Richard S. Gilbert [RSG]: Last spring Helena Chapin and I participated in a training program for UU ministers about the adult version of Our Whole Lives: Sexuality Education for Adults. OWL is a comprehensive, life-span, value-centered and holistic approach to human sexuality. Why is the relation of sexuality and religion so controversial? We'd like to reflect on that and other questions by sharing our experiences being ministers in a movement that takes sexuality seriously as part of the religious quest.
Helena P. Chapin [HPC]: As you will hear in many ways this morning: "to offer human sexuality education in a congregation is to acknowledge that human sexuality is simply too important, too beautiful and too potentially dangerous to be ignored in a religious community." (UUA) Our Whole Lives (OWL) curricula has been being developed by our Unitarian Universalist association since 1968 when our department of religious education staff began to study our overly sexualized culture and the obvious need to counteract its effect on our children. At first, we concentrated upon junior highers, as we wanted to introduce human sexuality education before (or, we hoped before ) the young peoples' sexual hormones began raging.
Over the years we have become well known for our work - even mentioned in such places as the Dilbert cartoon series by Scott Adams: in the first frame Dogbert is sitting on a bench with a woman and saying: "I don't understand something, Liz. You told Dilbert you don't want to be physical until after marriage...in the second frame, they are still on the bench and Dogbert continues: I would expect him to be cranky around the house, yet he's quite relaxed...serene. I don't see how...unless...and in the third frame, Dogbert is home with Dilbert and says: "did you discover religion?" And Dilbert replies: "I think I'm a Unitarian."
Over the last thirty four years, some of which have been filled with public and intra Unitarian Universalist controversy, we have evolved into a curriculum of five segments for five different age groups, with five varying developmental age group needs: there are materials for those who are five years of age, ten years, thirteen years, fifteen to seventeen years and over eighteen years. There is only one stage, thirteen years, when we spend the entire church school year with the curriculum, the other age group offerings are from eight to twelve weeks in length. With the newly developed owl, we have shared the creation of the curricula with the educators of the United Church of Christ denomination, preparing a separate religious beliefs segment for each faith. RSG: One of the interesting features of the new OWL program is that it is life-span - there are programs for every stage of the life process, including adulthood. Now, why would sophisticated, intelligent, informed, emancipated Unitarian Universalists need adult human sexuality education? To which I respond: Have adults stopped needing to learn? And what may we need to unlearn? I discovered some of the reasons at our training session for ministers last spring.
Much of our knowledge is out of date - at least mine was - knowledge of anatomy was a bit rusty - some of the developmental features of sexuality as people age needed review. There is new information about homosexuality, bi-sexual and transgendered people.
We adults are all the teachers of our children - and our grandchildren. We are teachers whether or not we are trained for teaching OWL. Teaching human sexuality happens at any time or place.
I remember when our older son and I were in our car on Highland Avenue - I think he was 8 or 9. He asked me how we was created. Firmly gripping the wheel, in what I thought was a matter-of-fact fashion I gave him an accurate description of human love-making. My steering was challenged when he said something like "You've got to be kidding! That's yucky!" I think I said it wasn't yucky, but that this happened because his mother and I loved each other and wanted a child - like him. We need to know because at any time we can be asked to step up as sex educators, and there is nothing more dangerous than an uninformed teacher.
As we age we become models for the succeeding generations of how human intimacy develops over the life span. Unless we understand how our sexual powers change, our needs and our desires, we will not convey to younger generations that the intimacy we know as human sexuality lasts a lifetime.
I think of the man, celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary, who told the secret of his marital success. He woke up every morning, looked in the mirror, and said, "You're no prize either."[1] We have a responsibility to communicate that kind of wisdom to our progeny.
Adults need sex education because so many contemporary issues depend upon our understanding the facts and the issues - stem-cell research and abortion, homosexuality and reproductive freedom - to name just a few. Sexuality is not only a private and personal issue; it is also a public and political issue.
