THE BELL CURVE:

Have you noticed how big sex is in these parts recently?

A guy’s manhood is being measured by whether he allows himself to be dragged off to “Sex and the City.”

I find this a little embarrassing because I watched it regularly on TV — and not for the scenes of Manhattan — and have been wanting to see the movie, but I’m a little bit uneasy about running into a wife of one of my poker group at the theater. Also, I just read a scathing review of it in the New Yorker that has almost dissuaded me.

Meanwhile, sex education in our local schools has supplanted the location of the proposed city hall in public attention. I find sex a lot more interesting, especially since it’s a subject that gets trotted out every 10 years or so. I have a fat file on it that I started building in the late 1960s when for five years Anaheim became a kind of Mecca for sex-ed advocates all over the U.S.

That’s when the Anaheim Union High School District came up with Family Living, a program that worked so well that both disciples and critics came visiting. Each group played its role resolutely, from the John Birch Society, which regarded the program as designed to win students over to communism, to Planned Parenthood’s certainty that it would perform a similar service for the American family.

Once these extremities took up the cause, it was a foregone conclusion that in Orange County — especially at that time — the political right-wingers would win.

And they did. Big time. First they won control of the school board, then they fired the superintendent and killed the program, and it’s been in recession ever since.

But it left behind some guideposts that seem to transcend the time and circumstances in which it flourished.

The first, and by far most important, was the involvement of community leaders as much as possible in the program. Sex ed in public schools will always be under attack, and the arguments against it can be disarmed in advance by the breadth of this support.

They can also be disarmed by dispelling the myths that cling to sex ed. These were well summed up by Supt. Paul W. Cook, who spawned the Family Living program then went down with it when the program was still attracting educators who wanted to copy it. I worked with Cook on a magazine piece called, “Six Myths about Sex Education” that might be helpful in redesigning sex education in Newport-Mesa.

Myth No. 1: Sex-ed material is pornographic.

To a large extent, this reflects the fears and furtiveness of our own sex ed. Sex ed in schools should be an integral aspect of the overall health education program. Teaching without the visual aids so necessary and useful in other courses would be both foolish and difficult.

Myth No. 2: Sex-ed students are taught “dirty words” and encouraged to use them.

This concern is also a product of parental embarrassment, manifested by the refusal to use accurate terminology to describe bodily functions. The slang expressions young people pick up are replaced in sex-ed classes by proper and precise — and unembarrassed — terminology.

Myth No. 3: Discussion of human sexuality in the classroom invites experimentation.

Just the opposite took place in Anaheim. In a school district that had one of the highest rates of teen pregnancies in the state, the Family Living program in three years reduced the rate of pregnancies to 3.59 per thousand students in Anaheim while illegitimate births among high school girls in the state as a whole were three times as great.

Myth No. 4: Family Life and sex-ed courses ignore ethics and morality and are taught independent of these vital considerations.

Morality is what the Family Life program was all about, equipping young people with knowledge — the dangers and consequences of pre-marital sex, for example — that will lead them to make intelligent moral decisions. Said Cook, “We have been accused of teaching middle class morality, and maybe that’s what we’re doing. But we’re doing it by involving the youngsters instead of just lecturing at them.”

Myth No. 5: Sex ed in public schools is unnecessary because the parents and the church fulfill this function.

Most young people will talk to their parents about sexual matters only if they think they can get factual answers and won’t be pre-judged. They want reasons instead of arbitrary commands and are often desperate for someone who will level with them. A responsible sex-ed program will open avenues of communication at home.

Myth No. 6: If sex information isn’t pushed on young people, they won’t take time from other activities to think about it.

Young people today are adrift in a sea of sex-laden films and books. Innuendoes are shrieked at them daily from billboards and TV commercials. Misinformation and destructive attitudes are massive, resulting in fantastic information about sex. Children can’t be protected from these topics, nor should they be. If they are provided simple, factual, unembarrassed information about their own sexuality when they are ready to receive it, they will think a great deal less about sex.

One other point is especially important to remember: Sex-ed programs are always voluntary. Parents who — for whatever reasons — find it contrary to their convictions can withdraw their children. But the corollary to this protection is that opposition to the program should not be allowed to deny it to parents who embrace it.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.