Blinded to sexual truths

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Blinded to sexual truths				May 26, 2010

Greek playwrights like Aristophanes always considered human sexuality a prime target for their comic barbs, and now I know why.

Just a few weeks ago there appeared the revelation in the journal Science that, according to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, humans were interbreeding with Neanderthals 30,000 years ago. As a result, between one and four percent of our human DNA can be directly traced to those epitomes of duh.

This explains a lot about several people I know, but you have to wonder what on Earth so attracted humans to hairy dimwits that they wanted to have sex with them.

Similarly comical was another story in The New York Times about a middle school health teacher on Staten Island. Following her state-mandated curriculum for a discussion about HIV, she wrote on the board all the appropriate terms for sexual organs and sexual activity. She then asked her students to write in their notebooks all the synonyms they could think of for the words on the board.

What resulted were notebooks filled with every bawdy and prurient term the kids could come up with for sexual organs and sexual acts. The notebooks were then dutifully taken home and shown to parents, who popped their corks and had the teacher fired. Thankfully, as a result of a lawsuit, she is now back in the classroom.

All of which brings me to a recent flap that arose when Lawrence Griffith gave a no-nonsense talk to Walsingham Academy’s middle schoolers about the dangers of sex and the transmission of the AIDS virus. Like in Staten Island, parents here were upset with Griffith for explaining terms like “blow job” and “anal penetration” as part of his presentation.

Well, good for him.

How much better it is to alert students in an academic setting about sexual truths and explain terms they’ve heard tossed around in the halls than to rely on what went on before sex education courses were introduced.

Like most boys, I was becoming aware of things sexual around age 10 or 11. But it wasn’t until I was 13 that my father and I had our traditional man talk. This lasted all of five minutes, and from it I learned that stork-delivered babies ranked right up there with Santa Claus.

I was then given a book from the Middle Ages about sex for boys and told to read it.

Among other things, I read that “autoeroticism inevitably results in blindness.” Since I had no idea what autoeroticism meant, I checked it in the dictionary and immediately became terrified. Obviously, given the way things were going, I would be blind by age 15.

In anticipation of this horrific development I started closing my eyes and, when my parents were out, wandering around the house as though blind to make sure I knew where everything was by touch. I took special care with things in the bathroom and the refrigerator and could soon differentiate between a loaf of bread and leftover liver.

I also taught myself touch typing, just in case I needed to write a report for school or was reduced to writing novels for a living. It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to read. Otherwise I probably would have gotten into Braille.

On the other hand, I was aware of all the sexual slang my friends used, though I couldn’t have told you what a “blow job” really consisted of. Nor was I sure why, if you really hated someone, you referred to him as a “homo.”

So yes, I would have definitely profited from a course in sex ed and been happy to have a man like Griffith explain it all to me, including why I still have my eyesight.

Who knows? If our human ancestors had had a course in sex ed and knew how DNA worked, perhaps they would have shied away from those hairy dimwits whose genes we have unwittingly inherited.