Coyote, chasing each other around the byways of biology. The seeds have tails but not top hats and swim. The eggs are round and go on a fantastic voyage once a month. All this and more have been elicited over years of incremental kid information gathering, culminating one day in the middle of rush-hour traffic, natch, in the question of how the seed and the egg wind up in the same place at the same time.
Because my sons look upon my person the way I looked upon a transparent plastic model called The Visible Woman when I was a kid, they have asked many incisive questions about human reproduction, often in crowded trains while commuters strained for my explanation as though we were all in an E. Hutton ad. After their sister was born, they stared at her on the changing table as though they were at the drive-in and she was the screen. Sex education is good.
So we are educating about sex. I worry that in explaining sex technically, we fail to capture its essential humanity, even its sexiness.
The parents of adolescents grimace at this. That last part, they say, the kids figure out for themselves. Well, yes and no. I sat recently with a group of young women in their 20s and was struck by the difference between how they saw their sex lives and how my friends had seen theirs 15 years ago. The difference was fear. The younger women were looking for Mr. Right and Mr. Wrong at the same time. These women did not invent the nexus of sex and fear. Somewhere between now and then were those of us who grew up after the pill but before AIDS was a household acronym.
The time was called the sexual revolution, which overstated the case. But in retrospect it does seem revolutionary, this freedom from fear, this freedom to make a mistake and not pay for it with your life, one way or the other.
