Modern sex ed is a failure. Abstinence is too difficult, indulgence leads to “baby accidents,” and the free condoms we hand out are full of Chinese asbestos. Yes, teen-pregnancy rates have struck historic lows, but that seems as much an index of laziness as anything else. But I leave girls to other experts; I wish to speak about the education of American boys. No other group on Earth shall be so harried in their lifetime, so it is important that the business of educating them be taken seriously. I recommend a program of lies and obfuscation — anything to avoid actually talking about sex.
Sex ed should occur in two stages: the first, less serious, when Questions are Raised; the second, more difficult, when Answers are Demanded. When boys begin to ask questions, they should be given illustrated texts on the human body, complete and replete with illustrated diseases. This will awaken their interest in the study of the human form but quell any desire for it. Further interrogation should be answered tersely. A simple “Where do babies come from?” can best be met with the equally simple “I do not know.” This is how scientists, and gentlemen, are raised.
But for those who persist in their curiosity, there must be an account. I can imagine four such cases — apologies to the haggadah — involving a wise son, a wicked son, a simple son, and a son who can’t quite find the words.
The wise son, what does he ask? “What is the meaning of the diagrams they showed me at school today?” Him you must show the Dennis Quaid movie Innerspace, telling him only that the film is a metaphor and that the Root of All Knowledge lies somewhere inside Martin Short. With any luck, he’ll believe you, and spend the next few years trying to figure out what that means — you won’t have the foggiest — and he’ll be off to college before he thinks to ask another question.
The wicked son, what does he ask? “Why did she choose you?” You must set his teeth on edge, telling him, “She picked me because I earn a ton of money. Now go get a job and stop bothering me.” That should keep him busy until he’s off your hands.
The simple son, what does he ask? “Do you pee in her bellybutton?” And you shall tell him yes.
As for the son who doesn’t know what he means to say, don’t go putting words in his mouth! If you make it any easier for him he might keep asking, and a surfeit of knowledge in these affairs never helped anyone.
Now college approaches and the time for Answers has arrived. College is a sea of sexuality, and male co-eds (let’s call them Eds), will learn nothing if not the proper relations of the sexes. (If you choose the right school, they’ll learn nothing else.) Now is the time to instill in him a great fear: At college, his will be an education in perils, so it’s best that he be suspicious of women from the start.
Where shall he turn for guidance? Should he read Rousseau’s Emile, the great work on education and the soul? Rousseau the man was a lace-making priss who liked to watch children at play from afar (alarm bells?); Rousseau the father preferred his make-believe charge Emile to his actual children, whom he abandoned. But Rousseau the philosopher is an artist, and his thoughts on the relations of the sexes are worth heeding and exploring. The trouble is, Ed won’t understand them until he’s older, so Rousseau will have to wait until at least a junior-year seminar.
STEALING OUR ESSENCE
Where then shall he look? To the ancients, as did Rousseau? His first stop should be The Epic of Gilgamesh, which predicts the snares that lie in store for him. There we meet Enkidu, wild man of the forests, Enkidu who eats grass and runs with the gazelles and knows not the society of man nor the touch of a woman. But Enkidu is seduced by a harlot, and when he tries to return to the company of beasts, they flee from him, for he is changed. “Enkidu would have followed, but his body was bound as though with a cord, his knees gave way when he started to run, his swiftness was gone. . . . Enkidu was grown weak, for wisdom was in him, and the thoughts of a man were in his heart.”
Plucked from his idyll and thrust upon women, Enkidu is no longer innocent of mankind. Where once he was full of vigor, now he is sapped and reduced. What pastoral poetry he might have composed in his forests are forever lost. He would have been right to fear that harlot, and the first chapter of The Epic of Gilgamesh will hopefully impress upon our student a reasonable terror of women.
A proper vision of this sensible paranoia appears in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, in the form of Sterling Hayden’s Gen. Jack D. Ripper. General Ripper has known submission and subduction like Enkidu, and he’s not afraid to tell Peter Sellers’s Colonel Mandrake about it. “I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love. . . . Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women, er, women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake . . . but I do deny them my essence.”
Loss of Essence — here is the key. Need proof that it’s true? My alma mater, Kenyon College, once put out the nation’s leading literary journal, The Kenyon Review. In 1969, women were admitted to Kenyon for the first time, and in 1969, The Kenyon Review ceased publication. The thoughts of men now in our hearts, our poems dried up, our artistic reserves emptied. It took years to recover, and publication resumed only after a decade, yet forever subdued.
RECESSIVE KNEE
But what is to be done now that women are on campus and desirous of attention? A college boy must look again to the Ancients, this time to Thurber and White’s landmark Is Sex Necessary?, published in 1929. It is here, and not in Martin Short, where he will find what he’s looking for. Thurber and White discovered a phenomenon, the knowledge of which is like a second gift from Prometheus — the Recessive Knee. To wit: “Occasions arise sometimes when a girl presses her knee, ever so gently, against the knee of the young man she is out with. . . . In restaurants and dining-rooms it often takes place under the table, as though by accident. . . . It is not a hard push, you understand — rather the merest touch of knee to knee, light as the brush of a falling blossom against one’s cheek, and just as lovely.”
Every man has known this merest touch and the crippling doubt that accompanies it. Eighty years have passed; little has changed. Few men have the courage to answer that tempting volley, and instead withdraw their knees in fear, apprehension, and a distrust of subtlety. But there should be no doubt — it is always intentional; it is always inviting; the parley must be met. A man needs no more advice than this — to fear women, to love them, to accede to their demands. The rest is details, and far too clumsy for words.
– Joseph Abrams is an associate editor of National Review.