SR: Volume 30 Number 4

Sexual Pleasure, Volume 30 Number 4

Articles are:

Sexual Pleasure: the Next Frontier in the Study of Sexuality

Teaching Teens About Sexual Pleasure

Promoting Pleasure: What's the Problem?

Pleasure, Medicalization, and the Tyranny of the Natural

A Theology of Sexual Pleasure

Also in This Issue...

Policy Update: "Welfare Reform's Provision for Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs"

From the President: "Pleasure is the Ultimate Secret of Sexuality"

From the Editor:

"Sexual Pleasure Has Central Place in the Human Potential"

Mac Edwards

I cannot remember ever having had a sexuality education class when I attended high school in Virginia in the early 1960s. I also cannot remember ever having talked to the minister of my church about sexuality-related issues. And I never talked about sexuality with my mother or father. Everything that I learned came from books and talks with friends. I don't think this was unusual for my generation.

In truth, my most valuable learning experiences about sexuality-related issues have come during my seven years here at SIECUS. I was hired to edit the SIECUS Report because I was a journalist and writer, not because I was a sexuality educator or sexual health expert. So, through the years, I have learned a lot from our staff as well as from those who have written articles for us.

This SIECUS Report on "Sexual Pleasure" has been particularly valuable in that respect. In fact, I feel that the information is so important that I hope you will take the time to read every article and use the information to help others appreciate the importance of discussing sexual pleasure in all sexuality education curricula.

PLEASURE AS A HIDDEN SUBJECT

Dr. Leonore Tiefer, the noted clinical psychologist, activist, and author, writes in our first article titled "Pleasure, Medicalization, and the Tyranny of the Natural" that the neglect of pleasure as a subject in current writings is the legacy of a puritanical and naturalistic sex-as-function, sex-for-reproduction model that is still popular in medicine.

This, she says, is partly because pleasure, being subjective, is conceptually complex and difficult to study. Mostly, however, she says it is because sex researchers and educators still find sexual pleasure a politically dangerous topic. She points out that, at the same time, the larger culture is busy 24 hours a day, seven days a week distributing overblown promises of sexual pleasure through consumerist films, popular music, advertising, and, in the latest twist on advertising-the promotion of sexopharmaceutical drugs like Viagra.

"If sex researchers and educators neglect the study of sexual pleasure," she says, "the public will continue to be vulnerable to shame and disappointment as well as gullible to every new Madison Avenue promise-pusher."

Next, author and journalist Judith Levine writes in "Promoting Pleasure: What's the Problem?" that pleasure has been virtually expurgated from sexuality education curricula and that is has become a "hidden discourse."

"If sexual expertise is expected of adults, children must get a chance to understand the rudiments," she says. "If educators want to be credible about sexual responsibility, they have to be forthright and explicit about sexual joy and pleasure."

PLEASURE AS VALID SUBJECT

Dr. Stella Resnick, a sex therapist and author, writes in her article "Sexual Pleasure: The Next Frontier in the Study of Sexuality" that happily, things are changing. "Pleasure has been discovered as a valid subject of systematic investigation," she explains. "Probably a major factor precipitating this new attitude is the wealth of data accumulated over the past three decades showing a direct correlation between pleasurable experiences and good health." She concludes by saying that science is just beginning to investigate the value and role of pleasure in enjoying a healthy sexuality. "As therapists, we can provide more comprehensive sex therapy by not just working with our clients to explore their sexual problems and pains but also to help them thoroughly investigate their sexual pleasures."

Then Joe Fay, a health educator with the York City Health Bureau in York, PA, says that sexuality educators need to broaden their perspectives to include sexual pleasure as part of the larger issue of body awareness. "With this change, we can more easily recognize how our culture's neglect of sexual pleasure is but one part, albeit a very important part, of our general alienation from the body that gets to the very heart of the question: "What does it mean to be fully human?"

We have long misunderstood, exploited, and reduced the concept of pleasure to mere hedonism, he concludes. When we treat it as a sacred gift rather than a frivolous pursuit, we will begin to recognize its central place in humanity's potential.

Next, Dr. Bill Stayton, who is a professor of sexual health at Widener University in West Chester, PA, as well as an ordained Baptist minister, writes that the current focus on finding sexual meaning in our time is a reaction of humans striving to understand the nature of their sexuality.

"Many are fearful of implications," he says. "Maybe one of those implications is that they will discover sexual pleasure in all the dimensions of their lives. That will happen when they join their sexual selves with their spiritual selves and seek appropriate ways of expressing that pleasure in all their relationships."

TEENS TALK ABOUT SEXUAL PLEASURE

To round out this issue of the SIECUS Report, we asked several teens who are editorial board members or national correspondents for SEX, ETC., a national newsletter and Web site, to write about their feelings relating to sexual pleasure. The result is the article "Teens Talk about Sexual Pleasure" that includes this thoughtful comment:

I personally believe that sexual pleasure is a mental and physical satiation of our desires, and it is unhealthy to repress these feelings as we are indirectly told to do so from a young age. As we are sexual beings by nature, it is healthy to fulfill our desires, so long as we are responsible in our actions.

WASHINGTON ACTION

This issue of the SIECUS Report also includes a Policy Update by SIECUS Public Policy Director Bill Smith.

In his article titled "Welfare Reform's Provision for Abstinence Only Until Marriage Programs," he updates us on recent Congressional action behind the reauthorization of this federal program that began in relative secret five years ago.

As most sexuality educators and professionals now know, the abstinence-only-until-marriage programs supported by the federal government and the Bush Administration cannot teach preventative measures such as condom and contraceptive use or positive aspects of sexuality such as pleasure and desire.

Sadly, these programs must stick to a strict eight-point definition which includes teaching teens that sexuality activity outside of marriage is likely to have harmful physical and psychological effects.

Everything about the program is in conflict with the discussions in this issue that point to the need to develop a sexuality education curriculum that is sex positive and that includes discussions on sexual pleasure.

Washington's actions show us that we still have a long way to go to develop sexuality education curricula that will lead toward the creation of a sexually healthy America.