Best Sex Writing 2010 (24 page)

That sure goes a long way toward the real questions kids have about sex. The United States has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world, and American adolescents are contracting HIV faster than almost any other demographic group.
Texas, with all those great abstinence-only textbooks, has the highest rate of teen births in the nation. And, duh—abortion rates are lowest in states where teens have access to accurate contraception information. In April 2007, a twenty-page Columbia University study exposed that abstinence curriculum statements about condom use are medically inaccurate. The American Civil Liberties Union, tired of the Department of Health and Human Services ignoring repeated warnings about incorrect data, sent the department a letter threatening legal action. The ACLU is currently trying to get the DHHS to stop disseminating incorrect information—because doing so violates federal law.

Wow, the U.S. government violating its own federal law? Barack, Michelle, your iPhones are ringing. Again. It’s some kid who wants to know if she’s going to get AIDS because her boyfriend came on her leg. Before that, she said they just let it soak so it should be all right. Should I take a message? Have an intern call her later?

Contrast our sex-ed failures to Australia, where, according to Carmody, the new brand of teen sex ed is “really about what they’re doing because a lot of programs tend to focus just on biology and safe sex, but they don’t. They don’t tell us how to work out how to do consent, how to communicate with people. Those sort of things were what they were interested in.” As part of her sex-ed curriculum, the students did role-play (not that kind of role-play), learned how to interpret body language, practiced asserting themselves, and were coached to think about their sexual behaviors and expectations.

The Obamas represent change that most of us are hungry for, and in some cases, desperate for. So, here’s how Barack can put an end to the war on public school sex education and the sharing of accurate sex information to people of all ages:

1) Kill the abstinence programs. Period. Think of them as creationism in schools: optional to include in curricula but privately funded only. Fire the f—out of anyone with a religious agenda in a position of power in relation to public health. We are a nation of many faiths—most of which are not being served with this nonsense.

2) My best friend’s daughter is five, and brags that she has a boyfriend. Craft programs that are age appropriate so kids understand what they’re doing every step of the way. Take a cue from England, where the Sex and Relationship Education program centers on “All About Us: Living and Growing” videos for five-to seven-year-olds, seven- to nine-year-olds and nine- to eleven-year-olds, with workbooks about healthy sexual relationships for kids (and adults) with learning disabilities.

3) Require all sex-ed programs to include practical information about reproduction (including a woman’s right to choose and male responsibilities of parenthood), contraception, STDs and STIs, sexual pleasure, masturbation, consent, homosexuality, sexual tolerance, and gender identity. Kids are dealing with all this stuff; adults need to stop lying to themselves and have honest discourse with kids about it.

4) Set aside federal funding for a teen sex-ed counselor to be on school staff at all times, exclusively for hotline-style accurate sex information, and completely confidential. Our kids’ health and futures depend on it. Require that they are tech- and Internet-savvy.

5) Create a task force to research and implement outreach programs that visit schools for presentations on relevant and current sexual issues. This could include the Gardasil vaccination (HPV shot), presentations on transgender issues, workshops on sexual consent, rape prevention and self-defense for girls, age-appropriate
sex-ed books, religious faith and sexuality, and sexual questions around—yes—political scandals.

Michelle, Barack—I think you’re cool, and you might just totally get what young girls and boys are going through. Or at least I want to think that. We need this change more than ever.

 

How old were you the first time you had sex?

If you were a teenager when you “lost it,” did you do it because you wanted social status or peer acceptance? For love? Was it your idea, or against your wishes? Or—did you try it because you thought it might just feel really good? Like, you know, warm apple pie?

Chances are good that if you had first-time sex under the age of consent, it wasn’t for reproductive reasons—though it’s a typical unintended consequence. Ask Bristol Palin. With your hormones in teenage overdrive and senses reeling, it’s likely it was the pleasure principle, and not moral family factors, that had you dropping trou before you were barely legal.

Last week, Britain’s new sexual health booklet hit the press, causing a furor by telling health-care practitioners who work with kids/teens that pleasure is an important principle in overall sexual health. The pamphlet was not distributed to adolescents but to adults who teach sexuality to kids: the underlying message of the booklet was to encourage “sexual awareness” in kids and that “sex is something that is meant to be enjoyed.” It also explicitly encouraged young people to delay losing virginity until they were sure they would enjoy the experience. AP reported:

Predictably, some American conservatives reacted to the U.K.’s simple but revolutionary booklet with panties in a firm bunch, saying that such an attitude will “encourage promiscuity.” Which is pretty much what we can predict them to say because they’re so sexually repressed they still actually believe in dated moral-religious shame-drenched notions like “promiscuity.” The argument seems to be that encouraging enjoyment of healthy masturbation to a teen will suddenly mean the kid will lose control and no longer know the difference between right and wrong and go on a sex spree of some kind. Tell them it’s okay to explore and look out! We’ll have skyrocketing teen pregnancy and teen STD rates—oh, wait. Eight years of abstinence education, and a sharp rise in these rates thanks to Bush (according to the CDC) have produced precisely that.

