LAID: Sex Ed, Overshare-Style

I was fortunate in my sexual discovery: I never contracted any sort of disease and while not every encounter resulted in dynamite sex, I never found myself in a threatening situation.

I like to think this has to do with the fact that I am fairly intuitive and committed to my personal health, but we all know there is a fair share of luck in there, too. Accidents happen. People are misread. You have too many drinks. Condoms break. The list is endless and it doesn’t just involve your physical health. Rape is a mental and emotional trauma. Even consensual sex carries with it a danger of emotional damage.

These are all issues addressed in Laid: Young People’s Experiences With Sex In An Easy Access Culture, edited by Shannon T. Boodram. What initially looks like a collection of sexy coming-of-age tales is actually a sex-ed Trojan horse.

I’ll confess something—at first, I was put off by the book. Chapter one made mention of “wasted” virginities too often for my taste. I am a staunch opponent of the idea that the first time is a sacred time and everything else is meaningless or somehow defined by it. To me, that’s a poisonous construct. Every sexual experience should be viewed as an opportunity to reach for the divine.

But as I read on the collection of accounts of sexual encounters I saw the book for what it is: a collection of different experiences and personal truths. Every chapter deals with a different aspect of sex. Yes, there are accounts that bemoan a lost gift, but there are many that celebrate responsible sexual freedom, too. And there are also accounts about consequences of sex (from abortions to HIV); accounts about rape; and tales of those who made the choice to abstain.

This book is a complete collection of sexual experiences, told in the voices of many people, men and women, across North America. It’s not a textbook, filled with clinical language, or a philosophical call-to-arms, heavy on the agenda.

It’s like sitting with a group of friends and letting them tell you what they went through. Oversharing, as the kids say nowadays.

Read the whole review at BlogHer.

Brace Yourself For Some Bad Sex

This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement – the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze.

Phillip Roth, The Humbling

For the past 17 years, the Literary Review magazine awards authors for “rude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.”

Unsurprisingly, Philip Roth’s totem threesome has landed him on the shortlist this year–but he’s in good company.

Nick Cave made the list with his The Death of Bunny Munro, about a nymphomaniacal door-to-door salesman (“He is naked and his clothes sit in sad, little heaps on the living room floor.”). Sanjida O’Connell, the only woman to make it, was chosen for The Naked Name of Love, about a young Jesuit priest who learns to love with a mystical shaman woman in the steppes of Mongolia (“Her skin was smooth and she felt sleekly muscled, like a dolphin might…”). Simon Van Booy’s collection of little love stories Love Begins in Winter, offered this gem: “After, we kept very still, like the only two roots of the forest.” Acclaimed Israeli novelist Amos Oz joined the list with Rhyming Life and Death: “He feels the ripples in her skin, as though he has been transformed into a delicate seismograph that intercepts and instantly deciphers her body’s reactions.”

Here’s the shortlist:

John Banville for The Infinities
Nick Cave for The Death of Bunny Munro
Jonathan Littell for The Kindly Ones
Richard Milward for Ten Storey Love Song
Sanjida O’Connell for The Naked Name of Love
Amos Oz for Rhyming Life and Death
Anthony Quinn for The Rescue Man
Philip Roth for The Humbling
Paul Theroux for A Dead Hand
Simon Van Booy for Love Begins in Winter

Image via The Stranger. Information via The Guardian UK.

Good Morning Class, Today We’ll Read About Savage Masturbation

Top: illustration for Chuck Palahniuk's Guts. Bottom: teacher Greg Van Voorhis.

A young teacher in New York is in trouble for assigning an incredibly graphic short story by Chuck Palahniuk about masturbation and consequences.

True to form, the media is thrilled with the prospect of putting the word MASTURBATION and its variations in huge font across its pages, and hasn’t taken a lot of time to ask 30-year-old Greg Van Voorhis why he selected this story for his class.

We’ll have to tweet him about it.

I read “Guts” when it ran in Playboy a handful of years ago. I will be completely honest with you: it fucked me up. I will never forget that story–because of the use of language, the social comment it makes, and how well it functions as a sort of cautionary tale.

