Grant v. Lee

All children whose parents Never Told Them grow up to be authorities on sex education. Well, Mary Breasted's mother tried. She said something in the kitchen once about a "rosy glow." The years passed, and Mary saw a bit of life. She spent two years as a VISTA volunteer in Spanish Harlem. She --wow!--even went to Radcliffe. By her 26th year she had become one of those bright reporters on the Village Voice, and she had reached a decision: Mother's little touch of poetry about the rosy glow was something less than enough. Sex education had become Now, and manifestly it was a Village Voicer's worthy cause.

Armed with her bias, a tape recorder and what was to prove to be a subversive sense of humor, Mary set out for the war zone of sex education--Anaheim, Calif. Somewhere in the Neverland of Orange County, trapped by flak from every side, Mary grew up. She got her education not only in sex but in the politics of the public schools and in the slightly mad ways Americans define and propagandize their moral values.

The result, Oh! Sex Education! (Praeger; $7.95), is a small journalistic masterpiece of rueful perception. With her first book, Mary Breasted takes her place among the Joan Didions, Gloria Steinems, Gail Sheehys--the journalists of grace-note disillusionment, all those sharp young women who look at their fellow Americans with the sad-eyed vision of little girls whose dolls were broken at an early age.

In the shadow of the Disneyland Matterhorn, Mary slipped out her tape recorder and notebooks and listened while the Anaheim Pros and Antis talked. And talked! In 1969, the pioneering Family Life and Sex Education Program, which Anaheim had introduced into its schools, was the major local topic.

FLSE, as it was known, consisted of an ungraded 41-week session, beginning in seventh grade and running through the twelfth. The facts of reproduction, pregnancy and birth were progressively detailed. But in Mary Breasted's opinion, "the emphasis of the seventh-grade sessions was placed on youngsters' social problems," while even "twelfth graders would learn more about the problems of raising a family than they would about sexual intercourse." Nevertheless, the Antis saw it as the evil of all evils --a Communist plot to brainwash pure-minded America. Atheism, rock 'n' roll, even the U.K. were minor perils beside sex education. It was "programmed perversion," condoning homosexuality, endorsing masturbation--a sneaky death blow at the heart of America: the Family. The Pros, on the other hand, saw the experiment as education at the point of salvation. "Stamp Out Neurosis" was the invisible banner every Pro waved. Sex education promised to free America from its puritan hang-ups--and about time, too!

Mary Breasted left the battlefields of Anaheim with an ear-buzzing sense of overkill. Everybody was talking, but nobody was listening. It was just as if two tape recorders were shouting at each other. The futility of the polarized and polished dialogue made her recall the words of H.L. Mencken: "Did Luther convert Leo X? Did Grant convert Lee?" The missionaries were playing cannibals.

The other disturbing thing Mary noticed was that she tended to like the wrong-thinking Antis better than the right-thinking Pros. When she left Anaheim, she went on to interview the No. 1 Pro missionary, Dr. Mary Calderone, director of SIECUS (Sex Information and Education Council of the United States) and Anti Master Propagandist Gordon Drake, once the right-hand man to Billie Hargis in his Christian Crusade against sex education. Drake's eyes had a nice twinkle--almost enough to give a girl a rosy glow --and even the MOMS (Mothers for Moral Stability) could be nice folk. By contrast, Dr. Calderone seemed austere and arrogant, driving Mary to think up cross questions like: Just what is it that sex education is supposed to teach? (At present it could be described as a science of half-developed intuitions, with a collateral course in polltakers' sociology.) Just who will teach it? And just what will its effects be?

Worrying over these questions, Mary progressed to an even graver heresy. She began to wonder if the Pros and the Antis were quite as different as they thought they were. Both, she concluded, were really committed to the principle of premarital chastity. The Antis believed that to say "Thou shalt not..." was enough; further discussion was risky. The Pros, in turn, thought that you had to reason the kids into it, but their master objective was pretty much the same.

At this point, sex education rather collapsed as a serious issue for Mary Breasted. It became not a matter of right or wrong--but irrelevant. The Pros, she decided, despite their intellectual modern decor, are just as dated as the Antis. Sex education is a comedy of red-faced adults contending to the death to save young America. For better or for worse, Author Breasted suggests, sex is simply no longer what the young think of when they think of morality: "They have other things to worry about, like the draft and the people who are ruining our water and our air."

Mary Breasted started out to collect the Facts, just the Facts, and ended up seeing the sex-education controversy as a distress signal for something else. For instance, America's persistent tendency to present choices as moral absolutes. Few social scientists will produce better reports on American morals--and few novelists will write more devastating satires on American idealism--tfifea this Story of Oh!

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