Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That*

* Being a guy named Stac[e]y, that is

If we could trust schools not to serve up advocacy along with sex education, the issues of sex-ed and anti-bullying would be a heck of a lot easier. There’s nothing wrong with making sure kids know the fundamentals of reproduction, and that they should not be assholes toward anyone, irrespective of orientation.

But of course these days the temptation to the educational establishment is simply enormous to turn it into much more than that, and to sexualize kids too early, or make the hookup cultures–gay or straight–the normative thing. All of this is just as destructive as sending kids out into the world not knowing about the human body.

UPDATE: Stacy drops by, and says:

Get off of my lawn!

Oh, wait. I pasted the wrong thing, dearie me. Here we go:

1. There is no need for sex education in schools. There are plenty of books about sex in bookstores, if only the schools would teach children to read! And then there’s this thing call “the Internet.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Because sex-ed is demonstrably unnecessary (I did just fine without it), the question arises: Why have some people become so insistent on including it in the curriculum? I could suggest answers to that question, but the important thing is to ask the question.

I dunno, Stace. Didn’t they used to at least have “Hygeine class,” back in the 1930s or whenever, when you were in high school?

When I was 14 years old my stepfather got prostate cancer, and at the same time within a year my mother went mad. Another friend’s mother attempted to convince me that part of the reason my mother was crazy was that her mate was no longer able to “satisfy” her. I explained that the only thing the surgery had changed, according to my mom, was to make my stepdad unable to ejaculate, but our argument bogged down when I realized she did not know what the word “ejaculate” meant.

She seemed to think that perhaps the word referred to the back-and-forth movement of sexual intercourse.

I was so embarrassed for her, and so confused that anyone could make it into their late forties/early fifties without knowing the function of the prostate gland, or what the word “ejaculate” meant, or that there were alternatives to sexual intercourse, should that not be a desirable or possible thing for a heterosexual couple any more–or that there were reasons for chemical imbalances in the brain that had nothing whatsoever to do with a woman’s sexual frustration.

I want kids to learn the fundamentals from their parents at a reasonably early age, but I do think there should be a fallback course in high school, for those whose parents think “ejaculate” means “wiggle the penis around inside a woman’s vagina.”

Because it’s shameful for an 18-year-old to think that, much less a 49-year-old. And, no, I don’t want teenagers to pick that kind of information up off the street from the internet, either. In case you were not aware, the internet can be a reliable source of misinformation.

2. What the hell is with this “anti-bullying” crap? Are they trying to tell us that kids are, in this supposed Age of Enlightened Tolerance, even more sadistically barbaric than in the Bad Old Days when you and I were kids? What has caused this supposed upsurge in bullying? Could it possibly have something to do with the discontinuation of corporal punishment in schools? The threat of getting 10 licks with a wooden paddle wielded by a muscular football coach was enough to put The Fear into even the toughest kids back in the day.

Beats the hell out of me. At my high school, the kids who were super-bright and therefore most picked-upon (and some who were bright but not picked-upon) used to eat lunch in the classrooms of the Anthropology teacher and the Geography teacher. And these same people are now 1) publishing books; 2) doing cutting-edge research in math and science; 3) writing for The Atlantic; 4) starting companies, some of multinational stature; 5) making music; 6) editing films; 7) creating new ways of looking at computer graphics and the scanning of images and 3D objects; and 8 ) for the total slackers, writing blogs.

If those teachers hadn’t taken us in, who knows whether we’d be the coffee achievers we are today?

Give ’em a place to eat lunch away from the bullies, and they’ll be fine. Anyway, if they’re out of junior high they are likely past the real danger point: it was far more brutal in elementary and middle school, versus high school. Just sayin’.

UPDATE II: For the record, Stacy is only three years my senior.

My husband, however, is nine and a half years my senior, and attended Catholic school in Skokie, Illinois while he was growing up. And, yes; the curriculum included sex education.