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.
July 2008
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:
LONDON (AP) -- Britain’s National Health Service has a message for teens: Sex can be fun.
Health officials are trying to change the tone of sex education by urging teachers to emphasize that sexual relations can be healthy and pleasurable instead of simply explaining the mechanics of sex and warning about diseases.
The new pamphlet, called “Pleasure,” has sparked some opposition from those who believe it encourages promiscuity among teens in a country that already has high rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
The National Health Service in the city of Sheffield produced the booklet, which has a section called “an orgasm a day” that encourages educators to tell teens about the positive physical and emotional effects of sex and masturbation, which is described as an easy way for people to explore their bodies and feel good. Like more traditional sex education guides, it encourages demonstrations about how to use condoms and other contraceptives.
Some professionals have hailed the new approach as a welcome antidote to traditional sex education, which they say can be long on biological facts but short on information about the complexity of human relationships. (…)
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.
July 2009
A Cunning Linguist
John Thursday
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.
Who coined these terms? We’ll never know. But these unsung heroes have provided us with a quick and easy way to describe our sexual world.
Not all these words are in daily use, (my spell-check barely recognized any of them), but they are there for the taking as a way to enrich our experience. Which brings me back to the lout who stole my hyphen.
You cannot own the act until you own the word.
I did not have a three-way.
We did not make triangles of ourselves. There was no geometry, no directional signals.
A three-way is something you boast about. It is a phrase without grace, a phrase reflecting the numbers, not the experience. There is nowhere to go from a three-way. The story has been told, you’ve jumped to the end, and you’ve climaxed too soon.
A ménage à trois is a memory to keep you warm on a lonely night.
A ménage à trois, a house of three, only sets the scene. There’s the feel of sex, there’s the house, and there are the three people.
It begs the question, “What was the house like?”
Once I had a ménage à trois with a doll and a dame. Another time it was with a betty and a fox.
There were no blumpers or felching involved.
In the beginning there were breasts and bottoms, but by the end it was all tits and ass.
Vaginas were perfumed, pussies queefed, and in the end I was very, very flaccid.
SWL(actating)F Seeking Sex with No Strings Attached
Rachel Sarah
On Thanksgiving Day my boyfriend walked out the door. Our daughter was seven months old, and I’ll never know for sure what put him over the edge. He was bipolar. He drank. He was fragile. He didn’t leave a forwarding address.
This was a time when I believed that love would overcome anything. Well, it certainly overcame me. The very first thing I did, even before crying, was to sit down on the living room rug and nurse my daughter, Mae. Nursing was my landing pad. It was the place where my milk could turn my anger into white, warm calmness. Nursing had the same soothing effect on my baby, no matter how hungry, agitated, red-faced, and cranky she was at the start. Nothing beat nursing.
No matter how alone I felt, those times that Mae lay on my chest, her tiny hands kneading my breasts, milk flowing from me, I knew that I could do this alone. Not only did nursing nourish Mae, it nourished me. But it wasn’t long after her father split town—as Mae’s first birthday approached without a sign from him, I knew he wasn’t coming back—that friends started to ask me, “When are you going to get back out there?”
As in date? They had to be kidding. Not only was I a twenty-nine-year-old single mom with dishes in the sink and baby clothes with stains I’d never actually scrub out, but I breastfed “on demand.” How in the world could I even think about hooking up with some hot man when my cha-chas were making milk?
“But look at you!” my girlfriends (who were all married) said to me. “You’re attractive, and you’re young.”
Maybe they were right. About getting back out there, anyway. As the months passed, I started to notice men: our building manager—who gave Mae stuffed animals and called her “Little Guacamole”—and the UPS man, who rolled his packages past me.
Still, noticing men in the hallway was not the same as dating them. I’m grateful that back then I did not sit down at my computer and type lactating and dating into Google. If I had, I never would have gone on a date. Because recently, while writing this essay, I turned to my computer to do some research, in hopes of finding a thoughtful example of what it means to balance these two acts. I hoped to come across a first-person essay in Redbook about a mother’s deep feelings, something to inspire me as I worked.
One of the first things that came up, however, was a site called MilkMyTits.com. Men were looking for “mature women willing to breastfeed me.”
Gross. I kept scrolling through the sites that Google brought up; there had to be something. But they were all the same: white men in their forties in search of sweet breast milk. My breasts had always been one of the most sensual parts of me. Before motherhood, when a man put his lips around my nipple, it made my body rain—not a light sprinkle, either. If I slept with a man as a nursing mom, my breasts would rain on him. Perhaps, after undressing, I could open my closet, pull out an umbrella, and hand it to him: “You might need this….”
I couldn’t remember if I’d slept with Mae’s father in the weeks before he’d left for good. If I had, I didn’t remember the details. He was shut down and hungover; I was absorbed with my baby. I lived in the world of womanhood for years, and now I was a mother. But who says that you can’t live in both worlds? Some mothers I knew wore bras to bed because they didn’t want to leak on the mattress—or their husbands. That’s how they divided their realms. But I wanted to be a woman who lived in both worlds; I wanted to be the kind of woman who didn’t care if she spurted.
One of my best friends in New York City told me that she wanted to set me up on a blind date. Ironically, she was the same friend who, in 2002, was thrown out of the public library
in Manhattan for breastfeeding her daughter. She’d been nursing in an empty reading room, when a female security guard screamed at her to “Take that outside.” The guard didn’t know that my friend, Susan Light, was a lawyer who took it straight to the media, after which the library expressed “deep regret” over the incident and immediately sent a memo to remind staff of the right of women to breastfeed.
“I want to date, but I can’t,” I told my friend.
“Why not?”
“I’m nursing.”
“So?” she said.
“What would I wear?” I huffed. “A nursing bra?”
She laughed.
“No, really,” I said. “I’d have to bring my pump along, for after my drink.”
Little did my mother-friend know that the blind date she wanted to set me up with might have had a breastfeeding fetish. She told me that he was a lawyer, too, “a cute one.” After chatting on the phone with the lawyer—his call woke me as I fell asleep while nursing Mae in the bed we share—I decided to go for it. I’ve always considered myself to be open-minded about anything intimate. Maybe I was rebelling against my Catholic mother, but I certainly was not a prude. I decided that I’d keep the date short and sweet—and I’d nurse before leaving so (I hoped) I wouldn’t leak.
The following Friday, after enlisting another girlfriend to babysit, I dashed out the door to meet the lawyer at a bar. When I got inside, he waved. I didn’t see the cuteness—he had a receding hairline—but maybe I was too nervous.
Still, he did the right thing: he asked if I had a photo of Mae, and when I pulled one from my wallet, he used the word adorable.
“She is,” I said. “I’m late because I was nursing her before bed—”
“You were nursing her?”
That’s when I noticed the sparkle in his eyes. Maybe I’d misread? But no.
“A woman who’s lactating!” he said, way too loudly. “What a turn-on!”
Best Sex Writing 2010 Page 19