Sex ed exploded over the next three decades. In the 1930s, the U.S. Office of Education began to publish materials and train teachers. In the 1940s and '50s, courses in human sexuality began to appear on college campuses. In 1964, Mary Calderone, a physician who had been the medical director at Planned Parenthood, founded the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). SIECUS was created in part to challenge the hegemony of the American Social Hygiene Association, which then dominated sex-education curriculum development. In 1968, The U.S. Office of Education gave New York University a grant to develop graduate programs for training sex-education teachers.

Oddly enough, some of the greatest resistance to sex ed arose during the sexual revolution of the late '60s and early '70s. Sex ed became a political issue during this time, as religious conservatives built a movement based, in part, on their opposition to sex instruction in the public schools. Groups like the Christian Crusade and the John Birch Society attacked SIECUS and sex education overall for promoting promiscuity and moral depravity. In the widely distributed 1968 pamphlet entitled "Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?" Gordon Drake and James Hargis framed sex ed as communist indoctrination: "[If] the new morality is affirmed, our children will become easy targets for Marxism and other amoral, nihilistic philosophies—as well as V.D.!" Rumors spread that sex instructors were encouraging students to be homosexuals or even stripping and having sex in front of their classes. "Religious conservatives began using sex ed to their political advantage," says Janice M. Irvine, author of Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States. "They had this really scary rhetoric." In school districts across the country, groups of parents started protesting sex-ed programs.

When the AIDS and HIV pandemic began in the 1980s, however, proponents of sex ed found their position strengthened. By the mid-1990s, every state had passed mandates for AIDS education (sometimes tied to general sex ed and sometimes not). But as some form of sex ed became inevitable in the era of HIV and AIDS, conservatives launched a movement to rebrand sex education as "abstinence education." Religious conservatives helped add provisions for abstinence education to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, and the Federal government directed tens of millions of dollars to abstinence-education programs for the first time.

Although people stopped referring to it as self pollution, masturbation was still pretty much taboo 160 years after Sylvester Graham railed against it. At the 1994 United Nations conference on AIDS, then surgeon general Jocelyn Elders was asked about promoting masturbation to prevent young people from engaging in riskier sexual behavior. "I think that it is a part of human sexuality," Elders replied. "And perhaps it should be taught." Her answer, and the reaction to it, ultimately forced her to resign. "The U.S. is really paradoxical," Irvine says. "We have this massive sexualization of the media (just think of the movie American Pie), but we're not allowed to talk about masturbation with teenagers." Newsweek, A Brief History of Sex Ed in America

BY JOHANNAH CORNBLATT ON 10/27/09 AT 8:00 PM EDT

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In 1979, PPFA established a national sex education program

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CDC latest report on STDs:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/2019/2018-STD-surveillance-report.html#Graphics

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