Image by FML Photography.
I take great issue with the methodology of the way this human sexuality course in LA is being taught — not meaning to undermine the fact that it is being taught *at all* which is a fundamentally good thing. It is. But I’m from the sex positive, all-gender, all orientation vanguard of sex ed that “I” statements are reserved for your therapy time and your lover, and not for teachers, or preaching your opinions on sexuality *as an educator*. Giving students — even rambunctious ones, which I can totally handle — the tools to self-individuate their sexuality and sex education is something that should always be objectively taught. Give the students choices and the tools to decide for themselves. Just because it works for me doesn’t mean it’s got to work for you (the implication that you’re sexually “broken” if my model doesn’t work in your bedroom). Am I overreacting? Here’s a snip from At UC Santa Barbara, sex as a matter of course — taught by a long-term married heterosexual couple from a different generation, rife with gender stereotypes, underlying proscriptions (and not DEscriptions) about goal-oriented sexuality and relationships…
Sociology professors John and Janice Baldwin, married for 41 years, are trusted voices on love and lovemaking for thousands of students at the beach-side campus.
By Larry Gordon
August 1, 2009
Reporting from Santa Barbara — How well should people know each other before they have sex?In the biggest classroom at UC Santa Barbara, sociology professors John and Janice Baldwin are reeling off survey results showing that male and female students are almost equally willing to sleep with someone they love. But the hall erupts in knowing laughter as a gender gap emerges: Men, the long-married couple reports, remain eager for sex through descending categories of friendship and casual acquaintance. Women don’t.
By the time Janice Baldwin gets to the statistic on sex between strangers, the din from the 600 students is so loud, they can hardly hear her announce that 37% of men would have sex with a person they had just met, compared with only 7% of women.
“So you can see, males are a little more likely to go to bed with somebody they don’t know very well,” Baldwin says dryly.
“Or at all,” she adds, to guffaws.
By turns humorous and deadly serious, “Sociology of Human Sexuality” has been an institution at the beach-side campus for more than two decades. So have the Baldwins, unflappable sixtysomethings who are trusted voices on love and lovemaking for thousands of current and former UC Santa Barbara students.
Today’s undergraduates have easy access to X-rated Internet sites, and many have watched television gurus dissect troubled marriages. But there are often gaps in their knowledge of biology and sexual behavior, the result of squeamish parents and less-than-candid high school health teachers.
The Baldwins step in with data about orgasm, birth control and infertility — and, implicitly, with their own example of a 41-year marriage that seems to work well.
“We don’t feel we are the sex king and queen of the world,” Janice Baldwin, 63, said recently in the cramped office the couple share, their desks touching. “So this is not about us. It’s about the students, and we are privileged to get to teach a class that can help them avoid the downsides of sex and increase the positives.”
John Baldwin, 68, said he and his wife do not aim to be role models. “We are not trying to teach them to be like us,” he said. “But we are going to be talking about relationships, and a lot of them want relationships. Even though there is a lot of casual sex, they want to find somebody special . . . So we are little hope signals.”(…read more, latimes.com)
@ChicksonSpeedSpotter:
I don’t think you got the point of what I was saying. I’ll give another example and if that doesn’t help we can just leave it at “we agree to disagree”.
When I go to the doctor for something, she may prescribe some medication. If I take the notion that I won’t belive anything that I have not verified for myself then I will need to read an awful lot before I can take my medicine. I’ll need to start with the FDA’s publication on the approved uses of the medicine. Then I’ll have to go find the application information for the drug’s approval, and the published articles on the studies. And I’ll want to read the researchers other work to make sure they have no pervading bias. I probably also want financial reports to make sure they had no undue profit motive. And of course I’ll need to do all the background reading to educate myself to the point where I can evaluate this stuff properly. Just to take an Advil I will probably need to read several million words of information.
Science only works if you can trust another person’s results at some level. That’s why people who get caught faking results are treated like pariahs by the rest of the scientific community.
