Children and adolescents need accurate and comprehensive education about sexuality to practice healthy sexual behavior as adults. Early, exploitative, or risky sexual activity may lead to health and social problems, such as unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, including human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. This statement reviews the r...

This paper discusses research on men's reproductive health and sexuality in Oaxaca, Mexico, and specifically why some men there choose to be sterilized. Men who opt for vasectomies do so after considering numerous cultural, historical, physiological, commercial, and other concerns. Men and women in Oaxaca negotiate certain cultural folk beliefs about supposed male sexual desires and practices b...

CONTEXT While policymakers, educators and parents recognize the need for family life and sexuality education during children's formative years and before adolescence, there is little nationally representative information on the timing and content of such instruction in elementary schools. METHODS In 1999, data were gathered from 1, 789 fifth- and sixth-grade teachers as part of a nationally r...

BACKGROUND The World Health Organization's publication, Developing sexual health programmes, states that the media is an important source of information about sexuality. Although the media can promote awareness of sexual health issues, it also acts as a vehicle for defining and regulating sex norms. In other words, the standards of 'normal' sex are in part defined by the media. Accordingly, it ...

In Health Education, much sexuality education appears to have little evidence of an acknowledged theoretical basis for its knowledge and skills' teaching and learning. The Health Education teacher can frequently be at a loss to decipher what theoretical principles could or should permeate sexuality education curricula, which may be both detracting and distracting from the educational process. T...

thinking about sexuality. Yes, we must reject a naturalistic approach to sexuality; certainly, we need to challenge the worst excesses of those who see the nineteenth century as a period of sexual darkness: certainly we must explore the relationship between sexuality and power. Yet, there was, they suggest, a real darkening of the sexual climate in the Victorian period (thus challenging Foucaul...

In her article on adolescent sexuality development, Miriam Arbeit [this issue] conceptualizes adolescent sexuality as a realm of desire, pleasure, and social development, raising issues of negotiation, empowerment, ethics, and identity. This is quite different from the standard approach that classifies adolescent sexuality as a type of “risk taking” and then explains it in terms of a special ad...

Sexuality and sexual disorders of patients with psychoses are frequently neglected and under-investigated. The main purpose of the present study is to discuss the subjective experience of sexuality in patients with psychosis within the general psychodynamic and phenomenological understandings of psychotic states. The authors, both psychotherapists, dealing with patients with psychoses, reflecte...