HPC: The Parents Television Council found that between August 3 and November 8 of last year, the networks broadcast three thousand eight hundred and eighty five instances of sexual material, foul language and violence during the so called "family hour" from eight to nine pm. According to the president of the national law center for children and families, Bruce Taylor, there are several factors contributing to erotica working its way into mainstream American media: "(1) the number of state or federal prosecutions for violations of obscenity laws over the past decade stopped almost completely when the "Community Decency Act of 1996" was struck down as unconstitutional; ( 2) the rise of the internet as an easy way to deliver explicitly sexual material to a wide, undifferentiated market; and (3) the expansion of the entertainment marketplace from a few networks to a vast world of satellite, cable, video and pay-per view options." (The Christian Science Monitor)
Everyone is saying that all this stems from the idea that sex sells, and money is presently our bottom line in this culture. And last week, a Boston Globe investigation revealed "that as many as seventy priests in Boston have come to the attention of church officials there in sex-abuse allegations." I simply can't think of another way to help all of us in this type of atmosphere, but to talk with one another, to teach ourselves and our children, to share our commonly held understandings about our sexuality.
RSG: Helena, one distinction between OWL and the old About Your Sexuality (AYS) is the strong values orientation of this program. While in AYS there was a place for values, in OWL values are center stage.
For example, the meaning of human sexuality is an important part of the program, especially for adults. I remember reading several years ago about a woman who wrote, "I was once practice-teaching in the kindergarten class of an elderly teacher determined to prove how modern she was. She had just explained to the class that Mama and Papa Rabbit had become an expectant family - and how they got that way - when I overheard one child say to another, 'I know what they do, and I know when they do it, but I don't know why they do it."[2]
In OWL there is an understanding that affection, commitment and meaning attach to sexual intimacy. On the Diane Rheem show recently there was an interview with Pamela Paul, author of The Starter Marriage, which documents the increasing number of marriages that barely are consummated before they are dissolved. It has become increasingly prevalent - almost routine - marriage and divorce in the early 20's. Paul points to Isabel who was afraid of ending up single and at 25 decided to marry a many she'd been dating for 8 months. She felt she was supposed to get married. "When you're 25 suddenly you think you're old and the thought of being 27 or 28 and still being single is such a bad feeling. You think everyone is judging you." Isabel devoted more attention to the wedding than the marriage and after only a year they divorced. OWL takes sexuality, intimacy, commitment seriously.
HPC: This all sounds so serious, and it is, but we also have a lot of great "owl" stories to share: a five year old (we shall not use names, to protect the innocent) had completed her OWL course, and even though her parents kept asking her, she said she had learned nothing. Then one day while waiting for the bus, she said to her mother, "Mom, you know that sex stuff - I don't really like it. You and Dad don't do that, do you?" Well, Mom knew how to respond because she was an OWL teacher, so she said: "Why, dear, if we didn't do it, you wouldn't be here." The little girl looked at her mother in amazement and then delight, "Oh, she said, then I like it!!"
RSG: In the same vein, the unit on sexuality and aging contains this poem from Judith Viorst, "Sex Is Not So Sexy Anymore."
"I bring the children one more glass of water.
I rub the hormone night cream on my face.
Then after I complete the isometrics,
I greet my husband with a warm embrace,
A vision in my long-sleeved flannel nightgown
And socks (because my feet are always freezing),
Gulping tranquilizers for my nerve ends,
and Triaminic tablets for my wheezing.
Our blue electric blanket's set for toasty.
Our red alarm clock's set at seven-thirty.
I tell him that we owe the grocer plenty.
He tells me that his two best suits are dirty.
Last year I bought him Centaur for his birthday.
(They promised he'd become half-man, half-beast.)
Last year he bought me something black and lacy,
(They promised I'd go mad with lust, at least.)
Instead my rollers clink upon the pillow
And his big toenail scrapes against my skin.
He rises to apply a little Chap Stick.
I ask him to bring back two Bufferin.
Oh somewhere there are lovely little boudoirs
With Porthault sheets and canopies and whips.
He lion-hunts in Africa on weekends.
She measures thirty-three around the hips.
Their eyes engage across the brandy snifters.
He runs his fingers through her Kenneth hair.
The kids are in the other wing with nanny.
The sound of violins is everywhere.
In our house there's the sound of dripping water.
It's raining and he never patched the leak.
He grabs the mop and I get out the bucket.
We both agree to try again next week."[3]
HPC and RSG: Happy Valentine's Day!
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