For Goodness Sex (23 page)

“When you’re getting sexual with someone, keep the lights on—at least at the start,” I’ll tell them. “It’s important to see your partner’s body, both to really appreciate it and to make a quick visual inspection. You should make sure they’re as sexually healthy as you are.” In other words, you’ll be able to make an informed choice about whether or not you want to be physical with someone who may have signs or symptoms that can signal an STD. I suggest to my students that anyone who is sexually active should be tested once per year, especially if they’re sexually active with more than one person.

My students always laugh when I tell them, “The first thing my parents taught me how to do was worry, and over the years, I’ve gotten really good at it.” Sometimes I wish I could be more carefree, like my students. I love how invulnerable they think they are, even from things like STDs. I hate for you to take that feeling away from them by scaring them senseless about diseases or other negative consequences. Still, a healthy dose of reality is in order. A perfect line to deliver to your kids is: “I don’t want you to be scared of having sex—I just want you to be smart.” Kids know what you mean when you say you want them to be smart. You’re telling them you want them to make an informed decision. You’re giving them the information and the value context to make a decision, and you’re putting the ball in their court. Kids appreciate that.

“Keep the lights on,” I’ll holler out to my students as they walk out the door at the end of the period. That’s my way of keeping them smart.

Red-Faced: When You Walk In On Your Kids

Y
ou and your sweetheart get home from dinner with friends. You go upstairs to check on your sixteen-year-old. You knock, open their door, and find your child masturbating. The two of you lock eyes in terror. Red-faced and flustered, you turn around, slam the door, and run downstairs.
How will you ever look your child in the eyes again?

What’s the right way to handle a scenario like this? The above example is not that far off. I tell parents that the best way to handle walking in on their kids masturbating is to say, “Oops, I’m sorry,” close the door, and walk out. You don’t want to freak out—the conversation can happen later. Freaking out shames children into thinking that they’re doing something wrong. They’re not—they’re doing something private. I don’t think that that moment is the time for a conversation about masturbation, although when you do have that talk, make sure you let your children know that it’s a normal part of their developing sexuality. Instead, it would be good to talk about issues of privacy. “I’m sorry,” you might tell your son or daughter. “I should have waited for you to say it was OK before I opened the door.”

Walking in on your child having sex with someone else is a whole different story, and there are a couple of appropriate responses. First of all, if your child is in bed with someone you don’t know, you have every right to ask him or her to stop right then and there and get dressed—and you can wait there while it happens.

If your child tells you that it’s his or her sweetheart but you didn’t know they were dating or you never met the person, you might say, “Well, this isn’t how I expected to meet. I’d like to get to know you, but put on some clothes first.” If your child is in a relationship you know about with a person you’ve met, then the rules may change, especially if you’ve established that it’s OK to be sexual together in your home. If so, maybe you can say, “Oops, I’m sorry,” and leave, as if you walked in on your child masturbating. If you haven’t established any rules about sexual activity in your home or the behavior you come upon is violating those rules, then that’s what needs to be addressed. You can have the conversation with the couple or with your child alone. It’s important that both child and sweetheart know your rules about sexual activity in the home. Is there a family rule that says that when you’re with your sweetheart, you’re not alone in the bedroom? Once you establish a rule and they break it, then the conversation isn’t about the sexual activity. It’s about breaking the family rule.

Question Box

Q: How do disabled people have sex?

A:
One of the first things to note about this question is that it all depends on the definition of sex. If we’re using a very limited “baseball” definition of sex as vaginal intercourse, then those whose disability leaves them with no sensation in their genitals wouldn’t be able to have sex. If, however, we use a more pizza-based definition of sex that isn’t solely focused on genitals or vaginal intercourse, then people can have satisfying sexual experiences in all kinds of ways, so people’s disabilities may not affect their sexual lives at all.

The question is also difficult to answer because people can have so many different kinds of disabilities. People who are paralyzed below the waist have little or no feeling in their genitals but often find that another part of their body is especially sensitive to sexual stimulation and may receive sexual pleasure in that way. People with other kinds of physical disabilities that don’t involve paralysis or loss of feeling may experience no difference in their sexual activity when compared with someone who isn’t disabled. People with intellectual disabilities have whatever sexual activity is appropriate to their level of intellectual development.

The important thing to remember is that people with physical or mental disabilities are fully sexual human beings and enjoy pleasure, intimacy, love, and sex just like people who don’t have disabilities.

Q: Can girls really have orgasms?

A:
Absolutely!! Orgasms are a biological event that both human and nonhuman animals, male and female, can experience. An orgasm is a sudden release of muscle and nerve tension that produces a very pleasurable feeling throughout the whole body, usually starting from the genitals and radiating out to the rest of the body. When people are not having orgasms, it’s likely that they’re not receiving the kind of stimulation their bodies need to get to the point of orgasm or that they’re nervous, anxious, tense, or otherwise not able to relax into the experience and let their bodies do what they want to do. There is a myth that it is harder for a woman to achieve orgasm than it is for a man. This isn’t actually true. What is true is that knowledge of how to bring a man sexual pleasure that might lead to an orgasm is much more widespread than knowledge of how to bring a woman pleasure that might lead to an orgasm. Here we see that sexism again; we’re expected to know about men’s bodies but not about women’s.

