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Notes -
This was a private school, located in (what I as an adult now recognize as) a quite wealthy neighborhood in Cambridge, MA. FWIW, I do recall we were specifically encourage to masturbate for health reasons (specifically no STD & no pregnancy - any other benefits such as pleasure or whatever weren't mentioned IIRC), but I don't think any actual explicit instructions were provided, either orally or visually.
Your line does seem reasonable, but it also does seem like one that's hard to maintain from the current hegemonic belief that pregnancy and bonding with a partner are merely a couple of optional consequences one can freely choose to get or not from sex. That mostly just leaves the pleasure portion, and not covering that, along with the many now-mainstream techniques for accomplishing those, would leave a big gaping hole in the education that the internet can rush to fill (less of an issue in the 90s).
This belief is less hegemonic than it probably seems from a deep blue tribe perspective; plenty of people who don’t go to church every Sunday, fornicate and use contraceptives think that casual sex is morally wrong and people having sex should be prepared for the possibility of having a kid.
And I think that’s the rub; you point to a hippie-dippy private school, but public schools holding that same attitude of ‘of course we’re going to teach your kids progressive sexual ideas, it’s too hard not to’ is a problem because these are supposedly neutral institutions that are funded with taxpayer dollars partly on the basis of that supposed neutrality. If public schools are actually a vehicle for pushing blue tribe attitudes that’s a problem, and I suspect that sex Ed isn’t the only example of this.
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I'm sorry, but this whole section reads, to me, like "Yeah, you're right, but I don't care." How is anyone supposed to push back against the "hegemonic belief that pregnancy and bonding with a partner are merely a couple of optional consequences one can freely choose to get or not from sex" when that worldview is baked into compulsory education you must send your children to? That's people's entire bugbear with supposedly public institutions not acting in a neutral manner that the entire public can agree on. All you've done, to refute my reasonable argument, is fall back on some sort of learned helplessness towards the problems that my enemy tribe have created.
No. Just no.
Well, I don't care about the state of sex ed in America in the most literal sense of the term - I have nothing in my life that would be affected positively or negatively based on what these sex ed policies are. If I had children of my own, I would care, and if I thought my own future would be affected meaningfully by the next generation of adults being taught the pleasure of sexual acts in explicit ways, I would care, but I don't see how it would.
I would certainly prefer it that kids today were taught sex in ways even more conservatively than I was taught, but that's just my own aesthetic preferences, along with some empathy I have towards those kids, who I feel sorry for to some extent due to the world we created for them. But it's not my responsibility to care about these kids, and their sexual well-being ultimately doesn't affect my life all that much.
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