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Glee and Sex Education in my High School
Favorite show that we Tivo-ed this week: Glee. This episode is called "Preggers" which is sort of self explanatory, and it does have a surprise pregnancy, but the parts of the show that made it my favorite for the week are about the other theme of the show. Curt/Kurt who is our very gay teenage boy main character gets a little too much help from one of his friends and ends up having to figure out how to really be the kicker for the football team so his dad can come to a game. It seems typical sitcom fodder, but it’s "Glee" and its never typically. I’ll try not to spoil it for you but my two favorite moments are the song/video at the beginning where the father comes in and sees his son in a unitard doing a Beyonce song, and the moment on the football field where it all comes to a hilarious and memorable end.
Spoiler Alert: If you watch Glee but haven’t seen this show, stop reading. No, really, I mean it.
Still reading? Okay, I warned you here’s the spoiler.
The preggers moment only works because our straight male student is so naive on what gets a girl pregnant that he believes he got his girlfriend pregnant from ejaculating in a hot tub. Hot tubs are hot enough that sperm would die in seconds, this doesn’t mean that sex in a hot tub won’t get you pregnant folks, because if you ejaculate inside the girl the temperature is juuuust right for making babies. Unprotected sex is a bad idea unless you want that baby moment.
But the guy believing hot tubs get you pregnant reminded me of a high school moment of my own. I was simply walking from one class to another, books in hand, when I turned the corner and came upon a knot of girls all huddled around one hysterical classmate. I might have walked on by, but one of the girls in the huddle was one of my best friends so I felt compelled to stop and find out what all the fuss was about. Turns out the hysterical girl had had that special talk with her mother the night before, but some of the facts might not have been accurate. What facts?
Seems the mother had told the hysterical girl that when a boy penetrated a girl that going in was okay, but when he withdrew his penis it would drag all of her intestines with it and gut her like a fish. (My hand to God, I am not making this up.) Apparently, the mother went to the alien school of sex education, and the daughter bought it.
My friend said, "We have a farm. It doesn’t work that way for any of our livestock."
Hysterical Girl, "My mom wouldn’t lie to me."
Hmm. None of the other girls could convince her that her mom had told such a horrible lie. Finally, it was my turn to try. I went for logic. Me, "You have a little brother, right?"
Hysterical Girl, hiccuping between sobs. "Yes."
"He’s younger than you, right?"
Hiccup. "Yes."
"Then obviously your mom did not die when your father had sex with her, because she’s got two children."
The other girls chimed in with their own siblings, most younger, some older, but in either case proof that sex did not kill you. Otherwise there’d be no younger siblings. I didn’t try and argue the whole human race would have died out if sex really worked like this, it seemed a little too esoteric for Hysterical Girl. But the younger sibling thing worked. That she had proof of because of her own younger brother. Cool.
She began to calm down and stop crying. Then she looked at me with big, doe eyes and said, "But why would my mom tell me something like that?"
No one else seemed to have a good answer, but I did. "Apparently she never wants you to have sex, ever," I said.
Calmer Hysterical Girl nods. The other girls nod, as if I’ve said a smart thing. It didn’t seem smart to me, it seemed obvious. I have to wonder what the mother was thinking, because if I hadn’t been there at that moment would her daughter have believed that pile of dog poo? Maybe, but never fear, I was there to add a dose of logic to the madness of our mothers trying to save our virginity, or in Hysterical Girls case keep herself from every becoming a grandmother. I wonder if she tried to tell her son that his penis would go in, but not come out?
This was either freshman or sophomore year of school back in the day when most of us were actually still virgins at this age and sex was theoretical. I went to the library to learn about sex. There was so much misinformation going around that I had girls who were having actual sex with actual boys come to me for advice, because I had unbiased information from the books. I can thank those girl and their horror stories of bad sex, misunderstood contraception, and boys that couldn’t wait to over share in the morning for me getting through high school as the best-educated virgin in my school. But I figured if they were coming to the bookish virgin to find out more about sex which they were already having, then I wasn’t missing much. I’ve never regretted the decision to wait, and this was the beginning of me learning how to research. When the girls were taking my advice after a disastrous Saturday night date, I wanted that advice to be right.