Q: Are you a semi-virgin if you had oral sex but not intercourse?

A:
The question I have in response to your question is what’s the value of being a “semi-virgin”? As we discussed in our classes, there is no one definition for the term
virgin
. It can mean many different things to many different people. We should start by asking the question: Why is the label “virgin” important? What benefits and drawbacks come with that label? Are the benefits and drawbacks the same for men and women? We might see sexism again here, as virginity is often seen as a desirable quality in women but not in men. Why is that? Is that fair?

According to my definition of virginity (never having interacted with another person’s body in order to give and receive sexual pleasure), having oral sex means a person is not a virgin. What does your definition of virginity tell you, and why does that answer matter?

Q: What’s the average duration of sex?

A:
This is a great question but one that’s hard to answer. Often this question focuses only on the length of time vaginal intercourse takes, from when the penis is inserted into the vagina until the male ejaculates. (Notice how that definition is both heterosexist and sexist. It doesn’t include gay and lesbian couples and the endpoint is defined only by the male ejaculating; it says nothing about whether the woman has achieved orgasm or not. Here’s a great example of the baseball model at work!) A 2008 survey of Canadian and American sex therapists stated that the average time for heterosexual intercourse was seven minutes.
12
  In a global study done by the Durex Condom Company in 2004, Americans claimed to spend 19.7 minutes on foreplay prior to sex.

If we’re using the pizza model instead of the baseball model, this question becomes unimportant. Sexual activity should last until both partners feel satisfied. Each act of sexual activity wouldn’t need to be compared with the next or the last one. Why worry about how long or short the activity is if both people feel satisfied at the end of it? Remember, it’s not a competition.

BODY RATING EXERCISE

PART I—INDIVIDUAL RATINGS

Directions: Listed below are various parts of your body. Your task is to rate your satisfaction with each individual body part. You are not comparing body parts here, but are looking at each one individually and determining your satisfaction with it. Use the following scale:

1 = very dissatisfied 2 = dissatisfied 3 = neutral
4 = satisfied 5 = very satisfied

PART II—TOP/BOTTOM 5

Directions: Go back to the list in Part I. Write the five body parts that received the highest scores or with which you are most satisfied and the five body parts that received the lowest scores or with which you are least satisfied in the spaces below:

PART III—REFLECTION QUESTIONS:

Directions: After completing sections I and II, reflect on the questions below.

1) Were there body parts left off of the lists that you found yourself thinking about? Which ones? Would they get positive or negative ratings?

2) Were there body parts that you realized you don’t think about much? Why don’t you think about them?

3) What makes a body part one that gets your attention versus one that gets ignored by you?

4) What feelings were you aware of when you were completing this exercise? Did those feelings surprise you? Why or why not?

5) Overall, what did this exercise suggest about your own body image? Does that please you? Why or why not?

Chapter 8
#iloveyou: Teens, Sex, and Technology

M
y father and his family were big storytellers. When he got together with his siblings and cousins, they didn’t talk about politics or religion or current events; they talked about the past. They told stories from their childhood. They reminisced about people who had died. They relived events from years past as if they had happened just last night. My cousin Mary Ann would scoff at the adults sitting around the kitchen table with their coffee cups, their cigarettes ablaze. She referred to their nostalgic musings as “taking the Buick out of the garage for a ride.” Bear with me for a moment as I head for the garage and take my own Buick out for a brief spin.

When I was in third grade, my father called my brother and me to the dining room table for “an important talk.” We, of course, thought we were in trouble, but we weren’t. My father was sitting in his usual seat looking serious and somewhat worried. He said he wanted to show us something that we should know about but
never
touch. He took a small something down from the top shelf of the corner cupboard, far above where we could reach. As he sat back down, he held it with a reverence reserved for something in church. It was a pocket calculator, one that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide all by touching a few buttons. And that’s all it could do, by the way—no percentages or trig functions and certainly no graphing. It performed only the most rudimentary math functions—and it was the most technologically advanced device in our house. He told us that we were never to use “it” (the calculator was referred to only as “it,” as if to speak its name were to release its inner demons), especially for homework. It was an adult tool. If we used “it” to do our homework, we would never learn math properly, and that would do permanent damage to our intellectual growth. I never used “it,” never even tried to, and failed my next test on subtraction anyway.

Fast-forward to today. I use a three-tone meditation chime to begin my classes each day. As I explain its use to my students on the first day of class, they look at me as though I’m some hippie guru, but it’s just a simple way to focus. I tell them the first tone invites us to stop whatever we’re doing. The second tone invites us to take a gentle breath and clear our mind. The third tone invites us to place our focus in this present moment, to center ourselves here and now, and to commit to being here for the class block. The whole thing takes about thirty seconds, and it’s really effective when students can do it. Often, however, they’re distracted by a buzzing in their pants. No, not from our more sexual conversations . . . but from a received text, tweet, or Facebook notification.