Sex ed

The dos, the don'ts, and the never, ever agains of the birds and the bees.

By Andrea Nemerson

WHEN EMILY'S FIRST boyfriend rolled off her after their very first time, he asked the question the experienced man of the world is supposed to ask: "Was it good for you?" No one had told her she was supposed to be playing the complimentary role (starry-eyed and satisfied), so she answered honestly: "Well, I suppose it gets better." Which it did, she hastens to add now, a little too late. Perhaps lovers, like lawyers, ought never to ask a question if they don't already know the answer. It's safer that way.

We can presume, given the intervening years, that the young man eventually got over it. Anita's first boyfriend, on the other hand, might never have recovered if she'd told him the truth. On first contact (a hand down the pants), she exclaimed, "It's so big!" It was so big! He was so happy! She hadn't the heart to tell him she'd only seen one other such organ – her cousin's – and that it had been a while. They were four at the time.

In the clinch we so often seem to know our lines ("Was it good for you?" "It's so big!") but not what they mean or why we ought to say them. Nor do we tend to think about what we're doing any more carefully than we consider what we say. What made Shelly and her girlfriend, bright girls both, think that using Shelly's privates as a champagne flute was a good idea? Had they seen it in the movies, where sex-and-food scenes always look so delicious? Why don't we ever see the scene at the hospital in the middle of the night, where the bedraggled, abashed lovers explain to the triage nurse about the burning sensation that just won't stop?

Of course, these are the same young women who, on another occasion, attempted penetration with one of those battery-operated lollipops, briefly trendy but later dubbed the "rotating yeast infection on a stick." Perhaps we should simply thank them for making their youthful mistakes so we don't have to, and briskly move along.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that's as true in sex as it is in bomb making or neurosurgery. Should we be surprised that your average beginner possesses just about the right amount of information to get in trouble, but rarely enough to get back out again? I use the word "beginner" advisedly, as it's just as often grown-ups who end up as a source of late-night amusement for weary E.R. staffers. Or worse – firemen. Firemen have the Jaws of Life. They have bolt cutters. They have to help you. But they don't have to be nice about it. I know two grown men, both longtime (nearly full-time) perverts, who have had to crab-walk – carefully! – into the fire station late at night and admit that they got themselves into this cock ring but they can't get out. If you happen to get stuck in something, by the way, you might try a few all-purpose fixes (ice the thing, oil the thing, relax) or check out Greenery Press's Sex Disasters and How to Survive Them before turning yourself over to a bunch of burly, mustachioed guys who will laugh at you. If you still need the help, just go. Better to turn red than blue, green, or black.

I don't suppose that people actually make any more mistakes in the bedroom than in the kitchen or shop, but lumpy gravy or a poorly constructed bird feeder will never inspire the sniggers and the shame engendered by plain old bad sex, to say nothing of spectacularly botched sex of the "call 911" variety. And really, without ill-advised, shame-producing sex, what would we do for dirty jokes? Of course the victims of sex disasters deserve compassion, same as any other victims. Sometimes, though, you've got to admit that someone walked right into it.

Kelly's best friend in high school was dating a good-looking, overly fastidious, snobby Swedish guy (I picture any one of the Omegas from Animal House, complete with swagger stick). The snob mistreated the girlfriend and was generally a stuck-up butthead, but he was a cool, popular stuck-up butthead, and they were in high school. 'Nuff said.

"For some reason," Kelly says, "every time I went out with them together, he needed to buy socks." She was, understandably, puzzled until her friend confessed that Butthead thought sex with the likes of her was, well, beneath him, kind of icky and defiling. The second it was over, she confided, he needed to wipe off whatever traces of her still clung to the hallowed member. These were kids, remember, so they were doing it outside a lot, far from towels and toilet paper. So, socks. Which then had cooties and had to go, so ... more socks.

The next time Butthead marched his entourage off to the mall in search of socks, Kelly could not contain herself. She laughed – of course she laughed – and he knew she knew. And perhaps, since he was a cool, popular, stuck-up butthead who couldn't bear to be laughed at, that's why he chose to throw both caution and socks to the wind the next time and desullied himself with the nearest leaf instead. The nearest poison ivy leaf.

Is there a moral to this story? Not really, beyond the obvious: "Don't be a butthead." Or perhaps: "Cleanliness is next to godliness, except when it's next to Toxicodendron radicans."

I did the skip-school-and-do-it-alfresco routine myself once or twice, come to think of it, with similar results. We were in the old graveyard, and so was the poison ivy. After a childhood spent running barefoot and heedless through the woods, apparently immune to, well, everything, I was reduced to slinking past my mother, wearing long sleeves in June. "Oozing pink scaly patches? What oozing pink scaly patches? M-o-o-o-m, why can't you just leave me al-o-o-o-one?" I never skipped-and-screwed again, and oddly enough, I never got poison ivy again either, despite plenty of opportunity. Don't lie to your mother.

The "Oooh, spooky! Oooh, blasphemous! Oooh, rebellious!" call of the cemetery snagged Rebecca, too. It was her 16th birthday, and she and her boyfriend, determined to be as debauched as possible, were going at it behind a tombstone. She thought nothing of it when some guy zipped by on a bike (although it was kind of late, on a deserted road), until the cops showed up, lights flashing. Bike Guy must have snitched them out. The two kids, naked and shivering, were caught in the beam, pinned like bugs. They'd been bad! They were in trouble! The cops had them and were looking down at them ... laughing? "How'd you get your hair to do that?" one of them asked Rebecca, who was sporting seven-inch-high pink spikes. "Oh, and if you're gonna do this again, you really ought to try the other cemetery. We never check that one."

See? It's just like your parents told you: If you need help, ask a police officer.

But those were all kids. My pen pal Christine didn't have that excuse when she needed the paramedics. Smart and levelheaded, Christine is the sort of person you'd turn to if you needed help. Those traits, admirable as they are, never did her boyfriends that much good. The guys had an unfortunate habit of bleeding copiously whenever she got too close; no wonder she married the first one who never required hospitalization.

The first, when she urged, "Higher" (just like in the movies), went higher, slamming his nose straight into a glass coffee table. Five stitches. The second pulled out, looked down, and exclaimed, "You're bleeding!" She wasn't, of course. He was. They'd somehow contrived to snag and tear his foreskin, with spectacular results. The foreskin, as any anticircumcision activist will tell you, is very well supplied with nerves and blood vessels.

"And the next time," Christine recites (and no, it wasn't the last), "we were in the woods...." Home of poison ivy, as we've seen, but that wasn't what got him. "I decided we needed to roll over, and my beloved ended up sporting two inches of twig embedded in his gluteus maximus. He screamed and cried like a baby when I tried to pull it out."

How much destruction can one well-meaning woman wreak? Just a little bit more: "The last time, I was going for my lover's hair right as he was raising his head and managed to stick my finger up his nose. Which wouldn't have been so bad except I have great fingernails. Which is nice. Until you impale the guy who is giving you head right up his left nostril."

From all of which we learn absolutely nothing, besides "Don't have sex with Christine." And also, I suppose, that no matter what anyone tells you, there's no such thing as safe sex. We can learn our lessons, we can practice, we can dip ourselves in latex and eschew battery-operated lollipops. It doesn't matter; there's no guarantee we'll never end up covered in lesions, stuck in a welded steel ring, or just so embarrassed by something we did or said that we'd happily be dead. It's sex. It requires chemistry, physics, and human interaction just to get started. How safe could it be?

Andrea Nemerson writes the Bay Guardian's alt.sex.column. E-mail her at andrea@altsexcolumn.com.