obviously sexist. Here the differences between the sexes are made the focus of the knowledge to be imparted so that assumptions about gender, which elsewhere in the curriculum are submerged and implicit, are brought to the surface and made explicit. Sexism is evident both in the 'facts' that are taught and in the moral attitudes conveyed with them, in the emphasis on reproductive biology and in the value placed on marriage and the family. This bias limits the relevance of sex education for all adolescents and in particular excludes information related to female sexuality which might help girls to discover and develop their sexual potential. The sources of this sexism cannot be understood merely by listing the types of misinfor- mation, misrepresentation and misunderstanding through which it is manifested. The ques- tion of content, of what is included and what is omitted or distorted, should not be divorced from the context in which it is taught, for context and content are interrelated. The sexist bias of school education needs to be analysed within a broader perspective, taking in cultural attitudes to sexuality and children, the ways in which these are incorporated into such sex education programmes as exist and the constraints on the discussion of sexuality in the school. This paper is concerned mainly with girls' sex education, with the information they are given, its usefulness to them and their appraisal of it. 1 The discussion of these questions, however, is set against the background of more general problems concerning sex education. SEX EDUCATION AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM Sex education is a highly contentious issue around which a great deal of public debate takes place and as such may be seen as a social problem, that is: '... a condition in society that is defined by members of the society as a problem about which something ought to be done' (Becker, 1966 p. 2). The problem, so defined, is the degree of sexual knowledge possessed by young people and the means by which they acquire it, but when it comes to questions of whether too much or too little information is available and the ways in which it is disseminated there is little con- sensus. A study of newspaper coverage of the subject in Scotland revealed four major areas of controversy: whether sex education increased or decreased problems associated with 'promiscuity', whether it should be the responsibility of the family or the school, at what 1 This paper makes use of research conducted between 1973 and 1975 in schools and youth clubs in East Kent. I conducted a series of twent2~-fourtape-recorded interviews with girls aged 13-17 (weighted towards the older girls) from which the quotes are taken. 341