A guest column by Jeana Jorgensen, PhD
I’ve been a folklorist since I finished my first semester at UC Berkeley in the fall of 2000. I’d wandered in thinking I was going to be a history major, and ended up taking an introduction to cultural anthropology, introduction to linguistics, introduction to religious studies, and a freshman seminar on fairy tales. By the end of that semester, I was like, “I want all these things combined as one thing forever” and you know what? That’s kinda what folklore is.
I also lucked out in that I was able to study with Alan Dundes, one of the most eminent American folklorists of all time. From Dundes, I learned not only the basics of folklore studies (in a time before most library resources were digitized!) but I also learned that all products of human culture were worthy of study, even when those items were violent, bigoted, or disgusting.
The study of sexual folklore was largely held to occupy the latter category: filth that occasionally popped up and demanded our attention, alongside the more elegant and meaningful forms of folklore like creation myths, fairy tales, and so on. And there was a corresponding history of censorship of sexual folklore; it was often considered unprintable, and even Stith Thompson’s monumental Motif Index of Folk Literature left out a lot of “erotic” motifs. But if humans made it and maintained it, Dundes argued that it could tell us something about ourselves, even if that something might also not be anything we wanted to acknowledge.
I did research for Dundes about how to classify dead baby jokes, about the jokes Americans told about Nazi German and Japanese soldiers during World War II, and about incest in European fairy tales. And then I went to grad school, and acquired specialties in feminist theory, queer theory, and gender studies to go with my graduate degrees in folklore from Indiana University.
At the same time, I was always “that friend” you could ask about sex stuff. I grew up in a fairly shame-free household and I was a voracious reader, so if I didn’t know something, I generally knew where to find it. So at some point, things clicked for me and I began researching sex education, both its history and how to go about getting involved as a sex educator.
Ultimately, while I went to a bunch of cool conferences and met a bunch of sex educators, therapists, and so on, I stayed in my academic bubble and just did a few talks here and there rather than going full-on for a sex education career (and those can be quite varied; I know people who work in sex shops who don’t have certifications or degrees but have a ton of amazing knowledge, while others have worked at Planned Parenthood or in different areas of nursing, all while disseminating as much sex ed info as they could manage).
But the topic stayed with me, and I developed and taught a course about cultural conflict and sex education, once again using my folklore background to interpret the past and present of sex education in the U.S.
After about a decade of this, I was finally like, I should write a darn book! And so I did. I’d already written Folklore 101 and Fairy Tales 101, so it made sense that I could apply the same strategy here, and brain-dump years’ worth of material into an accessible, engaging book that would have way more fun and disturbing facts than academic jargon.
Sex Education 101 is unique in that it utilizes a folklore-studies lens to understand the history of sex education as grounded in moral panics, rumors, and other classic folklore genres. Which is wild, because all these folklore genres went on to influence public policy! Like, to take just one example, gossip and rumors about what kinds of people were supposedly dangerous hosts of sexually transmitted illnesses influenced the U.S. government in its nefarious plan to indefinitely detain and treat supposedly “loose” women for decades! And practically no one has heard of this “America Plan” unless you’re in a very specific vein of history. So I’ve remained true to my folkloristic roots even as I’ve branched out into topics that you don’t typically see in folklore books or on a folklore syllabus.
Anyway, I’m happy to have a place among Storied Imaginarium authors because this community is all about seeking the unexpected connections, whether delightful or horrifying, between the varied threads of traditional creative genres. My newest book is just one example of the kinds of wacky and weird ways we put folklore into dialogue with other areas of humanity.
My new book: Sex Education 101 (order here!)
My existing books: Folklore 101 (order here) & Fairy Tales 101 (order here)
The Foxy Folklorist blog at Only Sky
My personal site, jeanajorgensen.com
My sex education site, doctorjeana.com
