Since its publication, the typology in Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (1984) has been useful for analyzing contemporary sexual concerns, as well as the potential subsequent moral and sex panics that follow. One such concern revolves around sexual education in public school systems. Since receiving federal backing in 1940, sexual education has been contested throughout the United States; in fact, over 70 years later, the country still lacks a consensus on what the school’s role in sex education is (Crary, 2016). An article in The Seattle Times written by David Crary (2016) sheds light on this debate in one specific school district: public schools in Omaha, Nebraska. When read in consideration
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In the piece, Rubin (1984) attempts to parse out what a radical theory of sex would look like through the analysis of current trends in the societal attitudes and understandings surrounding sex. In doing so, she identifies five ideological structures which she argues shape our conception of ‘good’ sex and ‘bad’ sex; ‘good’ sex can be seen as sex that is often unmarked and receives institutional benefits, and whereas ‘bad’ sex is marked as deviant, condemned and, often, criminalized (Rubin, 1984). Two of these ideological structures, sex negativity and the hierarchical valuation of sexual acts, can be invoked in the case of the Omaha public school district to illuminate why this debate has come to …show more content…
This commonly occurs through the mechanism of a ‘moral panic’, a concept created by Jeffrey Weeks. Rubin (1984) describes a moral panic as a politicization in which public fears are exacerbated by moral entrepreneurs who have a vested interested in the policing of a certain type of deviance, resulting in political action that causes long term structural changes in laws and policies. Moral panics are also characterized by Rubin (1984) as a shifting of blame from the real root of a social problem to an easily accessible scapegoat. She argues that by virtue of our system of sexual stratification, those at the bottom of the erotic pyramid or in the outer circle find themselves especially vulnerable to being cast as a scapegoat (Rubin, 1984). In regards to sex, Rubin (1984) claims moral panics have taken form in the advent of stricter pornography, age of consent, and obscenity laws following the ‘kiddie porn crisis’ and in the creation of laws to ‘prevent’ the spreading of AIDS during the AIDS moral panic, such as laws prohibiting men who have sex with men from donating blood. These laws persist long after the panic has subsided, often reifying sexual stratification by creating categories to mark certain groups as
In the piece, Rubin (1984) attempts to parse out what a radical theory of sex would look like through the analysis of current trends in the societal attitudes and understandings surrounding sex. In doing so, she identifies five ideological structures which she argues shape our conception of ‘good’ sex and ‘bad’ sex; ‘good’ sex can be seen as sex that is often unmarked and receives institutional benefits, and whereas ‘bad’ sex is marked as deviant, condemned and, often, criminalized (Rubin, 1984). Two of these ideological structures, sex negativity and the hierarchical valuation of sexual acts, can be invoked in the case of the Omaha public school district to illuminate why this debate has come to …show more content…
This commonly occurs through the mechanism of a ‘moral panic’, a concept created by Jeffrey Weeks. Rubin (1984) describes a moral panic as a politicization in which public fears are exacerbated by moral entrepreneurs who have a vested interested in the policing of a certain type of deviance, resulting in political action that causes long term structural changes in laws and policies. Moral panics are also characterized by Rubin (1984) as a shifting of blame from the real root of a social problem to an easily accessible scapegoat. She argues that by virtue of our system of sexual stratification, those at the bottom of the erotic pyramid or in the outer circle find themselves especially vulnerable to being cast as a scapegoat (Rubin, 1984). In regards to sex, Rubin (1984) claims moral panics have taken form in the advent of stricter pornography, age of consent, and obscenity laws following the ‘kiddie porn crisis’ and in the creation of laws to ‘prevent’ the spreading of AIDS during the AIDS moral panic, such as laws prohibiting men who have sex with men from donating blood. These laws persist long after the panic has subsided, often reifying sexual stratification by creating categories to mark certain groups as