This couple at UC are doing a good job from what I read. The only issues were due to a “slant” imposed by the reporter.
Being a scientist is more than having a baseline skeptical attitude towards survey based stats along the lines of the popular “you should always take stats with a grain of salt”. Being a scientist is being able to point out why you should take survey data based stats with a grain of salt. The instrumental use of stats, as presented in this article (statements like “37% of men would have sex with a person they had just met, compared with only 7% of women”), is not going to teach students scientific self-reflection. Students will end up using stats the same way their instructors do: instrumentally (these stats “prove” such and such difference between men and women), instead of reflectively (why did women and men give different answers to the same questions? What if we reworded the questions differently?) Different answers aren’t always proof of difference, is my point.
A better exercise would be, imo, to take two surveys that produced different results – or even slightly different results, or even identical results – and to have the students analyze them comparatively, not just the stats but the way the survey itself was conducted, and try to figure out why there were different results, or identical ones. I think that this exercise would do more to “encourage students to evaluate their own attitudes and behaviours” as scientists, than presenting them with the instrumental use of stats. I also think that this would do a better job at taking the “I” out of sex-education, and to encourage objectivity.
“If you want to change that, or you believe they are incapable”
Um, they are not paying *me* their tuition fees to teach them or change them are they? Unless I get paid for it I don’t want to change anything. I am simply stating my opinion that the instrumental use of survey based stats is not good science. If students are willing to pay money to be taught how to be bad scientists, more power to them. I know that’s cynical, but I have seen enough bad science in my lifetime to realize that masses of students are perfectly willing to pay gold for some pretty worthless instruction. And I guess in the end it makes it that much easier for the rest of us to weed out the good scientists from the bad ones. Here you don’t have to take the good ones with the bad ones ;-)
I am with Tom Marks on this one,
@ChickenSpeedspotter university students should be able (as you obviously can, to take all statistics with a grain, or tablespoon full of salt)
If you want to change that, or you believe they are incapable then get behind proposals like this:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/arthur_benjamin_s_formula_for_changing_math_education.html
The statistics cited in this article are unreffereanced so any speculation on their accuracy is just that, speculative.
The fact that this couple, who have had some form of a working relationship for decades, is prepared to share their knowledge and encourage students to evaluate their own attitudes and behaviours is, I feel very valuable.
What issue have with this I am not really sure, the stats don’t fit your world-view? the reporters a dick? expand please.
Thank you
@ChicksonSpeedSpotter
Lies, damned lies, and statistics?
“At some point you have to be willing to accept that other people did a competent job in obtaining their data and that the journal editors were competent in checking it.”
I’m sorry I totally disagree. Interpreting survey data, especially when the survey data is but a collection of self-assessments by a population, is not real science. That’s -pardon me- “bullshit in, gospel out”. I really think science ought to be more than just taking survey data at face value, and assuming that just because the research was produced by a well meaning scientist and published in a reputable journal it’s OK to use the data to make a point or to get at a point. Doing real science is to investigate the data, the questionnaire and the process of questioning all together. If it doesn’t come with an appendix or two don’t trust it.
“You also trust that two profs at the school who read the original article and are presenting it to their class first read the article and decided that the data gathering method described was reasonable”
The point I am trying to make is that rather than teaching their students to trust survey data “just because the teacher read it beforehand and ascertained it is kosher”, they have an obligation to teach their students to be critical of surveys. Instead they are teaching their students an instrumental use of survey data, which is not good science imo.
@ChicksonSpeedSpotter:
At some point you have to be willing to accept that other people did a competent job in obtaining their data and that the journal editors were competent in checking it. You also trust that two profs at the school who read the original article and are presenting it to their class first read the article and decided that the data gathering method described was reasonable. If you for some reason find any of those suspect then, yes you should go check yourself which is why the written material probably included citations for the information they quote in lecture. If you finally come to the conclusion that the data is flawed then you run your own experiment and publish those results.
