Sex Education
In the fifth grade at Saint Joseph Catholic School, we had our first sex education class. My mother had already given me a book about adolescence, telling me she’d never been able to talk about that stuff when she was my age. She said I was lucky because it was good to know what was happening to my body.
The book explained things, but not quite enough. I knew I could always ask my mom or even my dad for more information, but I hoped the teacher would present things in a frank, objective way that would clarify our questions once and for all. This was the age of science and reason, after all. We were encouraged to understand the workings of nature in the rational terms provided by results from all the most recent studies. Gone were the mysteries that had plagued generations before us with fear, superstition and doubt…
The teacher explained how hormones and sperm were produced. How eggs dropped down into women’s ovaries. When the sperm made contact with the egg, a baby was formed. The word “abstract” probably hadn’t yet entered my vocabulary, but this was among my first examples of its definition.
After class, I asked the other kids: “So, how does the sperm get with the egg?”
They tried to be cool, but they didn’t know any better than me. I think someone said, “It just falls in…”
I asked Ms. G.: “We were kind of wondering. Well, we know how the sperm cells get made and how the egg comes down, but what we were wondering about was how exactly it is that they end up coming together…”
“Well, out of a great love for the woman, the man places his sexual organ inside the sexual organ of the woman where the sperm is released to form the baby.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
Apparently the action of reproduction was so horrible and frightening for the man that he could only do it out of this “great love” for the woman whom God had chosen for him as one chooses an appliance. And placing the sexual organ inside hers must have been, for her, like getting a rectal thermometer. They endured this uncomfortable experience because God had asked them (called them) to do so in the name of their “great love.”
What exactly her sexual organ looked like was still a bit vague. Did she pee out of hers too? Didn’t that make her eggs fall out? At any rate, the real mystery of sex was solved. It was all about the placement of the penis into the vagina. That must have been the embarrassing thing that my mothers’ and fathers’ parents hadn’t been able to talk about. No big deal. Sex was a closed subject. It would happen when I got married one day and when God told me I was ready to suffer through the experience with my wife. Unless, of course I was one of those whom God had chosen for another vocation…