American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

by Dan Savage

  “If you’re convinced of her guilt,” Val writes, “you should be asking yourself why she needed to have affairs (assuming your evidence is substantial), what went wrong in your marriage, and why you didn’t satisfy her.” [Emphasis added.]

  Val could have said something similar to the wife in the first letter. Something went wrong in her marriage too. She wasn’t satisfying her husband either. The first woman’s weight gain—there I said it—turned her husband off. And did her husband cheat? Nope, he just lost interest. And now that she’s lost some weight, he’s interested again—and that’s proof, according to Val, that her husband doesn’t love her and never did. Divorce him! But when a wife cheats on her husband? Repeatedly? And the husband has evidence that confirms his suspicions? Well, says Val, the husband was clearly doing something wrong. He must have failed to satisfy her in some mysterious, undefined way, and her infidelities are his fault!

  It’s a wonder that straight men seek relationship advice at all. So many “advice professionals”—from marital counselors to advice columnists to talk show hosts—are like Val: Whatever the problem is, it’s his fault. Professional advisers know they work for women, and telling women what they want to hear is a good way to protect their jobs. (For another example of this dynamic at work, watch any episode of Dr. Phil in which the subject of porn comes up.)

  4 Advice columnists willing to call bullshit on their letter writers, aside from myself: Carolyn Hax, a writer and columnist for The Washington Post and the author of the eponymous advice column; Emily Yoffe, author of Slate’s Dear Prudence column; and Cheryl Strayed, the author of Dear Sugar, the advice column at The Rumpus. Best example of bullshit-calling by an advice columnist ever: A reader asked Abigail Van Buren—in 1972—what she could do to “improve the quality of the neighborhood” after a gay couple moved in down the street. Van Buren’s three-word answer: “You could move.”

  5 This guy, who had the four-year affair without getting caught, says he pulled it off because he followed these eight rules:

  1.I never told anyone about it. Ever. This is my sole secret.

  2.I chose a partner who wanted exactly what I wanted, and who was not someone I knew socially.

  3. I never took stupid risks—we only met up when we both had clear time so as not to jeopardize our secret.

  4. We didn’t film ourselves, as hot as that sounded.

  5. We used condoms.

  6. I kept my computer clear of any evidence.

  7. We never called or texted each other.

  8. When it ended, we didn’t try to keep in touch.

  3. Sex Dread

  Imagine a driver’s-education course that didn’t cover steering. Or brakes. Or turn signals. Or what those red octagons on the tops of those metal sticks near all those intersections are supposed to mean exactly. This driver’s-ed course is entirely dedicated to the miracle of internal combustion. Now imagine you’re fifteen years old and this is your driver’s-ed class.

  When your instructor isn’t drilling you and your fellow students on the inner workings of the internal combustion engine—fuel combines with an oxidizer in a combustion chamber where it explodes and the energy produced by these explosions causes pistons to fire and this miraculous chain of events makes a car move—he’s issuing dire warnings about the highly flammable nature of gasoline and wildly overstating your odds of dying in a car accident.

  “There’s no such thing as ‘safe’ driving,” your instructor warns you at the end of every class. “The only safe driver is the driver who doesn’t drive.”

  Then your sixteenth birthday rolls around and, surprise, you’re given a driver’s permit and the keys to a car. No one expected that you wouldn’t take up driving—not your driver’s-ed instructor, not the school administrators who hired him, not the parents who told you to listen to him, not the federal or state agencies that paid his salary. So on your sixteenth birthday you get behind the wheel of a car for the first time.

  What happens next?

  The odds that you’ll get into an accident, perhaps a fatal one, are pretty high. Because you don’t know how to drive. You may have taken a driver’s-ed course, true, but not one that prepared you to drive a car on actual roads that other people would be driving their own cars on as well. You shouldn’t feel too bad about getting into an accident, though—I mean anyone who took a driver’s-ed class like the one you took is probably going to kill himself or someone else or a score of people the first time he takes the car out for a spin. And here’s the neat part…

  Well, it’s the neat part for your driver’s-ed instructor anyway: If you do kill yourself or someone else the first time you drive a car—or the second or third or even the three-hundredth time—your old driver’s-ed instructor will cite your death as proof that he was right about driving. He’ll show your picture to his current students and describe the accident in gory detail. And he’ll tell his students that this wouldn’t have happened if only you had listened to him and abstained from driving.

  Sex education in America is a lot like a driver’s-ed course that covers the internal combustion but not steering or brakes or those red octagons on the tops of those sticks at all those intersections. And while strict “abstinence-only” sex-education programs get all the bad press—and for many years, all the federal funding (to the tune of billions of your tax dollars)—what we think of as “comprehensive” sex-ed programs often aren’t much better. Despite what the parents of Taylor Ghimenti, and others like them, believe.

  Taylor Ghimenti is a high school student in Fresno County, California, whose parents sued the Clovis Unified School District in the fall of 2012 alleging the district’s failure to provide their daughter with a comprehensive sex education. According to the Ghimentis, Taylor was “given no information” about contraception, condoms, or disease prevention in the abstinence-only sex-ed classes at her high school, in direct violation of state law. Instead, they asserted, she was taught—incorrectly—that she could contract HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from kissing, and told that she should abstain from sex until marriage. If the allegations are proved, what is being taught in the schools of Fresno County isn’t sex ed. It’s sex dread.

