by Jon Pressick
“I really don’t remember anything I learned from sex education in high school,” Breanna, twenty-one, who graduated from Elko High School in 2009, tells me. “In middle school, they told us… well, they didn’t really tell us anything except, ‘Don’t have sex.’ In high school, it was pretty much the same thing. But you’re a bunch of high school kids. You’re going to want to experiment.”
“I don’t think we had a birth-control unit. They would show us pictures of STIs to scare us, but they never said, ‘If you get an STI you have to go to a doctor; if it’s herpes you have to take medication for the rest of your life but you can still have sex.’ It was implied that if you got an STI your sex life was ruined.”
Breanna wasn’t the only person I talked to who felt that her school-based sex education was light on detailed information and heavy on scare tactics.
Maddie, seventeen, a senior at Northwest Career & Technical Academy, took a unit on drugs and date rape in eighth grade, followed by three weeks of sex education in her freshman year. She tells the same stories of a focus on STIs, complete with graphic pictures. Despite the limited information she received, she credits her health teacher for cultivating an environment where students could ask questions. But she also admits that, “Because we were so young, we weren’t really sure what questions to ask.”
“Honestly, I wish we would have had sex ed our junior year. Freshman year we still giggled about it. Very few kids were sexually active. I think we were still in that middle school phase. The majority of us weren’t at the point in our lives to really take it in and hear about it.”
“They Call It a Cookie or a Flower”
Which topics were covered in sex ed—and how they were presented—often depended on the teacher.
Maria, twenty-two, had a teacher at Cimarron Memorial High School who went beyond the district’s curriculum, bringing in her own videos and other materials. She also debunked myths, like the idea that you can’t get pregnant if you have sex in the shower because hot water kills sperm.
Even at the time, Maria realized her teacher was not the norm. “Her method wasn’t to say, ‘Don’t have sex.’ Rather, it was, ‘If you have sex, you need to know this stuff. You need to know what is true and what is not true.’ If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have learned as much as I did.”
Despite the efforts of teachers like Maria’s, there are still those students who fall through the cracks. Amber, twenty-six, graduated from Bonanza High School in 2005, yet says she “somehow missed sex ed.”
“I kept waiting for an opportunity to take it—it was something I was interested in—but it was never an option.”
Instead, Amber eventually turned to friends and Planned Parenthood to pick up the slack. “[Clark County School District] failed me as a student. I think in Las Vegas, there’s a lot of access to a lot of different things than if I lived elsewhere. I could go to an Adult Superstore to get the education I needed without getting it in school. But why should we have to go somewhere else? Getting that information in school would’ve been more helpful to me.”
None of this surprises Amanda Morgan, a sexual-health educator who teaches human sexuality at UNLV. “I have students who come into my class and they don’t know the proper name for their genitals. They call it a ‘cookie,’ a ‘flower’ or just ‘down there.’ And that’s because their parents taught them it was a cookie or a flower.”
A 2004 graduate of Las Vegas Academy, Morgan, twenty-six, knows firsthand what sex education in Nevada public schools is like. “I am blown away constantly by the lack of information,” she says. “Students are grateful for the basic, medically accurate information they receive [in my class]. What I teach isn’t based on opinion, it’s based on research—this is how your body functions; this is what happens during arousal; this is how pregnancy happens.”
While a few of the women I spoke with had mothers they felt they could talk to about sex, others acknowledged that if they weren’t getting sex education in the classroom, they weren’t going to get it at all.
“Some people can’t talk to their parents about sex, so I think school is a good place to get it,” Breanna says. “School is your home away from home. When I was in school, I felt my teachers were like parents. Teachers are there to help you learn and sex ed is part of that.”
Veronica, who supported AB230, was surprised to learn the bill had died. What would she say to the legislators who failed to support it?
“I would probably tell them my story, growing up not knowing anything. Not having access to basic information. Not being able to talk to your parents. I am not the only one. There are thousands of people like me.”
