Sex Education as Shame

Ignorance is dangerous. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably one who is ignorant. Specific ignorance has specific consequences. Schools have this wonderful Abstinence Only class, but what does it teach them? Not a whole lot – that sex is a one-way road to Hell, and that condoms don’t work. Where will that lead?

It’s a thought I’ve had, and, as a writer, I’ve thought this through probably more than is healthy. Here’s where it led me:

“There will always be one: a child who will go home from church each week with the weight of the patriarchy bearing down on them. Marriage. Children. An eternal partnership with one person and no one else, ever, and the expectation of abstinence till then.

Then, outside their church, they go into the world and are slammed with worldly things. Drugs! Music! Movies! Ads for shoes, for perfume, for cars and PETA and food – all half-nude, all about men wanting women or wanting anything that moves, and the end result forever and always is sex. It’s in everything.

Most children want sex. They try to fight it because God told them to and then… they slip – a kiss, a touch. A hand-job, a blow-job – but they’re still virgins! It doesn’t count, it’s not real sex, they tell themselves, ‘my parents will still love me’. But they know that isn’t true. Once down, they will always be sexual, sexed up, sexed over. Fag. Slut. Whore. Worthless to their family and their church.

At this point, what does it matter? Why bother staying pure, it feels better having sex. They’ve gone this far, they’ll never get it back – not virginity, not their family. They won’t use condoms – bad kids carry those, they plan sex, and besides that their parents says they don’t work, not for HIV, not for pregnancy and if they’re this far gone, it’s in the Devil’s hands now because God doesn’t love children who don’t stay pure. Nobody loves a whore.”

“There’s something wrong,” sex educator Sol Gordon once said, “with a country that says, ‘Sex is dirty, save it for someone you love.’ “  It’s something most women who read into virginity and feminism and church morals face, and most gay young men have to come to terms with. Read anything by Jessica Valenti and she has all the facts, the quotes.

If you, as a parent, are still too scared of the P-Word or the V-Word… It’s okay. Someone else will teach your kids that for you. Don’t bitch when it bites them – and you – in the ass… that’s the price of fear. Of ignorance.

And don’t cry when your children don’t come home to your religion of fear and hate.

Thank you for reading.

(Blurb written by me)

Marriage as Civil Union

This may be an odd topic for someone who never intends to get married, but it’s become an ear-worm to our culture. Everyone wants you to be married, everyone wants your babies, and you just have to have the Almighty Penis and Vagina set.

Wait, sorry, that should have been ‘Theme Five’. Can’t say Penis in public.

For most people the basic tenet of marriage is ‘God Said So’. However, I’m non-Christian (I worship Murphy) and from what I read in the Bible before stalling at Nehemiah, the Christian God sounded a bit like a sexually frustrated Zeus. In the New Testament (I’m up to Luke, by the way) Jesus dropped a Catch-22 that not everyone is mature enough for marriage (Matthew 19:11-12,)  but he still seems to be against fornication. I’m not sure he understands hormones too well.

The second matter, naturally, is children. Everyone wants kids with marriage. People divorce over lack of children. The Moral Guardians feel that kids must have straight, married parents or all Hell will break loose and Armageddon will come and swallow us whole.

Mind you, I’m not sure these Moral Guardians have been outside recently. They seem to have missed that all their sweet little angels have been documented at all hours duct-taping a cat and spray-painting the church’s backdoor with ’4-20′ and ‘Hail Avril’. Maybe they’re a little behind on the times.

When they aren’t encouraging the single and divorced to remarry for the sake of their children’s souls, they’re ignoring the stats about rape where being home with family and friends is the most dangerous place for women, that spousal rape only became a crime in the 70s, and child abuse reports shot up then, too. About five kids a day died from abuse or neglect in 2007.  Mind, I don’t know how many were in married families, but I’d be willing to bet they started out with male and female parents.

It’s almost unfair how much focus is on how often this arrangement of enforced domicile fails miserably. From a lovingly obvious website called ‘divorcerate.org’ (I have no idea how accurate it is,) Divorce is somewhere between 30 – 50%, if one plays fast-and-loose with numbers. This isn’t exactly a bad thing. Argumentative couples are bad for everyone’s health – it’s why we got an out from God in the first place. Seems like a good way to lower the homicide rate.

There’s more than a few reasons why we aren’t on the marriage bandwagon anymore: self-sufficiency has arrived. Women don’t have bride prices in the USA, and a lot of men don’t want to settle down. Marrying out of love rather than duty (and, preferably, rather than lust) makes this a convenience, not a necessity. Loving partners have every promise for them being better parents anyways. Lack of love is destined to fail. It must be serious: you couldn’t pry my dad off his phone for nothing when he lived with my mother, but now that’s he’s got a husband he can’t wait to have privacy.

There’s no guarantee same-sex partners will fare any better than classic ones: we haven’t studied them to death yet. But if het parents can work out, why can’t gay, lesbian, or poly? (“It takes a village to raise a child” is remembered for a reason.)

Of course, “Gay people aren’t monogamous” – and neither are straight. “The sanctity of marriage” – as kept by Britney Spears, and Abraham and his two wives and two mistresses. Do we need more children? We’re so fat in population, we’re all set for the cannibal holocaust.

‘Marriage’ is just so important, just like ‘Gentleman’ is a definition of property ownership and ‘Christian’ supposedly means one religion (C.S.Lewis’s made the Gentleman argument better, but he took more pages to do it.) In either case, America is not a Theocracy and the Marriage argument is grounded in the church.

We have judges for matters of legal contracts, and in essence that’s all a marriage is: an agreement to own property in kind, raise dependents together, and to remain as one unit for a set duration of time. That’s pretty straightforward. ‘Civil Union’ describes it well – none of this ‘marriage’ nonsense.

‘Marriage’, you’ve done pretty well but you’re failing. Miserably. Perhaps you should retire to the church-houses, with consecrations and baptisms and bar mitzvahs. We can party and hold feasts in your honour, and ignore the legal bits since those papers were already filed with the law. Nobody calls it a ‘Birth Certificate day’, and it doesn’t change that we were born, or what rights we have.

Thank you for reading.

General references are the books  ‘Predators’ by Anna C. Salter, ‘Full-Frontal Feminism’ by Jessica Valenti, ‘Mere Christianity’ by C.S.Lewis, and, of course, the Bible

Topics that will be forthcoming.

Lately, I’ve had a lot of thoughts rolling through my head that I feel need addressed and shared.
Marriage. Abortion. Transgender. None of them are strong, personal matters – I never want to get married, I have no partner, and I’m content with my body the way it is – but the amount of argument that crops up about them disgusts me.
It seems like a simple solution: Respect choice of each individual person. Obviously, nobody’s managed to accomplish this yet. I might have a few suggestions, or I might end up with nothing but ranting and raving, but I’d like to hope that it can be constructive, clear, and food for the thought, at least.
Much thanks for reading.