While the average student is equipped with basic sex ed, they are likely unaware of the history of sexual education from a global perspective.

Jonathan Zimmerman, director of the history of education program at the New York University Steinhardt School, gave his lecture, “Hot and Bothered,” on Friday afternoon. The talk was inspired by his new book “Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education.”

While writing his book, Zimmerman said his goal was to uncover the history of sexual education throughout the world and how its purpose differed across countries. He explained that through his research, he discovered the United States was the pioneer of sexual education. He also found that European countries like Sweden and Holland have different goals than the United States when it comes to educating students.

“United States sex ed is explicitly orientated towards preventing negative collective outcomes; we don’t want kids to get pregnant, we don’t want them to get STDs,” Zimmerman said. “In Holland they see it as a pleasurable, sexual existence. That’s a very different kind of goal, and I would say a very difficult kind of goal to sustain.”

Zimmerman said his research revealed that there is very little sexual education available for students and that internet pornography and hypersexualized media give students a skewed view of sexuality.

Additionally, he said he was surprised to find that sexual education was stalled because of globalization.

“We’ve seen societies in Europe that were formally fairly monocultural, but now they’ve become much more diverse,” Zimmerman said. “What that’s done is create more of a diversity of opinion about sexual education and more contention about the subject.”

Sarah Glose, a first-year graduate student studying public administration, said that although the topic could have been hard to listen to, Zimmerman made it intriguing.

“I really like this lecture, and he was really engaging with the audience,” Glose said. “It could have been a really dry and academic topic but he was very vibrant and he made it interesting because he seemed to really care about it.”

Zimmerman ended the lecture encouraging attendees to keep an open mind when conducting research and said he did not initially intend to write a book.

“You absolutely have to leave yourself open to surprise in the course of doing the work that we do,” Zimmerman said. “If you don’t, you’re just going to say what you thought before, and we’ve all read that; it’s deadly.”