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Since Michelle Fine's writing on the missing discourse of desire in sex education, there has been considerable prompting among sexuality educators and feminist scholars to incorporate talk of pleasure into sex education curricula. While the calls for inclusion continue, few have actually examined the curricula for a pleasure discourse or explored how it is contextualised within sex education curricula. In this paper, we analysed curricula used in the USA in the past decade. A qualitative thematic analysis revealed that the discourse around pleasurable sex was often linked to a range of dangerous or negative outcomes including not using condoms, rushing into sex without thinking, regretted sex, and pregnancy or STDs. When the discourse around pleasure was included in sections on ‘knowing one's body’, this discourse took a medicalised, scientific tone. Pleasurable sex was also presented in more positive ways, either linked to marriage in Abstinence Only Until Marriage curricula, or within a more feminist discourse about female pleasure in comprehensive sex education curricula. Our research indicates that a discourse of desire is not missing, but that this discourse was often situated as part of a discourse on safe practice and there, continues to equate pleasure with danger. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It has long been noted that sexuality education curricula contain gender stereotypes and heterosexism that may be harmful to people of all genders. Many of the stereotypes and sources of heterosexism that have been discussed in the literature have to do with old-fashioned and restrictive roles for men and women and focus on heterosexual sex and marriage. In this article, we analyzed four currently used Abstinence Only Until Marriage (AOUM) curricula in order to examine to what extent these curricula reproduce these stereotypes. We found only a few instances of older stereotypes of boys as pursuers and girls as passive recipients. There were instead more modern ideals of choice and equality that were represented; however, we found that the language of choice and equality was often used to support new stereotypes of female sexuality. For example, in treating boys and girls as equal in terms of pressuring each other to have sex or objectifying each other, they introduce some problematic new images and stereotypes of female sexuality. We use Blum's theory of “false symmetry” and Glick and Fiske's theory of benevolent sexism to explain the problems with these new images. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]