  But teenagers lucky enough to receive the kind of “comprehensive” sex education that Taylor’s parents are fighting to get into schools in Fresno County—or fighting to get back into schools—often don’t get much more than an extended primer on reproductive biology. Like their contemporaries in abstinence-only programs, these students are taught how the human reproductive combustion engine works; they know testes from ovaries, ejaculation from ovulation, and prostate glands from mammary glands. In other words: They learn where babies come from and how to prevent babies from coming.

  Reproductive biology is the easy part, though. Everything a young person needs to know about human reproduction can be packed into a single, time-saving, run-on sentence: The nice man puts his erect penis into the nice woman’s vagina and moves it back and forth until he ejaculates—lady orgasms are nice, and the clitoris is somehow involved, but only a man’s orgasm is strictly necessary—and then the speediest sperm cell, out of the millions of sperm cells in the man’s ejaculate, fertilizes one of the woman’s eggs (if there’s an egg lurking in her lady parts somewhere), and that fertilized egg implants on the wall of her uterus, and nine months later, barring a miscarriage or an abortion or a meteor strike, the woman will give birth to one or more babies—sometimes there are two eggs, sometimes a single egg-and-sperm combo splits and grows into two babies (sometimes three!)—which is why most people use condoms or some other form of contraception when they’re having sex—because, you see, most people, including your parents, want to have sex a lot more often than they want to have babies.

  Whether reproductive biology is covered in an abstinence-only sex-ed class or a comprehensive sex-ed class—or at the kitchen table after a four-year-old asks his parents where babies come from—it isn’t that difficult to impart the basics. About the only th
ing simpler than reproductive biology is reproduction itself; people, whether they should or not, reproduce constantly, on purpose and by accident.

  And studies consistently show that young people who’ve had abstinence-only sex educations are far likelier to accidentally reproduce than young people who’ve had comprehensive sex educations. Bristol Palin may be the most famous example. In fact, teenagers who’ve had abstinence-only sex educations show no delay in “sexual debut,” an unbelievably quaint way of saying, “fucked for the very first time.” (At some point in our lives we were all sexual debutantes.) But while teenagers who’ve had abstinence-only sex ed don’t wait appreciably longer to become sexually active—certainly not until marriage—they are far less likely to use contraception when they do become sexually active.

  Consequently, teenagers who’ve had abstinence-only sex ed are at greater risk of contracting a sexually transmitted infection or suffering an unplanned pregnancy—and those are the kinds of pregnancies that typically lead to abortion.

  While the teen pregnancy rate in the United States has been dropping for years (hitting a six-decade low in 2010, according to research done by the Centers for Disease Control), the United States still has far and away the highest teen pregnancy rates in the industrialized world, and states with abstinence-only sex education have the highest rates of teen pregnancy. The teen pregnancy rate in Mississippi, an abstinence-only state, is nearly four times higher than the teen pregnancy rate in New Hampshire, a comprehensive sex-ed state. (Not only does Mississippi lead the country in teen births, but it takes first, second, and third place in reported cases of gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis, respectively, the overwhelming number of which involve fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds.) Teenagers who receive comprehensive sex ed are 60 percent less likely to get pregnant or get someone else pregnant than teenagers who have had abstinence-only sex education, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Washington. The failure to provide young people with comprehensive sex education drives up the abortion rates in blue states and the rates of single parenthood in red states. A conservative who claims to oppose abortion and single parenthood shouldn’t support abstinence-only sex ed, as it only seems to drive up the rates of both.

  Despite the growing mountain of evidence that abstinence-only education doesn’t work, states continue to pour money into these programs. In 2012 the governor of Tennessee signed into law an abstinence-only education bill that included a provision banning teachers from condoning “gateway sexual activities,” such as hugging or holding hands. Tennessee’s new law allows parents to sue teachers or “outside parties”—like sex-advice columnists?—who provide their children with any information that contradicts the state’s abstinence-only message. And the 2012 Republican Party platform called for abstinence-only sex education in all American schools and condemned teaching about contraception.

  Obviously, there are huge differences in outcomes between abstinence-only and comprehensive sex-ed courses—and an outcome like “four times fewer unplanned pregnancies” is the most important measure of success. Yet comprehensive sex-education programs still fall short.

  “There is abstinence-only sex education, and there’s abstinence-based sex ed,” Leslie Kantor, vice president of education for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told The New York Times Magazine in a November 2011 story. “There’s almost nothing else left in public schools.”

  Kantor was quoted in Laurie Abraham’s profile of Al Vernacchio, an English teacher at a private high school in Philadelphia who also teaches an elective course called Sexuality and Society. Surveying the sex-ed courses available in most schools in the United States, Abraham observed, “The approach ranges from abstinence until marriage is the only acceptable choice, contraceptives don’t work and premarital sex is physically and emotionally harmful, to abstinence is usually best, but if you must have sex, here are some ways to protect yourself from pregnancy and disease. The latter has been called ‘disaster prevention’ education by sex educators who wish they could teach more.”

