Sex Education: An Anti-Feminist Socialization of American Youth

My research is on the ways in which young adults have come to learn about sex and
sexuality specifically through parent/guardian teachings and formal sex education.
Through my work, I analyze interviews conducted with 25 undergraduates at Stanford
University on their memories of sex education, using their narratives to complement
statistics that surround teen pregnancy and STI rates in the US. I engage with social
theory on socialization, female oppression, and the performance of gender, as well as
existing literature on sex education and the state of reproductive health. The aim of this
paper is to showcase the manner in which sex education plays a role in the perpetuation
of problematic gender socialization binaries through misleading sex education practices.
I demonstrate the benefit participant narratives can provide in illustrating more about
the human experience behind national reproductive health concerns, with the goal of
proposing nuanced approaches to such issues.