Sex is Yuckburgers

I received my first bit of formal sexual education, like so many boys before me, the way God and country intended: my fifth grade class was separated into two groups and we each watched a different black and white movie about puberty. The boys’ movie was mostly about imminent pubic hair and the need for underarm deodorant. I’m not sure what the girls’ film was, but I’m sure it was enlightening. Afterward, there was a question and answer session between the boys and a sixth grade teacher who acted as our guide through the topic of sex. Unfortunately, we didn’t glean enough information from the black and white movie to properly formulate any cogent questions. I recall one boy asking if a woman had two babies, would her breasts grow two nipples apiece? And in the first of what would be many, many examples showing why I should never be charged with children in an instructional capacity, the sixth grade teacher said that the breasts would not sprout extra nipples. I would have told the kid that women’s tits turn into cow udders during the second trimester.

Luckily, I had an older brother who was happy to instruct me in the truth about sex. The way Adem made it sound, sex was an intense mashing of pee pees that quite frankly grossed me out. He had a few old issues of Playboy and probably a few other skin mags, but he also had these two magazines that each contained high-gloss pages depicting stills from a hardcore pornography movie. I pored over these periodicals and practically gagged at the glistening, hairy genitalia in life size across a two-page spread. It was more like looking at photos from a murder scene or something you’d see in a journal about surgery. This is sex? It looks ridiculous. And why is this woman lounging around her house wearing a leotard and pantyhose? None if it added up for me.

When I was thirteen, my parents sent me to a church-sponsored sexual education program called About Your Sexuality. For most people, a church-sponsored sex ed. program evokes images of watching outdated filmstrips about proper hair-combing techniques and the dangers of holding hands before marriage. I was raised a Unitarian Universalist, so About Your Sexuality was a series of six brutally frank classes on the ins and outs of sex. Lesson one: the penis goes in and out, as evidenced by a full color filmstrip featuring two of the homeliest people you’ll ever see fondling each other’s hairy genitals before going at it in extreme closeup. One of our instructors specifically pointed out the woman’s poor manicure and back-twisting scoliosis. What I and a room full of pubescent teenagers were seeing was sex, not as presented on the glossy pages of some porn magazine or an implied offer of sex by some bathing suit-clad model in a beer commercial, but actual raw, dirty, hairy, sweaty, human sex. And it was fucking disgusting.

There was another health class in the seventh grade that tried to instruct me on the finer points of sex, including those famous painted cross-sections of a penis and a vagina. By then, I was so turned off by sex that I treated it all very clinically. Many of my friends were confused by sex, and would espouse common junior high school misconceptions about it: a girl can’t get pregnant the first time, or you can go blind from repeated masturbation. I had been through About Your Sexuality, and I held no such misconceptions. Sex began to take on the aura of some future chore I would eventually perform rather than a special, life-changing event that I should anticipate. Looking back, I can see that for all of my sexual education prior to actually having sex, there was one point that was left out: sex is fun. It feels good. Whether it is a shameful or a glorious act, whether you will have sex to procreate or to get your rocks off is up to you. But even taken academically, the pure clinical act of making whoopee is enjoyable. That’s the only reason human beings do it. That was the missing link to my instruction, that for all of its grossness, for all of the matted hair and pungent odors and horrifying, contorted facial expressions that can result from sex, it is one of life’s simplest, purest pleasures. And there’s every reason why a hormone-fueled kid should want to do it.

I wish that, when I was younger, YouTube existed, because then I would have watched Laci Green. Of course, this would cause a further temporal conundrum where she would have still been in diapers, but if I’m already traveling through time and changing shit around, we can say that she would have been a recent college graduate who already made videos like this. Laci is really very informative and takes special pains to be inclusive, which I think it a good attitude when it comes to helping young people feel okay with their uglies. She’s a good mix of entertaining and informative, each of her videos are well-researched and nicely produced and come from an angle that sex is fun, you should want to have sex (and not just as a biological imperative). Instead of laying out the cold, hard facts as if you’re cramming for some endocrinology exam, Laci attempts to dissect the emotional and romantic components to sex as well as the physical. I’d recommend her to any young person looking for the straight dope on fucking, though watching her videos myself makes me feel like a dirty old man. Just more evincing of my repression due to years of faulty sexual education.

It Occurs to Me that Perhaps Pornography is Not the Altruistic Venture I’ve Made It Out to Be

My mother is an extremely intelligent, capable person. Most people warm to her immediately and she lives a life rich with activity and intellectual pursuits. It’s no wonder, then, that I have grown up expecting women I meet to be equally smart and able, or at least approach it. I have a few male friends who are provincial and barely literate, but I expect more from women. I realize this promotes a kind of double-standard in my world, and I already wrote a piece about it. I think the answer is to drop my retarded male friends and stick with a more intelligent set in general, whether they have ovaries or not.

