Table of Contents
Here is a distinction that sounds simple until you actually try to apply it: a fact tells you what is true, while a value tells you what matters. "The average age of first intercourse in a given population is X" is a fact, something you can measure and be wrong about. "People should wait until marriage" or "monogamy is the healthiest relationship structure" are values, statements about what's good or right, not statements that a study can simply confirm or refute. The philosopher David Hume noticed this gap centuries ago and it still trips people up constantly: you cannot logically derive a "should" purely from an "is." Knowing what happens doesn't, by itself, tell you what ought to happen.
This course has spent its first several lessons almost entirely in the world of facts: definitions, prevalence data, developmental research. This lesson is different on purpose. It's the lesson where we openly acknowledge that facts alone don't settle what you should personally believe or do about sex and relationships, and it's the lesson where we try to give you the tools to examine your own values honestly, rather than either inheriting them unexamined or assuming this course is quietly trying to hand you a new set to replace them with.
A Field That Learned This the Hard Way
In 1964, physician Mary Calderone founded the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, known as SIECUS, with the goal of providing accurate, science-based sexuality information at a time when almost none existed in public education. Within a decade, sex education programs across the country adopted a teaching method called "values clarification," an approach designed to help students examine and articulate their own beliefs about sex rather than simply being told what to believe.
The approach provoked a fierce backlash. Groups including the Christian Crusade and the John Birch Society accused SIECUS and values clarification of secretly pushing a permissive moral agenda under the guise of neutrality, and the controversy became one of the defining fights of the so called culture wars over sex education that followed. Psychologist Sol Gordon, one of the era's most prominent sex educators, later reflected on how badly the term itself had been misunderstood, noting in a public radio interview that teaching sex education while openly naming that moral values are involved does not automatically mean imposing any particular religion's values, a distinction he felt had gotten lost in decades of confusion.
Where this course lands on it.
This course is not values neutral in the sense of pretending values don't matter. It is values transparent: we tell you plainly when something is a fact backed by evidence versus a value that reasonable, well informed people can disagree on. Our job is to make sure your values, whatever they are, rest on accurate information rather than myths.
Where Sexual Values Actually Come From
If sexual values aren't simply derived from facts, where do they come from? Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory, developed with colleague Craig Joseph and later expanded with Jesse Graham, offers one of the more useful maps available. The theory proposes that human moral judgment draws on a small set of deep, largely intuitive foundations, including care and harm, fairness and cheating, loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, and sanctity and degradation (a sixth foundation, liberty versus oppression, was added later).
Sexual values map onto these foundations more directly than almost any other topic Haidt's research has examined. The sanctity foundation, concerned with purity and the sacred, tends to shape values around premarital sex, modesty, and monogamy far more strongly for some people than considerations of harm or fairness do. The care foundation, by contrast, tends to shape values around consent and preventing emotional or physical hurt. Neither foundation is "correct" in some absolute sense; they are simply different lenses that different people, cultures, and communities weigh differently. Researchers studying moral and political psychology have found a consistent pattern here worth noting: people who identify as more liberal tend to weight the care and fairness foundations most heavily, while people who identify as more conservative tend to draw on all the foundations, including sanctity and authority, more evenly. This helps explain why arguments about sexual values so often talk past each other: the two sides aren't just disagreeing about the facts, they're often applying entirely different moral foundations to the same situation.
A Case Study: The Sexual Double Standard
Nothing illustrates how values (rather than facts) shape sexual attitudes better than the sexual double standard: the well documented pattern of judging the same sexual behavior differently depending on whether a man or a woman does it. In 2003, psychologists Mary Crawford and Danielle Popp published an influential review in the Journal of Sex Research, examining 30 studies published since 1980. Their conclusion was direct: the review found continued evidence for sexual double standards, meaning different standards of sexual permissiveness applied to women compared with men, and that these standards were shaped by situational factors like a person's age, relationship status, and number of partners.
Nearly a decade later, researchers Sagebin Bordini and Tania Sperb extended this work, reviewing studies published between 2001 and 2010 specifically to see whether attitudes had shifted. Their review found the double standard could still be identified, though the specific sexual behaviors and situations it applied to had shifted somewhat over time compared to earlier decades. In other words, this isn't a historical artifact from a more conservative era; it's a persistent pattern that has simply changed shape.
