“A Mechanical View of Sex outside the Context of Love and the Family”: Contraception, Censorship, and the Brook Advisory Centre in Britain, 1964–1985

Rusterholz examines the sex education campaigns developed by the British youth-centered charity the Brook Advisory Centre (BAC) in the 1970s, a time when the liberalization of obscenity laws coexisted with the perception of sexual information aimed at young people as offensive. The BAC argued for a distinction between medical and moral sex education, framing the former as offering technical details dissociated from the context of heterosexual love, marriage, and commitment. He also demonstrates how BAC initiatives contributed to the institutionalization of supervision over school-aimed sex education teaching materials and highlights the important role that local lobbying groups played in impeding the dissemination of information about sex and reproduction and how unevenly arguments that such material was scientific and therefore acceptable for circulation were received in a single national context.