So much for the “hands off” approach. Talk about not understanding human social dynamics, let alone teen social dynamics. In my opinion, the conservative backlash just shows me that America’s anti-sex, anti-pleasure pundits are the ones who will enact their greatest fears and lose their f---ing minds should they give in to a single moment of pleasure. They don’t have the decision-making skills to know what’s appropriate and safe, and what’s not—because they’ve denied this type of understanding and exploration of sex’s pleasure principles from everyone else for so long.

We’re two hundred+ days into Obama’s shift, and while we’re waiting for all that change, the current state of sex ed in America is a flattened, empty, deserted war zone of sexlessness—at least Obama did eliminate federal abstinence education program funding from the 2010 budget.

After eight long years of abstinence education’s war against sex information, we could do with more than a little of the U.K.’s harm-reduction approach to teaching kids about sexual pleasure—because teens are going to be having sex no matter what you tell them. I was discussing the new booklet with a friend who grew up in London and got a simple retort, “That’s because we don’t have religion in our government like you do.” Say what you want about the separation of church and state, but the writing’s been on the bathroom wall for a long time. And it doesn’t say, “For a good time, call the Bush twins.” Okay, maybe it does.

America not only needs to admit that teens have sex, but that they really like doing it—so they do it more than once. Unless you’re ‘lucky’ it’s actually not easy to get pregnant: you have to time it right with a fertile partner, and do it right, to fertilize an egg. And it’s not a matter of imagining that sex will feel good that encourages repetition; otherwise teens wouldn’t be trying it and
trying it, again and again.

We can’t educate kids about sex and give them tools to make the right choices for themselves, their families, their morals and beliefs and their communities unless we allow them the benefit of the doubt that they can handle the fact that sex feels good. That sex is healthy and should be pleasure-filled at whatever stage of development is right for them—and if they’re old enough to ask, they’re old enough to deserve an honest answer. When they’re deprived of the feel-good truth, that’s when kids (and adults) lose the ability to create tools to help them self-individuate their own healthy sexuality.

Rebuilding America’s sex ed will result in a healthier country. Right now, in public schools across the nation it’s a crapshoot as to what kids are being taught: in some places kids get abstinence sermons, in a few others they receive medical information about reproduction, and in even fewer they get some social counseling—with the genders neatly separated, of course. We need to teach teens about sex in a three-pronged approach: scientific (reproduction and STD/STI information), social (behaviors, appropriateness, communication and permission), and pleasure (feeling good about themselves, becoming aware of their own bodies so that when they do have sex it is healthy and feels good).

But according to conservative adults, this is just going to encourage promiscuity: “loose morals” and indiscriminate sexual choices. Good thing kids these days have the Internet.

The sex-ed revolution will not be televised. It’s already on YouTube.

 

 

How fondly I recall my ménages à trois: the quiet conspiracy, the jealous glances, Dusty Springfield on the stereo.

Yet, I have never had a ménage à trois, for ménages à trois have been rechristened. One night, when no one was looking, they became three-ways.

Some fool stole a hyphen, added a number and voilà, a house of three became a conference call, romance became business.

It may seem like a small thing, but for such a physical pleasure, our sexual delights are all about language.

A ménage à trois is something that takes place in a pied-à-terre. A three-way takes place in your cousin Steve’s living room.

Indulge me in some examples.

Diddling a dame is completely different from balling a babe.

You lay a lady, but you do a chippy.

It’s easy to finger-fuck a floozy but you had better bang a broad.

I, myself, have gotten dirty with damsels.

I’ve been randy with Rapunzel, raunchy with Cinderella, and used the whole fist on Thumbelina.

The back of a trollop in a back alley differs from the front of a strumpet in back of the bar.

You can spank a skank or snog a bird, but snogging a skank will leave you quite rank.

I’ve spent money on a honey but only taken home a doll.

I’ve gone all the way with a betty and fallen in love with a stone fox.

I’ve suckled a breast and thrilled to see boobs—but I’ve only cum on a pair of tits.

I’ve pinched a tush and slapped a bottom—but I’ve only fucked an ass.

It’s anal sex if she went to college. Butt sex if she didn’t. And get-the-hell-out-of-there! if she’s Presbyterian.

If the word is wrong, all is lost.

Ever been topped by a pushy bottom leaving you bottomed while on top?

Howard Stern once got in trouble over a conversation he had on the air concerning an act he called a “blumpkin.”

The only word I’ve ever heard for an act combining oral sex with a bowel movement is “blumper.”

So, if there’s no such thing as a blumpkin, should Howard Stern get in trouble?

The word is the thing.

A blumpkin sounds like something a hobbit eats at Christmas while a blumper, well, that’s just dirty, filthy; in fact, it’s worthy of a skank.

Felching sounds like an act not for the faint of heart. It’s a word well suited to encompass an ass, a straw, and an orgasm.
What would nineteen-year-olds look forward to learning if not for words like
felching?

Queef is a wonderful little word: only cooters and pussies queef.

A cunt farts.

And a vagina pretends nothing happened.

In the same way, only a penis can be flaccid.

A dick is soft.

A prick is regrouping.

And a cock pretends it never happens.

In the beginning spooge and smegma are wonderful things, things we look forward to, moist onomatopoeias of a job well done.

But then, like a couple who doesn’t know when to leave, they stick around; falling into crevices they will later ooze out from. Spooge and smegma, the evil twins of post-coitus.