Sharing Body Heat
Joan Price
August 2, 2008: I crawled into Robert’s bed and wrapped my body around his. If I could only get close enough to make the last hour, the last months, disappear. I hugged him tightly, desperately. I wailed his name and listened to his silence, remembering his murmurs, his words of love. I nuzzled my face into his neck as I had many times before, but there was no warmth now, no “I love you, sweetheart,” no kiss on the top of my head, no strong arms pulling me into him. I covered his thigh with mine, snaking my arm under his pajama top so that I could stroke the chest hair I had first touched seven years before.
I willed him to respond.
But he didn’t.
I willed him to come back to life.
But he didn’t.
“Do you need some time alone with your husband before the mortuary takes his body away?” the hospice nurse asked me gently. I nodded, shut the bedroom door, turned off the light, and crawled into bed with Robert’s dead body.
It was the first time in three months that I could wrap myself around my beloved and hold him tightly without causing him pain. Multiple myeloma—a blood cancer that affects the bone marrow’s ability to make healthy blood cells—had ripped Robert’s life from him while he still lived. His fragile bones broke, causing excruciating pain. His strong dancer’s body weakened and withered.
We could no longer make love—which had been our great joy—or even snuggle. Every touch was painful to him. All I could do towards the end was rest my hand or cheek lightly on his chest, or hold his hand. These little acts became making love.
Earlier that night I had held Robert’s hand—the hand that painted extraordinary works of art, that gestured gracefully as he talked, that rested on the air as he danced, that caressed me for seven years. I talked to him for hours, telling him how much I loved him and recounting memories. I reminisced about the afternoons that turned into evening as we gloried in the tactile paradise of each other’s bodies, the rhythm of our breath in sync. Now there was no breath at all. My tears spilled onto his hand. I lifted his hand and rubbed the wetness into my cheek. “No-o-o-o!” I wailed.
Ours had been a later-life love affair—we met when I was fifty-seven and he was sixty-four. Robert Rice (yes, his name differed from mine by one letter) was a lifelong artist and a trained dancer from the age of two. He had recently moved to my area and was looking for a place to dance. He discovered my contemporary line-dance class.
The moment he walked into the room, my postmenopause-diminished hormones went into overdrive. I met his blue eyes and fell into them. I let my eyes travel to the tuft of chest hair that peeked from the V of his shirt, top two buttons undone, and I yearned to unbutton it the rest of the way down. Then when he moved his hips to the music, I pictured them moving under my hands and I lost my place in the dance I was teaching. It was lust at first sight.
My crush was one-sided, though. Robert kept coming to dance class, but he seemed oblivious to my interest, though it was obvious to all the other dancers, they told me later. Robert was there for dance, not romance.
Even after we started taking walks after class at my invitation, he showed no interest in moving our relationship to the next step. So after nine months of unrequited lust, I told myself, “If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.”
&n
bsp; And I propositioned him.
I can’t help wondering what it would feel like to hold you without footwork, I told him in an email.
He turned me down! I don’t like to rush into things, he explained. (Rush? Nine months?) Let’s keep getting to know each other.
But just hours later, he emailed me again—he changed his mind! “It’s been a long for these old parts,” he wrote. “Maybe it’s time.”
We made another walking date and shared our first kiss. Our first hour of kissing. Our first week of kissing. Once unleashed, we never stopped kissing.
And we fell in love.
We were in many ways a fairy-tale couple with wrinkles, finding our great love late in life, experiencing the thrills and lust of a new romance, but with the overlay of decades of life experience and mature self-knowledge. We gloried in our passionate sexuality and the discovery of how completely two people could bond.
Through our time together, we danced—in public, in private. As long as we could dance together, we knew we’d be all right. Even after his cancer diagnosis, Robert kept dancing, taking breaks when treatments made him too sick and weak, then glorying in recapturing his physicality when he could return to the dance floor.