Like pretty much every other guy, I look at pornography. I don’t view it compulsively and I don’t have a voluminous knowledge of it, but I do use porn for masturbating and have done for over twenty years now. I’ve never thought to reconcile the fact that I hold such respect for women in my life and female figures that I admire, but I have no compunctions about abusing myself to some moaning, saline-heavy broad writhing around in a kiddie pool full of baby oil. My general, abstract idea was that if a person decides to make money with their body, that’s their business. I don’t believe in a moral absolute where exchanging money for fucking is inherently wrong. I have never exchanged money to fuck, but I was okay with it in principle. I’ve certainly spent money on pornography through the years, so I figure it’s all in the same bag.

Recently, I have had cause to review my thinking on prostitution and pornography, and I see how silly it was. I created a scenario where a person would come from a loving, supportive family, grow up with a completely healthy and confident sexual identity, go on to college and grad school, graduate with honors, and then for some weird fucking reason decide that they’d like to have a career selling their nether regions rather than, say, anything else at all. Upon reasoning it out, I saw that I’d created a this fallacy, this ludicrous scenario where the women to whom I pounded my pud were willing supplicants to the most lucrative industry on the planet. As if I was, in fact, doing them a favor by examining their close-up crotches like an armchair gynecologist. Frankly, my legions of brainwashed readers, I feel a little ashamed.

I’m sure there are some rational people who make a completely cogent decision to exchange their bodies for money. But the people who exit the industry wealthy and unscathed are so few so as to be completely negligible: most people who get into porn are a mess. And these are people protected by a union; I’m sure prostitutes have it far worse. It’s difficult for me to separate my excuse for pornography from the facts: probably by unconscious design, I’ve never sought out any specific information on porn stars or the industry, save for what filters into mainstream news. I don’t condemn pornography and prostitution, but there’s got to be a better way for me to get my nut off. Luckily for me, I love to read: http://www.literotica.com/stories/index.php (not safe for work)

My Advice is That You Think Twice

Seems like the facile platitudes once only visible on bumper stickers and office coffee mugs are everywhere: silk-screened on t-shirts, posted on social networking websites, tattooed over butt cracks. Meaningless quotes like “live, laugh, love” and “we do not remember days, we remember moments” surround us, infusing the very air we breathe with pop culture existentialism. One of my most favorite meaningless quotes is: “Never regret anything, because at one time it was exactly what you wanted.” Let’s discuss that particular wafer-thin premise.

I do understand that “Never regret anything…” is mainly a woman’s euphemism for “don’t feel bad about your youthful promiscuity.” And you know, I agree with that. If you fucked a lot in your teens and twenties, and didn’t have one or more children or acquire a debilitating venereal disease, then bully for you. Only possessive assholes give a crap about how many partners you’ve been with before them, and frankly if it’s such a big issue that you need to justify your past with a phrase you might see scrawled on a teenager’s loose leaf notebook, then said relationship is probably going to be really shitty. However, to never regret anything…I mean, that’s how sociopaths behave, right? They have a poor sense of right and wrong, and so the line between waving hello to their neighbor and choking the life out of him becomes blurred.

The fact is that we learn by regretting: by facing our mistakes and wishing we hadn’t made them. Everyone has points in their lives when they wish they could start over, change decisions of the past and perhaps enjoin missed opportunities. Unfortunately, when looking at time, only hindsight is the exact science. But it is through this hindsight that we can see pitfalls and try to avoid similar problems in the future. It’s called Normal Social Development. Willfully refusing to regret anything is a kind of an Objectivist excuse for being an asshole.

I haven’t lived so many years that I feel comfortable dispensing life advice to anyone over the age of ten. Even then, what could I tell a ten year-old? “Don’t text with your mouth full.” But if there are any thin mantras I follow, then they could be these three:

Never say “never.” It is a virtual certainty that you will end up doing the very things you once railed so vehemently against.

There are no absolutes anywhere. This not-so-ironic nerd motto is actually pretty sound. When you look for the end-all, be-all answer to everything, you’re bound to be disappointed and confused.

Different folks, different strokes. There’s no correct way to live, no master plan to raising a child or pursuing a career or falling in love. Don’t judge how other people get down, do your own thing.

And if you choose to ignore these stupid quotes, then please: regret things. Ruminate in context, but do ruminate, regret, and grow.