  “Disaster prevention” sex education…or in other words: “You shouldn’t have sex because terrible things could happen. But if you do have sex, against our wishes, and despite the terrible things that could happen, then for fuck’s sake use a condom.” Even comprehensive sex educators are teaching sex dread.

  In 2009 researchers at York University in Toronto interviewed twelve hundred teenagers between the ages of thirteen and nineteen about what they learned in their sex-ed classes. Most of the students were deeply frustrated. The teenagers described their sex-ed classes as grim and tedious, focused primarily on sexually transmitted infections and preventing unplanned pregnancies. They learned about condoms, how to protect themselves from STIs, and about a variety of birth control methods, but their sex-ed courses left them feeling unprepared for romantic and sexual relationships. These teenagers told the York University researchers that they wanted—they needed—more information about sexual pleasure, giving and getting, and fewer in-class demonstrations of rolling condoms onto bananas. One highly disturbing finding: Many of the surveyed teenagers emerged from their “comprehensive” sex-ed classes not knowing that “sex was supposed to feel good.”

  “As fascinated as we all are with spermatogenesis and how egg meets sperm,” one of the authors of the study told The Globe and Mail, “what’s more interesting to everybody, including adolescents, is what do you do with sexual desire, how do you know when to act upon it, what kind of relationship is fulfilling and what should you be looking for to make sure your relationship is healthy and satisfying rather than one that’s unhappy, dysfunctional and disappointing.”

  Al Vernacchio’s sex-ed class covers all the basics: reproduction, physical development, sexually transmitted infections, and contraception. But his students are allowed to ask questions, in person or anonymously (there’s a box in Vernacchio’s classroom where students can leave their written questions), and more importantly, Vernacchio is allowed to answer any question asked by a student. Nothing is off-limits and students drive the conversation. And the one topic his students are most curious about—the topic his class seems to circle back to, again and again—is sexual pleasure. What you do with sexual desire and how you act on it.

  Sex-education classes that don’t include information about sexual pleasure, or when and how to act on sexual desire, can’t be described as “comprehensive.” Giving and receiving pleasure is what sex is about. Giving and receiving pleasure is why we have sex most of the time. The average human being has a great deal of sex over the course of his or her life and very few children; most sex is recreational (all of it is if you’re gay), and that’s not an accident. Human females don’t go into heat. We are designed—by evolution—expressly to have sex recreationally. Teaching young people to prevent unplanned pregnancies and to minimize the risk of acquiring STIs is a hugely important task, the first and most important responsibility of all sex educators. But so long as we skip past pleasure, desire, and negotiating a romantic or sexual relationship—less primly: how you talk someone into fucking you—we aren’t really teaching young adults about sex.

  It’s easy to say that pleasure should be included in any comprehensive sex-ed program. But pleasure is difficult to talk about, much less teach, as pleasure is subjective and personal. And when it comes to sex, pleasure is contested; it isn’t even acknowledged in most religious traditions as a legitimate reason to have sex.

  So I don’t want to come down too harshly on sex educators—actual sex educators, not those abstinence-only frauds—who find themselves trapped between the competing demands of curious, hormone-pickled adolescents, naturally conservative parents, nervous school administrators, and skittish school boards.

  Like I said, I understand how difficult it is to talk about pleasure. I understand from personal experience. Full confession: I screwed up the sex talk with the one and only child that I was specifically charged with educating about sex. My own.r />
  One day my then-eight-year-old son came into the kitchen and jumped on the counter. He narrowed his eyes and gave me a strange look.

  “Two men can’t make a baby,” D.J. finally said.

  That’s true, I told him, two men can’t make a baby.

  “Then you and daddy have sex for no reason,” he said.

  Most of the sex that goes on out there—gay sex, straight sex, solo sex—is for no reason, or more accurately for a very good reason—for pleasure. And yet almost all parents, myself included, leave pleasure out of “the talk.” And if a sex-advice columnist who believes that pleasure needs to be incorporated into sex education leaves pleasure out himself, can you blame sex educators for ducking the issue?

  “But if you’re not making a baby,” my son asked, “why would you want to do it?”

  Because it feels good, I told him, because it makes you feel close to another person, because your body is programmed to want and need it.

  “But it looks so stupid,” D.J. replied.

  He was talking about the couples he’d seen kissing on television. (Wait until he stumbles over Internet porn, I thought at the time. He has no idea just how stupid people can look when they’re having sex.) But he was right: Sex does look stupid. We look ridiculous doing it and feel a little ridiculous once we’re done. And fifteen minutes later we’re ready to do it again.

  Because it feels good. Because it’s pleasurable.

  When we’re young we hear about adults “having sex.” Mary is having sex; Terry is having sex; Larry is having sex. We’re both curious about and repulsed by this having-of-sex business that seems to consume adults. But then, at a certain point during adolescence, hormones kick in and we want to join the sex-having party too.