In the mid-1970s, the Park School of Baltimore hired Deborah Roffman to teach a course called Human Sexuality. The class dealt candidly with that most perilous of topics, the developing sexuality of young people. “This was a time when, under health education in the state of Maryland curriculum guide, the sex education part was called ‘genetic perpetuation,’” Roffman says. Now a national expert on sexuality education, she’s written two books, 2001’s Sex and Sensibility: The Thinking Parent’s Guide to Talking Sense About Sex and its 2002 follow-up, But How Did I Get In There In the First Place?, which is geared toward parents with young children. Roffman sat down with WEAA radio show host Marc Steiner to talk about what the media gets wrong about teens and sex, how our sexual culture has changed for the worse, and why Americans are terrified of talking about it with their kids.Q: You’ve spent thirty-five years teaching human sexuality. Talk about the changes you’ve seen in terms of our mores and attitudes.A I always like to say that we didn’t really have a revolution in the 1960s—we had a revolt. As long as third-graders are still going to the playground to talk about sex instead of talking with their teachers, and as long as teachers aren’t there to answer their questions, I’m going to say that we didn’t have a revolution. That’s the biggest test. How are we supporting our children in growing up to be sexually healthy people?Q: Part of what changed sexual attitudes during this revolt, as you call it, in the 1960s was the women’s liberation movement. The liberation of women meant the liberation of lots of other things, including our attitudes toward sex. We’re still battling that, aren’t we?A Look at advertising. Look at the way women in the workplace on television are sexualized. Young people see that. You have to think of children as Martians. They’ve never been here before. They’re just looking around, and it’s all coming at them. So they think, “That’s the way you get ahead if you’re a woman at work.” What the women’s movement was about was, “My body’s irrelevant here: I want to be judged on what I know, what I can do.”Q: Is it possible that maybe both are true, and that’s the problem? There is sexual tension between men and women. A: Absolutely. There is a time and place to be sexual—God knows, I’ve been teaching this for years. What concerns me is that I see girls and women feel that they have to be sexual in all settings.I think that much of the changes that have happened since the 1990s around sex and gender in this culture are indirectly related to AIDS. We forget what a closed society we were. In the 1980s, nobody said the word “condom” on television. The fear of AIDS caused this culture to grow up in a hurry, and by the end of the decade, I said to myself, “Wow, we’re about to raise the first generation of sexually literate young people.” But what happened was the advertising and entertainment industries said, “We can be open about sex now.” That’s when they started to push the envelope. In the 1990s, the number of sexual acts and references on television tripled. I think the culture became sexualized to an extent that changed it in fundamental ways.Q: So you think we became sexualized rather than sexually—A: Healthy. It’s very different. Then you have to add to that this whole “tweens” concept. What parents want to talk to me about more than anything is this adultification of children. Kids always paid attention to adult sexual messages, but now they’re being beamed directly at children, as if to say, “You are part of the adult sexual world.” Hence these unbelievably sexy Halloween costumes for 7-year-old girls.One piece of fallout from the ’60s that is very unhealthy is that [we concluded that] if being oppressed meant always saying no, then being liberated must mean always saying yes. That isn’t right: Being liberated means that you have the right to decide for yourself.Q: We read a lot about oral sex among middle-school kids. Have children become that much more sexualized?A: Yes and no. There have always been middle-school kids who’ve been outliers. Always. By the late ’90s, I was hearing my high-school seniors say they did not recognize the sexual and social lives of their middle-school siblings. And that’s when I started to see the power of this ever-exploding media involvement in sexuality. Every February, when it was sweeps month on television, I could guarantee I was going to get calls from media people because they were doing an oral sex story.Part of it is talk: There’s more permission for middle-school kids to talk about these things, so that’s what we’re hearing. But just because we talk about things more doesn’t mean they’re happening more. And by the way, if there is all this oral sex going on in middle school, where are the parents? It really always comes back to us as adults and how we’re engaged in their lives.Q: Do you work as much with parents as you do children?A: Absolutely. One of the things that I’ve observed over the years is this movement away from the concept of sex as intimacy, and part of the reason is because adults don’t know how to articulate this. I encourage parents of young children to introduce the word “intimacy” as a synonym for “closeness.” Then, when their children start noticing this thing about sexiness, parents can have a frame for the conversation. Not “sex is about these body parts rubbing,” but “these are the needs that sex is supposed to meet in people’s lives.”Q: How do you create a conversation around sexuality in a high school situation? These students are at an age when a lot of kids become sexually active.A: And can I assume that you mean intercourse by that?Q: Yes.A: See, that’s the other thing that we do. Sex is a range of behaviors. This penis-in-vagina frame—and notice how heterosexist that is—goes back centuries, to when that was the only permitted form of sex. If you want to understand sex as intimacy, you have to put those behaviors on a continuum. It involves sharing your body with another person in an intimate way that you don’t usually do with everybody in the world. That’s what sex therapists will tell you is the secret to a long-term sexual relationship: seeing it as different ways to share my body with another person, not this goal-directed vaginal intercourse—ejaculate and it’s over. Which is a very male model, as well.Do you know how many women in this country think their vaginas are on the outside? You ask a mother today to tell her daughter she has a clitoris, and it’s like, “Oh my God, I have to do that?” But when we don’t name parts of the body, we’re reinforcing the idea that women are only for reproductive purposes, not for sexual purposes. We think in little boxes. What I’m trying to do is blow up those boxes.Q: Have you ever attempted to do this in a public school?A: I once gave a talk at a public elementary school in Washington. The title was “Sex and Sensibility,” and when I walked in, I saw they’d changed it to “… and Sensibility.” The principal said that elementary school students should not see the word “sex” in school. This—and I mean this seriously—is psychotic. What are you supposed to tell a child? Go home and Google it?Q: Do you have children?A: Yes!Q: So, how’d this work with your own kids?A: Of all the research that has come out over the last forty years, there’s one that hasn’t changed: Children who grow up in families where sexuality is openly discussed grow up better able to make decisions, and they postpone risky behaviors of all kinds, including sexual intercourse. This is why I’m an educator. Education works. Nurturing works. The operative word in prevention research is postpone, postpone, postpone. And parents are the most important buffer.I will say that if you did a study of sexuality educators, you’d find that their children are way conservative, socially. But I don’t think they make great teenagers. They think too much like adults, because they can think critically. I’m not sure if this is a curse or a blessing, but teenage culture doesn’t always make a lot of sense to them.