On Sex Education

I’m glad to hear little talk of budget-chopping sex education in our schools.  Let’s stick to slashing music, art, girls’ sports, enrichment, and other worthless cultural activities and studies, all instigated by liberalistas determined to create as many lesbian volleyball teams, Glee Club knock-offs, Mapplethorpe fanboys, and life-long book readers  as possible.

Now you might argue how sex education is actually non-existent at most schools, ineffectively taught by virginal geeks at public schools and grouchy nuns at parochials.  Personally, my favorite stereotype is the high school gym teacher, his gonads shrunken and useless after heavy doses of steroids in college...who beats his wife in psychotic frustration...teaching 8^th graders about condoms, despite ignoring identical advice he received twenty years before.  But realistically, since our kids do grow up and have sex, our schools must be doing something right!

I remember my own brief introduction to Sex Ed in school.  Evidently our school district was lagging in terms of state mandates, so rather than initiating age-appropriate classroom instruction, an assembly was called to jump start things.  Dr. Jacobus, our local OB-GYN, facing 600 kids from grades 8 through 12, was reading questions from index cards, trying his best to balance what he needed to say against what he could say.

He had danced his way through ten or so questions when he started to read the next card:   “Can you....” he began, then paused.   He looked puzzled, shrugged, and finally offered, “I don’t know the answer to this one.”  Lots of laughter in the room, while some of us were shouting aloud, “Read the question!”  It had to be something really outrageous and cool, if Dr. J couldn’t come up with an answer.

Obviously some precocious teenager had asked something beyond Dr. J’s own experience and knowledge.  To this day, after hard-earned, on-the-job experience, I still wonder about that freakin’ question.  Have I missed something?

Absent a father in our home for many years, I never sat down for the ‘talk.’  The only sex-related advice came from my step-father who once suggested:  “Don’t let your mother see you doing that.”  This is actually really valuable advice, when generalized as:  “Don’t let anyone’s mother know you’re doing it.”

Nowadays kids have almost unlimited access to hardcore video porn.  Nothing is left to the imagination, except the embarrassment, blue-balls, tears, self-doubt, binge drinking, pregnancy fears, date rape, infidelity, roofies, and self-hate that are part and parcel to real life sex.  What a shock it is to discover someone’s brain and heart is attached to those sex-crazed organs.

I’m promoting an alternative approach to Sex Ed.  Based on my personal experience, my curriculum is rational, non-threatening, low cost, compatible with new technologies, and thoroughly explores the human complications of sex.  Minimum classroom time is needed, so districts avoid costs related to dedicated staffing.  As with Dr. J, a bit of Q&A might be helpful, but otherwise, as in my own case, the course is self-taught and stimulating (if you know what I mean:  wink, wink)...

Harold Robbins.  We need to go back to Harold Robbins, a writer unmatched in his ability to weave sexy sex into genuine human experience.  The Carpetbaggers (1961) is a timeless book, readily available in paperback and now on eBooks.  I read it the first time at age 13, when it was all the talk, though I have no memory about where I found a copy:  not the Free Library, that’s for certain;  not my mother or little sister;  probably a baby-sitter or one of my mother’s 20-ish cousins who would come and go.

While by today’s standard, Robbins’ scenes are fairly bland, as an introduction to all things naked, it’s a baby step needed to inform and instruct today’s teens.

Yes, it’s openly misogynist, routinely victimizing and exploiting his female characters, but can you cite any media that doesn’t?  Real life, baby.

Beyond the secondary benefits of improving teens’ reading skills and keeping starving writers stocked with vodka and Prozac, sexy literature allows a teen reader to incorporate his or her own fantasies and self-image, which might be quite different from some film school drop-out/porn director in the Valley.  Teens can develop their own standards for beauty, sexy, attractive, and approachable.  Through literature, the concepts of big boobs, giant penises, and virility are self-sustained, not one in ten thousand chosen by audition or enhanced by camera angle, Viagra, or silica gel.

And finally, through such literature, teens are exposed to necessary details about betrayal, cheating, abuse, exploitation, divorce, recrimination, suicide, and death.  From certain perspectives many of these books, including The Carpetbaggers, are cautionary tales.

In video porn, for example, infidelity always seems to end up with a ménage a trios; reading Harold Robbins, I grew up thinking cheating might get me shot or stabbed.  Which lesson would you like your teenage son to take away?

Are there missing elements?  Certainly, but my knowledge (and dread) of venereal disease came from a cringe-worthy course in Pathogenic Bacteriology, and about insemination and pregnancy from Endocrinology; so it sounds like a full-color and gross (teens love that shit) dose of science should complement my curriculum.

My freshman college biology professor, a woman as stiff as a manikin offered up one joke in fifty-four hours of mind-numbing lectures:  “Do you know what to call a woman who used the rhythm method for birth control?”

 I thought:  Catholic?  Glancing at the breath-taking Rose Carmen Ramirez radiating heat few seats away.

Straight faced, the Professor answered:  “A mother.”  Here endth the first lesson.