Attention Washington: Sex education can help clueless kids like the boy I once was

Senate Bill 5395 raised quite a furor in mandating sex education in Washington public schools’ K-12 curriculum — so much so that it was referred to the November election for state voters to decide on.

A fervent movement has arisen to take education about sex out of the schools and back to where it belongs — in school yards and whispered conversations between ill-informed pre-adolescents.

My initial connection to the subject was my Boy Scout manual’s teachings on personal hygiene, which wisely advised about keeping private parts washed: “Keep it clean but don’t touch it.”

This followed the approach of Dr. Kellogg, the inventor of the eponymous Corn Flakes, who created those crunchy comestibles to avoid feeding young boys sugar in the morning and exciting their raw appetites.

My family offered little in the way of advice. My mother grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household. Her father served as rabbi in cities across North America. He and his wife provided little guidance on sexual matters, except to ensure my mother that “you can’t get pregnant the first time.”

My older brother was born nine months to the day from my parents’ wedding night.

My parents were divorced by the time I was due for “the talk.” My mother offered no advice, since she had been advised never to talk about such things.

“Just don’t get her pregnant, because then you’ll never finish high school or get into college” she advised.

Since at that point my sexual experience was confined to playing Spin the Bottle, there was little danger of my getting anyone pregnant, and by the time I was old enough to be faced with the possibility, my mother was too busy organizing her own sex life to be concerned with mine.

My father lived many states away with his second wife. When I visited him during the summer of my 13th year, he regaled me about his experiences with “loose women” while he was in the Army during World War II.

He offered me no useful information other than “make sure she’s clean” and that penicillin worked.

My brother was away at school when my parents separated, but during one of his infrequent weekends at home he tried to offer useful advice.

Using his hands, he carefully explicated the sexual act. From his description and frantic mimicking, all I gathered was that sex was a cross between Greco-Roman wrestling and petting a rabid squirrel.

At 14, with my hormones beginning to express themselves, I was thrown back on my own devices to learn what to do with various urges that shot through parts of me that had been previously quiescent.

I had run out of potential human resources. I would rather have taken castor oil than talk to my family doctor, who was ancient, morbidly obese and useful only for removing tonsils and dispensing pills.

I cannot imagine that sex education in school would have awakened my imagination any more than my befuddled state did. Actual knowledge and the notion that my urges were natural and normal might have helped.

Instead, I turned to the small shelf full of books in what had been my parents’ bedroom. I found, fortunately, a recent copy of Kinsey’s “Sexual Behavior of the Human Male,” the bible of many couples in the mid 1950s.

I avidly opened it and started reading the small print with big words, mostly with Latin roots.

Kinsey had done his pioneering research primarily in a penitentiary, with convicts living in monastic isolation although clearly not in totally celibate conditions.

What I read in the heavy tome were sexual acts that seemed undesirable and distasteful, even if anatomically possible. My Webster’s Dictionary provided little help in that prudish period, but my primitive Latin helped me figure out some of the more arcane practices Kinsey described.

I concluded that the good doctor’s research subjects were both curious and limber.

My month with Kinsey ended my formal sex education. I survived despite my surpassing ignorance and fear.

Eventually I married a young woman who explained it all in small words and kind gestures. How much less fraught my life would have been had my schools offered sex education.

Stuart Grover is a Tacoma resident and former News Tribune reader columnist. A retired fundraising consultant with a doctorate in history, he can be reached at sgrover@harbornet.com