Sexually transmitted diseases, ranging from the serious to the fatal, are a fact of life in high schools and neighborhoods across the country. Misinformation and scare tactics about common sexual practices like masturbation are rampant. Despite these facts, and despite parents' overwhelming desire for their children to receive detailed sex education at school as well as at home, our society remains unwilling to make sexuality part of a comprehensive health education program in the schools and anxious to the point of hysteria about young people and sex...Hysteria about sex has hindered attempts to address these pressing concerns, and the people hurt most are those who most need the information—our young people, the poor, and the uninformed. Ignorance is not bliss.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Sexually transmitted diseases, ranging from the serious to the fatal, are a fact of life in high schools and neighborhoods across the country. Misinformation and scare tactics about common sexual practices like masturbation are rampant. Despite these facts, and despite parents' overwhelming desire for their children to receive detailed sex education at school as well as at home, our society remains unwilling to make sexuality part of a comprehensive health education program in the schools and anxious to the point of hysteria about young people and sex...Hysteria about sex has hindered attempts to address these pressing concerns, and the people hurt most are those who most need the information—our young people, the poor, and the uninformed. Ignorance is not bliss." in the context of "Joycelyn Elders, forward to Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (2002), Judith Levine, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. ix, x. https://www.ipce.info/library_3/pdf/harmfultominors.pdf In contrast to Elders' views, Judith Reisman has stated that "The damage done to children from sexual relations with adults-what the public thought was molestation-was almost always, in Kinsey's view, the result of overreaction and hysteria by parents, schoolteachers, police, etc. But one aspect of Kinsey's research was completely missed by everyone. That was the criminal childhood sexuality experimentation which formed the basis of Kinsey's conclusions on childhood sexual potential. The results of these experiments are the basis for beliefs on childhood sexuality held and taught by academic sexologists today." Judith Reisman, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People (1990), Judith Reisman, Huntington House, Lafayette, LA. p. 3. http://www.drjudithreisman.com/archives/Kinsey_Sex_and_Fraud.pdfhttps://books.google.com/books?ei=E961VIrNB8ycNoipgSg&id=GM5-AAAAMAAJ&dq=%22damage+done+to+children%22+kinsey&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22damage+done+to+children%22" to mean that wisdom is timeless.