Why does this matter for a lesson on personal values? Because the sexual double standard is a values judgment dressed up, very convincingly, as common sense. Most people who hold it were never taught it explicitly and would struggle to justify it if pressed. It's a useful example of exactly the kind of inherited value this lesson is asking you to examine deliberately rather than simply accept.
Most of what we call "just how things are" about sex is actually "what someone, somewhere, decided mattered." Worth knowing the difference.
A line I say to every new cohort
A Practical Tool: Values Clarification
Rather than simply telling you what to think, this course borrows a version of the values clarification method that has been used in professional sexual health training for decades. A guide developed for the American Medical Student Association, for instance, frames the exercise plainly: values clarification exercises help illuminate a person's own biases and attitudes toward a range of deeply personal topics, with the explicit goal of using that self-awareness to interact with others more thoughtfully, rather than to arrive at a single "correct" answer.
The exercise typically works by presenting a specific scenario (for example, a couple with very different desired frequencies of sex, or a person choosing not to disclose a past relationship) and asking you to notice your immediate reaction before analyzing it. That immediate reaction almost always reveals a value you're applying, often one you didn't consciously choose.
| If your first reaction is... | You may be prioritizing... |
|---|---|
| "That's just wrong, full stop" | Sanctity / purity foundation |
| "It depends whether anyone got hurt" | Care / harm foundation |
| "It depends whether both people agreed to it" | Fairness / consent foundation |
| "What would my family or community think" | Loyalty / authority foundation |
| "It's nobody's business but theirs" | Liberty / autonomy foundation |
Holding Your Values Without Imposing Them
None of this is an argument that all sexual values are equally valid or that you should abandon convictions you hold seriously. It's an argument for a specific, more demanding skill: distinguishing "this is factually true" from "this is what I believe is right," and extending other adults the same right to reach their own conclusions on the second category that you'd want extended to you, provided no one's consent, safety, or wellbeing is being violated in the process. That last clause matters enormously and isn't a throwaway line: this course treats consent, honesty, and freedom from coercion as close to non-negotiable, evidence backed baselines, not as one value among equally valid alternatives. Genuine pluralism applies above that floor, not as a way of blurring it.
Common Misunderstandings, Cleared Up
"Isn't 'values clarification' just a sneaky way to push a permissive agenda?"
That accusation dates back to the method's earliest use in the 1970s and largely misunderstood its actual goal. Values clarification doesn't tell you what to conclude; it helps you notice what you already believe and why, so you can examine it rather than simply act on it unexamined.
"If something is scientifically supported, doesn't that settle what's right?"
Not automatically. Facts can tell you what happens, what's common, or what reduces harm, but deciding what you personally value, based on those facts, is still a separate step. Two people can agree entirely on the evidence and still land on different personal conclusions.
"Is the sexual double standard basically gone in modern culture?"
Research through 2010, the most recent major review available, still found clear evidence of it, just applied somewhat differently than in earlier decades. It's a persistent pattern rather than a historical relic.
A Personal Values Exercise
- Pick one strongly held belief you have about sex or relationships. Write it down plainly, as a single sentence.
- Ask where it came from: a parent, a religious community, a past relationship, a piece of media, or your own direct experience. Be specific.
- Using the table above, identify which moral foundation (or foundations) it seems to draw on most heavily.
- Ask honestly: is this belief resting on a fact you could verify, or a value you're choosing to hold? Neither answer is wrong, but knowing which one it is changes how you should defend or reconsider it.
- Keep this reflection. In Module 12, you'll be asked to revisit it alongside everything else you've learned, to see whether anything has shifted.
Sources cited in this lesson:
Hume, D. (1739). A Treatise of Human Nature, origin of the philosophical is-ought distinction
Calderone, M. and the founding of SIECUS (1964), as documented in histories of U.S. sex education
Gordon, S. (1986). Public radio interview on sex education and moral values, MPR Archive
Haidt, J. and Joseph, C. (2004); Haidt, J. and Graham, J. (2007). Moral Foundations Theory
Graham, J., Haidt, J. and Nosek, B.A. (2009). Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Crawford, M. and Popp, D. (2003). Sexual Double Standards: A Review and Methodological Critique of Two Decades of Research. Journal of Sex Research, 40(1), 13 to 26
Bordini, G.S. and Sperb, T.M. (2013). Sexual Double Standard: A Review of the Literature Between 2001 and 2010. Sexuality & Culture, 17(4), 686 to 704
American Medical Student Association, Sexual Health Scholars Program, Values Clarification Guide