Until…he couldn’t anymore. His pain, fatigue, and broken spine sent his dance shoes to the closet. Finally he wrote a letter to our class: Today I began home hospice care. I will no longer be joining you in dancing. Dance with Joan, and you will be dancing with me as well.
Seven years to the day after our first kiss, I kissed Robert for the last time and rocked his dead body to the rhythm of my sobs. I covered as much of his body as I could reach with mine. I felt his body cooling, and yet—the parts of him that my body covered became warm! I didn’t know that was possible! I thought his body would chill mine, but instead, those spots under my thigh, chest, arm, and belly were warming to my touch. I marveled at the power of love—as I saw it—to warm a dead body.
The hospice nurse knocked at the bedroom door. “It’s time to let them take him away,” she said softly. “You won’t want to watch.”
I released Robert’s body slowly and crawled down from the bed. I didn’t look back as I left, willing the picture in my mind to be Robert’s strong dancer’s body, his hips in motion, his vitality, his loving gaze.
I crossed the hall to my study, closed the door, opened my laptop, and started an email to the line dancers. Robert is free to dance with us again, I wrote.
Being a Real-Life Accomplice
Cameryn Moore
The one call that I hated the most, over my nearly five years in phone work so far, involved a man calling in with his wife, and pressing her to get it on with me. I was so angry at him for asking me to engage her in nonconsensual activity. I felt like an accomplice. This was real life; someone on the other end was actually being coerced into participation; someone was actually being directly, psychologically abused by their partner, and I was playing along. No other call has ever made me feel even half as sleazy.
Except this guy. He’s a close second.
He’s a regular when I’m around; he’s always so excited the first time I get given his call when I come back from tour, and pretty reliably requests me when I’m consistently around in the evenings. I have no illusions that he, like all of my “seasonal regulars,” is perfectly happy with whichever other phone sex operator is handling his call when I’m not available—anyway, since my seasonal availability is self-imposed, I can hardly complain—but I am happy to hear his enthusiasm.
He fantasizes about his wife being a complete cock-hungry slut. (Side note: I kinda like it when guys fantasize about the women in their lives. I mean, in our mutual imagination they could do anything, and they’re choosing their wives.) This guy’s cuckolding thing is multilayered: he likes watching her be greedy, he likes the idea of fucking her after a bunch of guys (and a dog) have come in her, and his calls always culminate with a worked-up rant about how loose her cunt is when he’s inside her, partly because of how many dicks she’s taking and partly, that’s just the way her cunt is and that’s how small his dick is, relatively speaking. She’s loose and he’s small, and he likes to see her finally filled up, the way he wishes that she would want it.
So far, so good. He wants his wife to be a slut. I imagine, though I have no stats, that this is probably pretty common. He has talked about taking pictures of her, too. She sometimes agrees to pose, but not always. He tells her that he is just jacking off to them, but I know better. I forget that I know what he does with the pictures, because he doesn’t talk about them all the time, but then he mentions them and I remember. And then I feel the sleaze settle on my skin all over again.
He posts them on a fuck-my-wife site. Guys post up shots of their partners, with or without their partners’ knowledge, and revel in other guys looking at and talking dirty about their partners. On one call he gave me the link and his log-in name so I could access the site and his photo collection; we sat there for ten minutes and discussed his wife’s body.
This time he mentioned that other guys sometimes posted pictures of printouts of his wife’s picture with their come all over it. He also asked if my boyfriend has seen the pictures yet. Shit. I forgot that I said I might show these pictures to my lovers. Shit. I am a terrible liar. Not yet, I say, if I remember I will. Of course I will not show them. Of course I will say that I showed them, and they got so hard. And he will believe me because that is how much he wants images of his wife to be seen by strangers.