I read much weirder in high school, but I went to those progressive sorts of schools that let you make your own curricula and develop at your own weird little speed, so I don’t know that my experience is good comparison, but I do not think it is any heavier than 1984, A Clockwork Orange, The Catcher in the Rye or even Sons and Lovers.

Now, would I assign this to juniors if I was a high school teacher? Probably not without discussing with parents. Although at the same time, regardless of whether this is a desperate attempt to fameball on Voorhis’ part, the entire circus has brought attention to the literature syllabus and that’s important.

It does bear mentioning, after all, that Voorhis students’ reportedly perform better than others (96 percent of test-takers passed the English Regents with a 65 or above last year, compared to 68.6 percent at other schools in the city)–is it possible the renegade teacher is on to something?

OK, fine, enough about education, you pervs, here’s your snippet from this SHOCKING! STORY! ABOUT! MASTURBATION!:

This must be why girls want to sit on your face. The suction is like taking a dump that never ends. My dick hard and getting my butt eaten out, I do not need air. My heartbeat in my ears, I stay under until bright stars of light start worming around in my eyes. My legs straight out, the back of each knee rubbed raw against the concrete bottom. My toes are turning blue, my toes and fingers wrinkled from being so long in the water.

And then I let it happen. The big white gobs start spouting. The pearls.

It’s then I need some air. But when I go to kick off against the bottom, I can’t. I can’t get my feet under me. My ass is stuck.

Emergency paramedics will tell you that every year about 150 people get stuck this way, sucked by a circulation pump. Get your long hair caught, or your ass, and you’re going to drown. Every year, tons of people do. Most of them in Florida.

I know it’s a lot to ask, as you can hardly read a tweet completely, but given you’ve gotten this far, go read Guts by Chuck Palahniuk in its entirety.

Also, if you feel strongly about supporting Voorhis, you can join Save Mr. V on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, where he’s @Gvdubs.

Image from The New York Post and The Cult, information via Gothamist.

Surprise! Teens Have Sex!

Cory Doctorow’s young adult novel Little Brother is the tale of a 17-year-old who leads a guerilla army of teens against an oppressive U.S. government. Doctorow was surprised to receive critique from parents not because of the rioting and torture described in the book, but because the main character loses his virginity during the course of the story and at another point, has a beer.

An excerpt of his essay Teen Sex follows:

First, because teenagers have sex and drink beer, and most of the time the worst thing that results from this is a few days of social awkwardness and a hangover, respectively. When I was a teenager, I drank sometimes. I had sex sometimes. I disobeyed authority figures sometimes.

Mostly, it was OK. Sometimes it was bad. Sometimes it was wonderful. Once or twice, it was terrible. And it was thus for everyone I knew. Teenagers take risks, even stupid risks, at times. But the chance on any given night that sneaking a beer will destroy your life is damned slim. Art isn’t exactly like life, and science fiction asks the reader to accept the impossible, but unless your book is about a universe in which disapproving parents have cooked the physics so that every act of disobedience leads swiftly to destruction, it won’t be very credible. The pathos that parents would like to see here become bathos: mawkish and trivial, heavy-handed, and preachy.

Second, because it is good art. Artists have included sex and sexual content in their general-audience material since cave-painting days. There’s a reason the Vatican and the Louvre are full of nudes. Sex is part of what it means to be human, so art has sex in it.

Sex in YA stories usually comes naturally, as the literal climax of a coming-of-age story in which the adolescent characters have undertaken a series of leaps of faiths, doing consequential things (lying, telling the truth, being noble, subverting authority, etc.) for the first time, never knowing, really knowing, what the outcome will be. These figurative losses of virginity are one of the major themes of YA novels — and one of the major themes of adolescence — so it’s artistically satisfying for the figurative to become literal in the course of the book. This is a common literary and artistic technique, and it’s very effective.

… Adolescents think about sex. All the time. Many of them have sex. Many of them experiment with sex. I don’t believe that a fictional depiction of two young people who are in love and have sex is likely to impart any new knowledge to most teens — that is, the vast majority of teenagers are apt to be familiar with the existence of sexual liaisons between 17-year-olds.

Should sex be a part of young adult literature?

Information via Locus Online.