Dave Pollard: “no where in school sex education programs are students told that all healthy sexual activity is fun. This seems to me an absurd, Victorian omission. This is an important message. It's a fact, not a moral judgement. Not only would this message make it easier to teach the subject, it would go a long way to erasing many of the stigmas and guilt feelings that impede healthy sexual development.”
This reminds me of something I wrote in university back in 2000—before I knew what a weblog was—that may potentially disqualify me from holding any high-level elected office. I'll quote a bit of it here: "sex is treated by our education system as sterile. It focuses on where the different reproductive organs are, how a baby is created and where the pieces, so to speak, fit. Let's not forget the Learning Channel episodes on how sex works. Interesting enough, but not once in high school did we learn how to get laid. We are supposed to figure that out by ourselves." Dave Pollard is saying something similar, but he is more interested in teaching that sex is a pleasurable, exciting and as he also emphasizes, fun.
Jeremy Lott: “MTV Books published Marty Beckerman's raunchy anti-sex book Generation S.L.U.T. (when I interviewed him for a story that never quite came together, Beckerman rejected that characterization, though I doubt people who read the book will disagree with me) ”
I've read the book, and is against the type of sex that is anonymous and unfulfilling—or "cheap and tawdry" to use a phrase that those who follow current events would recognize—as well of the type of sex that happens around page 163 or so. (It was Beckerman himself who "warned" me about that part when I emailed him to let him know I had started reading it.) It does not comment much on lazy, easy, fun sex with many different, enthusiastic partners, so to claim that it is anti-sex is only half true. It is anti-unhealthy-sex, and as Pollard notes, finding the balance is hard, but responding to the negative so extremely, by teaching what sex is and then telling kids not to do it, just reinforces the negative. Outlaw something fun and only the outlaws will have fun.
