I've always taken the position that the internet is the catalyst for a major cultural shift in how we treat sexuality -- and that the shift will be toward healthier, more relaxed attitudes about the whole shebang.
And yet here we are in the middle of the "information age" and a lot of us still lack the basic knowledge we need to keep ourselves alive, much less about reaching our full potential for rich, joyful sex lives.
According to a survey published this week by FPA, the U.K.-based Family Planning Association, almost a third of British adults thought that a woman could use post-coital exercising, douching or urinating to prevent pregnancy.
Half the participants didn't know that sperm can live for a week in a vagina, and a quarter didn't know that pre-ejaculate does indeed contain sperm.
"People don't come out of school armed with a really good foundation of basic information (about sexual health)," says Rebecca Findlay, FPA spokeswoman. "They draw from a variety of sources, the media, friends, family or wherever, and because they don't have a solid foundation, the myths start coming together."
So on one hand, we have various groups on the sexual frontier, forging a world of sexual acceptance and pleasure, challenging our binary ideas of gender and relationships, and building communities where people with "alternate" tastes can come together.
On the other hand, we have smart, otherwise educated adults making elementary mistakes around sex that can have serious consequences, like unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
Anne Weyman, chief executive at FPA, says that one in five pregnancies end in abortion in the U.K.; that's about the same as in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute. I simply cannot believe that all or even most of those women prefer to terminate rather than prevent a pregnancy. So why aren't they taking precautions?
Maybe they thought they were.
It's hard to reconcile how easy it is to find good, solid information about sex -- online and elsewhere -- with how uninformed a large group of people seem to be. Part of it is that we don't know what we don't know, so we don't go looking to fill the gaps. Another is that we don't treat sex as a normal everyday activity that almost everyone will engage in at some point, and therefore worthy of continuous education.
Sex saturates our media, drives new technologies, enters the economy in creative ways and heavily influences who we choose as mates and parents of our future children. It's a basic human need. But we can't teach it with any kind of thoroughness because someone might get offended, and woe betide the teachers who stray from reproductive biology into more complex questions of relationships, gender, politics or pleasure.
"In the U.K., we have this strange relationship with sex," Findlay says. "It's everywhere, but we get embarrassed talking about it. We talk about it in moral terms or like it's something funny. We don't talk about it as a normal fact of life and just get the information so we can have an enjoyable, pleasurable sex life without the worry and without the risk. It makes it more difficult for people to act normally about sex."
Sound familiar, Americans?
We need to make this (type of information) part of everyday life," Findlay says, "so that people don't have to suddenly start finding out, when they're in a panic, what risk they've taken, if any risk at all, and what to do about it."
And yet I think one big reason adults lack basic sexual knowledge is that once we're paired up, we think we don't need it. Twenty-five years into a marriage, with three kids and a vasectomy behind you, does it matter whether you know when a woman is fertile?
But I contend that not knowing the basics, and more importantly, not knowing what we don't know, limits our potential for more fulfilling -- not to mention saner and safer -- sex lives, regardless of what kind of relationship we are in.
Certainly being out of touch with recent developments makes you a poor resource for your kids, or your friends' kids, or whoever else might come to you for help. And after 25 years together, you and your partner might be delighted to discover new developments like extra-moisturizing lube and drug-free erection enhancers ("vibrating rings").
If every individual kept up to date with the latest in sexual health, safety and pleasure, imagine the impact this will have on society as a whole. Rates of abortion and STDs would both drop; and all that great sex might result in a more relaxed population overall.
It's not like it's an onerous burden to brush up on sex. We're not talking tax law, here.
The New York Times ran a story on Valentine's Day about sex-ed classes becoming more popular, and more necessary, for seniors.
As we develop technology to help extend our sexual function to match the life span of our sexual imaginations, we're staying sexually active well into our later years. Apparently a rise in erection drug usage and testosterone supplements and a "re-awakening" of sexual interest among older women is laying the foundation for more frequent senior sex. While pregnancy is not a concern, STDs are; a lot has changed in the past 70 years.
And you can bet that the Boomers -- "We need to admit we're not babies anymore and start calling ourselves the Granny Boomers," says my mom -- are not going to give up sex before they turn 100.
Everyone has the responsibility to stay informed. Given the inconsistency of in-school sexual education, both in Britain and here in the United States, we can't trust that we've been set loose into sexual autonomy with everything we should know. And after college, sex-ed sort of falls off the table. Yet it's not like everyone gets married as virgins in their early 20s and stays together forever.
One of the arguments against school sex-ed is that sexuality and all that goes along with it -- relationships, love, health -- should be taught within each family, not by schools.
That is only going to work if the adults stay current. Because while you can find great sex information all over the internet, we are still likely to come across as much misinformation. That's the impetus behind the current push by some states (Washington, Iowa) to require sex-ed in schools to be "scientifically and medically accurate." The same goes for the sex-ed provisions in the Prevention First Act introduced to Congress by senate majority leader Harry Reid.
That we even need to legislate such a requirement reveals more ignorance of modern sexuality than anything the FPA survey revealed.
See you next Friday,
Regina Lynn
Regina Lynn is hard at work on her new book, but still welcomes your e-mails at ginalynn@gmail.com.
