Thoughts on Sex Ed

HEDONE (are you reading her blog yet?) said something in a comment on the last post that got me thinking (dangerous, I know), and not about Mango Man (and have you put in a good word for him yet?). She said, "If people learn one thing it should be 'don't get your sex education from porn.'"

It's a sad fact that for many people, children and adults, there's no other option than to get your "advice" on sex from pornography. Commentators more erudite than I have beaten the point into the ground that porn isn't a good teacher; I'll just echo their central point. But I think they do miss a point, which is that porn is a bit like Wikipedia.

Go with me here. If I were writing an academic paper, I wouldn't use Wikipedia as a source if the only source I had for something was Wikipedia. I might give credit where credit was due, but only if Wikipedia wasn't my only source. Not that it can't be useful, but that you should always corroborate. It's a fine place to look for additional sources of information, but as a source itself it lacks academic rigor.

The same is true with porn. I have seen things in porn which later helped me to be a better lover. But I didn't rely solely on porn, and I didn't assume that they were good techniques just because the people in the pornographic video seemed to enjoy them. As a source of even common knowledge, porn is horrible, much worse than Wikipedia (although I wouldn't recommend learning sex from Wikipedia either). But there are a few redeeming bits of porn. And it is useful in the way it was intended: to be arousing.

The problem arises when people only have porn as an educator. If someone even has one other source, of at least marginally reliable information, where he or she can double-check, then porn becomes much safer. Watching porn when I was young, I had the ability to ask my parents what was going on, and they told me the difference between fiction and reality. Ideally, everyone should have at least one person to ask.

But since most people don't, and the people who do have someone to ask are usually asking someone who knows just as little, we have a real problem, one for which porn perhaps should not be blamed, but one in which it plays a part. But I don't think that it's the only problem we have, as a society, about sex. The lack of communication surrounding the topic is criminal, but even people who are well-informed still have a further problem.

Suppose we went at learning to drive a car like we go at learning to have sex. Not only would there be practically no drivers' ed, but everyone would be expected to be a Formula 1 driver the first time they stepped into the vehicle. And you wouldn't be allowed to ride along with someone else, but that's breaking the metaphor a little. Oh, and some people would be taught only that driving cars is horribly bad for the environment and shouldn't be done at all. Kids would gather in groups around cars trying hard to catch glimpses of them out corners of their eyes, then passing around books which discussed driving in frank, adult terms. The guy who got to drive his father's tractor would be BMOC, and he'd crow about how smooth the ride was, neglecting to mention that he drove the tractor five feet into a ditch. Bootleg Car Talk tapes would be listened to under the covers late at night. Kids would hide sets of keys under their mattresses with old copies of Motor Week Magazine.

I'm a perfectionist (I know, considering that last metaphor, how could I not be). Always have been. When I was young, I developed slightly late because I wouldn't do something until I was sure I could do it. I went from baby talk to complete sentences overnight; I didn't talk early, but I talked well. I didn't have much of a transition period between crawling and walking; I rarely fell down. I didn't read until I could read silently, and I skipped over a lot of children's books straight to the longer books. I am not going to be hypocritical and say that my attitude about sex was any different.

But even I had to admit that, while maybe I could go from zero to sixty (okay, maybe forty-five), sexually, I couldn't go from zero to perfect. No one can. Hell, I don't think that the standards people set for themselves are ever attainable, let alone the first time out. Losing your virginity shouldn't be terrible, tawdry, or quick (though it often is), but magical or not, it likely won't be as good as a later time, unless you lock yourself into believing that it should be.

Sex is like anything else; practice makes perfect. Or if not perfect, at least better. But no one is willing to give themselves license to practice. We approach sex as this deadly-serious thing which must achieve its aim all the time. We have trouble experimenting or playing. Part of that is because as children the idea that sexual play is healthy has been rooted out of our mass psyche; I bet even now some of you are reacting viscerally to that, thinking that I'm recommending that children be scarred sexually for life. There's no shame in that; it's the way society is. I sometimes wonder myself whether children are being sexualized too early, although that has less to do with sex itself and more with the idea of sex, a concept which, thanks to a lack of education, children don't really understand but try to imitate. Putting your preschooler in a two-piece string bikini is just stupid, for instance.

Education is a lot about failure. Failing often teaches us more than success. I don't mean getting an F on your report card, I mean trying and failing. It's something I have to tell myself all the time, because I am, as I said, a perfectionist. But by giving myself license to fail, I've learned more, and that's an idea I can apply to my sexual education just as much as to any other thing. Hell, it's all the rage in the corporate world now; I don't know the buzzwords, but incremental design is something that's basically a series of imperfect attempts leading to a more finely-tuned finished product.

Why can't we do that in the bedroom (or on the kitchen counter, in the back room of the club, the seedy bathroom of a cheap hotel, the SM dungeon... etc.)? If the best way to learn is to be imperfect, why can't we just go at it, maybe sometimes failing, maybe not enjoying something, but stretching our boundaries a little? And why do kids seem to feel that either the first time should be perfect (it will not be) or that if it's not perfect, it'll be awful and will scar them for life (it'll likely be kind of mediocre, but so what)? If you get two people to do something that neither of them have ever done before, and most likely they have little idea of how to do it, it's probably not going to turn out that well, but even if they both have extensive book knowledge, they still might have a bad first time. It's only natural. Theory and practice are two different things.

But even education and the license to fail through practice aren't enough. Because at a certain point, you can practice all you want with your partner and you may know know the ins and outs like a book, but you'll still be inside that box. I know I'm repeating myself a bit, but practice with only one partner will polish you until you lose your edge. I know some people aren't comfortable with the idea of multiple partners, but at least talk with other people. This is where porn can come into its own; it may not be good sex ed, and you should take it with a mountain of salt, but it can show you options you might not have considered. But watching porn or talking to other people is really no substitute for finding someone with experience and learning from them. That's tough; there's not a good system of sexual dojos, and to the best of my knowledge there's no remote mountain peak you can climb to study with the guru of sex (Rama Lama Ding Dong, I believe he's called). I mean, you could go to Tibet and hang out with the Tantrists, but it's not like there's a set procedure for that, and there's certain religious baggage there too.

So the best you can do is try to broaden those horizons any way you can, and then return to your partner and give yourselves the option of trying something and not having a good time. Don't do it every night. Don't plan a romantic evening and then whip out the untested move you want to try, leading to disappointment and dejection. Plan a play date. Bring your A game, but go into it ready to fail, at least at first. Watch together that porn from which you got the idea. Read the blog post aloud to your sweetie. Model your latest bondage gear. And then, if things go pear-shaped, promise each other that you won't hold a grudge and you'll try something else next time (or even approach what went wrong from a different angle; just because it didn't work out the first time doesn't mean it won't if you do it right for you). The old reliable shouldn't be the desert for which you have to eat the disgusting vegetables of new and risky sex, but you might decide to finish the night off with something that you both enjoy, just to keep things fun.

Who knows: you might not need to finish up the night with something reliable, because just because you gave yourself permission to fail sexually doesn't mean you will. It doesn't mean that at all. You can learn from success too.

I suppose I should also thank Advizor, because he got me thinking sex-therapist-like. If you wished he'd gotten me thinking sex-reporter-like instead, it's not his fault, so don't go to his blog and bash him for making me rant. Actually, this wasn't a rant, it was a ramble. I feel strongly, but I haven't raised my voice. I did go on and on though. With jokes.