Either way, it’s still a fact that “a particular researcher did a particular survey under some particular conditions with a particular protocol and got a particular result” and it’s not just an opinion.
An opinion would be if they stood up and said “hey I think men all want sex and women are all prudes” (an offensive opinion at that!). But if they quote a study that has the figures cited in the article and they lead that into a discussion of what the data implies then they are doing exactly what they should be doing.
I think what is making a few people, including, VB unhappy is the interpretation and additions by the reporter. For example, the profs say “no, it’s not about us” but the reporter insists on talking about how the profs “are a role model for the students”. It sounded to me like the profs are working hard to teach an objective class, but the reporter wanted to use the “cute old adorable couple teach sex class” angle and so the reporter has added his/her own distortion.
“The information they present is not opinion, it facts.”
Science does not come in the form of a “collection of self assessments” from a population the scientists “believe” were serious when they answered the survey.
Science is to investigate the survey itself, looking to see whether the researchers included check-up questions to control whether the respondents were either paying attention or *consistently* telling the truth. Teaching students to analyze and question surveys, the outcome as well as the questions asked, that is good science, teaching students to uncritically accept survey results is not.
Hm. Mixed feelings. The New Yorker cartoons and the *article’s* lead-in make me uncomfortable, but as I read on, I find myself less perturbed. They actually sound pretty decent and non-judgmental and not all that prescriptive overall – like they are trying very hard to keep “I” out of it, in fact, and focus on their students’ concerns. Which seems reasonable (if not ideal) to me.
This sounds a lot like life imitating art…thinking here of that scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life where John Cleese teaches sex education by example. I do think the personal example sex ed thing has some taboo-breaking qualities about it that make it attractive, but I daresay we’re still living in a society where if this were ONE man or ONE woman leading the discussion, there would be a huge hypocritical outcry about decency and “family values”.
I feel like I probably should have been more offended than I was.
I remember at one point in my youth getting some vital information from the encyclopedia, of all places. My parents had given me a pretty good overview of the basics from a young age, but had skipped over the whole “erection” aspect. When, as a pubescent lad, I found my dick getting swollen and rigid from time to time, I had no idea what to make of it — although I did notice a correlation with thinking about girls. Eventually, whilst looking up something else entirely in the encyclopedia, I ran across a reference to the “male erectile reflex,” tracked down what that meant through a few different articles, and was vastly relieved to find out that it was supposed to do that.
That’s an interesting one. When I was young, some of what I consider the more useful information I got regarding sexuality and related activities came from some quite subjective sources. But then, by the time I was properly curious about such things, I’d already been raised into the practice of considering multiple sources and viewpoints when putting together my understanding of things. (Probably why I ended up agnostic too, come to think of it…)
If we’re talking about formal education, then I certainly believe the core of it should be objective and not making value judgements about what is or isn’t “good” sexuality. On the other hand, I’m wondering if there isn’t a place in people’s learning for some more subjective examples, too – from what I’ve learned of education theory, learners do tend to benefit from having concepts placed in an authentic context.
Care would have to be taken that the personal likes and dislikes in a teacher’s experience aren’t considered in any way authoritative or normative, though. Anything that’s pushing a “this is how you should/must feel” message about sex runs the risk of eroding both ability and authority to teach. And if you’re going to be providing context, trying to ensure it’s _relevant_ context for the learners, too.
By the way, why is “long-term married heterosexual couple from a different generation” relevant? TBH, it sounds like you might be doing a bit of stereotyping.
I think you need to re-read the article. The information they present is not opinion, it facts. If someone does a survey and 37% of men but only 7% of women say they would have sex with a stranger, that is not promoting a stereotype, it is reporting a fact. It would be like if 40 years ago someone reported that X% of African Americans could not read. Or if someone reported different occurrence rates for AIDS between gay and straight men. The question is what do you do with the information? If you make a stupid generalization then it’s stereotyping.
Anyhow, this class sounded like a thoughtful and fairly non-biased class. I’m not sure why you would object.