I need to remember, this could be all made up. His wife could fully approve of the way he’s disseminating her naked images. She could be totally getting off alongside him, but somehow I don’t think so. If his wife really doesn’t know about this, I hope she finds out and rips him a new one. Hell, I hope she divorces him. In my book, this is a fully divorce-worthy offense; this is frying-pan-to-the-head territory.
As angry as I am about this betrayal, my anger is muddied a little by my witnessing it, by my complicity and implied approval. It feels a little awful. Unlike all the dead babies and hard-cocked ponies and innocent little girls WHO DON’T ACTUALLY EXIST, I think this woman does exist. I desperately hope that he’s making her up, but I think she actually is alive and clueless and cooking dinner regularly for this man who loves her and fantasizes about her and has completely sacrificed her right to privacy to his satisfying wank. My job is to help him with that sacrifice.
Some days I don’t like my job very much.
Oops, I Slept with Your Boyfriend
Charlie Nox
I think of myself as a woman of integrity, a lady of honor, an upstanding broad. If you had asked me when I was in high school if I’d ever sleep with a man I knew was otherwise entangled, I would have given a proud and emphatic, “No way, sister.”
But as I got older, this view of relationships, among other things, got complicated. I’ve been married, separated, divorced, monogamous, polyamorous, celibate, and in recent years I’ve once in a while been the “other woman.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going out looking to fuck guys who have girlfriends. And when someone tells me they have a girlfriend, I never pressure them to sleep with me. I don’t even disregard their relationship with some sort of “I don’t care if you don’t care,” or “She’ll never know.” Usually I ask them what her name is and how they met. Sometimes they show me pictures.
The few times I’ve found myself the mistress, we have had deep, real, meaningful conversations about their relationships and their commitments, their heart and their body. I encourage them to honor their commitments if that feels good to them. And sometimes it does. And sometimes it doesn’t.
My lovers have been in complicated relationships that are basically over but they can’t break up, and they are exhausted and need the kind of nurturing that you can only get when you are getting ridden hard and kissed passionately. I’ve had lovers with agreements that are unclear and undefined, with no way to clarify before one of us left town. I’ve
had lovers who were very newly and casually trying out monogamy with someone and found that our long-term friendship carried more strength, connection, healing and passion than their new quasi-relationship did. More than once I’ve had lovers who were separated, but not divorced, and we kept things under wraps for legal or emotional purposes.
I’m not going to tell you that I ever just get carried away and oops, something happened. Far from it. In fact, I have been known to say, “Look, if I come over to your house, it will be very hard for me to be well-behaved. I don’t want us to pretend we don’t know what’s happening here. I don’t want us to say, ‘Oh my, who knew we’d end up sleeping together?’” I like men who make conscious choices, and sometimes when I give that speech, they say, “You’re right, we’d better not, good night.” No hard feelings there. I would always rather everyone feel right about it. I have sacrificed sex that I know I could have had because I demanded we go into it with full knowledge and intent, and they only wanted to sleep with me if it was drunk or “accidental.” I don’t do unconscious sex—girlfriend or not.
I trust people to navigate the decisions that work for them, and think it isn’t my place to police their morals. I’m not monogamous now, but when I have been, it’s been my willpower and my promises and my decision to honor my commitments that has kept me from straying. I would resent someone else trying to make me be monogamous by denying me the chance to hang out with them just because I found them attractive and interesting.
The few times I’ve found myself with a man who has a girlfriend, it has felt like an exception, a special moment outside normal rules. On paper it looks bad, but when I check in with my gut, and listen to my body, it feels right to move forward with our sexual relationship. I know some people will adamantly disagree with what I’m saying here. That’s okay, I think you should do what feels right in your body, and if that includes never, ever being the other man or woman, then so be it. But for me, there are times—few and far between—where my body (not my libido, but my body wisdom...my gut) says that this connection is right and good and sacred. And when that happens, I pursue it. I pursue it with clarity, consciousness and purpose. I never excuse what happened, or apologize for it either.