Sex 101

My dad's "birds and bees" talk with me was pretty terse: "Girls are different than boys, and sometimes the other boys will make fun of that, but it's not funny."

Poor Dad. He was so embarrassed he turned and left the room, and that was the end of my sex education from my father.* Mom was more subtle: She left a book in my underwear drawer. The Adequate Male was mostly a list of do's and don'ts for marital sex, since according to that book there wasn't any other kind. The other sex education lecture I got from Mom was when I was 18, after my girlfriend's dad called her and said he thought Cathy and I were engaged in some hanky-panky. "Some things are for marriage only!" she said in her loudest voice, and believe me, her loudest voice registered on the Richter Scale.

We had a Health Ed class in high school. Our teacher was Bob Walker, a name that always made me laugh because Bob Walker was exactly what he looked like. A basketball player, he was at least 6'4" tall, and slightly stooped over, and when he walked his head went up and down, bobbing as he walked. Perfect. Mr. Bob Walker, as all Health Ed teachers, walked--or bobbed--a thin line when it came to sex. It was one thing to talk about brushing teeth, washing your face or any other personal hygiene--he was good at describing how to avoid athlete's foot--but when it came to sex he got into dangerous territory. I'm surprised that 45 years later we are still having a debate over this. Teachers walk the same thin line now as they did then, even though sex is discussed openly everywhere else but in public schools.

Bob Walker used a lot of negatives: "Don't stay out past midnight with a girl because no one ever did anything proper after midnight." "Don't go out with rough girls." We all loved the rough girls lecture. I pictured girls with sandpaper skin.

When it came time for the nitty-gritty of sex, though, Bob Walker couldn't tell us anything. No nuts** and bolts. Just the driest of dry talk about male equipment vs. female equipment, complete with charts and diagrams. One day he was talking about boys and girls in cars necking and petting.

I raised my hand. "I'm sorry, and maybe everyone in the room will laugh at me because I don't know this, but what exactly is 'petting'? I've heard the word but don't know what it means."

Bob Walker's face blushed from the point of his chin to his blond crewcut. I noticed all of the guys in the room suddenly became silent and all eyes were on Bob Walker. Apparently I wasn't the only one in the room who didn't know the definition of 'petting'. I was just the one who admitted it. Bob Walker stammered, "It's uh...uh...when you're kissing, and touching, and...uh...fondling each other's sex organs." Aha. Now we were getting somewhere. There was a voice from the back of the room: "Sounds good to me!"

Bob Walker had crossed over the line into that dangerous territory, and quickly stepped back. I had learned a new word that day, but I already knew instinctively what petting was. We called it making out. The trick was, by either definition, how to find a girl with whom to practice making out...or petting. This is why it's my personal feeling that sex ed in public schools should be as liberal as possible, teaching the use of pickup lines, for instance, or the best places to park. None of us--except for a lucky few--had ever been in a position where we got to practice petting or making out. We found out the mechanics of a baby's conception and birth, but not how to prevent it. We were burning to know, "Can a girl get pregnant the first time?" and "Can Coca-Cola administered to the vagina after drive-in movie sex kill the sperm?"

Instead of abstinence only sex education--which got Sarah Palin's daughter, Bristol, pregnant--we should have sex education on how to prevent pregnancy by using oral sex. Or we could teach guys how to go for the gusto, where the clitoris is, how to make a woman have an orgasm. Now that's sex ed! Fat chance in this country, though. Like 45 years ago and Mr. Bob Walker stammering out the definition of petting, we are a nation of embarrassed and clueless adults wanting our children to know about sex without having to talk about it. We just want to tell them not to do it, when in too many cases it's all they want. I don't know about you, but if someone puts an apple in front of me...a ripe, juicy apple, yum...and says, "You can't eat that apple, not even a bite, not even a nibble," then the first thing I want when that person leaves the room is to bite into that apple.

*I'm admitting right here I wasn't much better with my own son. I don't remember having a conversation about sex with him at all.

**Ha-ha, I said nuts. Well, I thought it was funny.