Astonishing Fact: Sex Typically for Pleasure!

Dan Savage reviews a piece that points out that when children are told about sex, the pleasurable aspects are typically left out. Of course, teachers aren't really comfortable with talking about pleasure, as Alice Dreger, a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, wrote on her blog (which was later picked up on Pacific Standard).

Professor Dreger's piece is a must-read, but way of introduction, I want to quote Savage:

One day my then-eight-year-old son came into the kitchen and jumped up on the counter. He narrowed his eyes and gave me a strange look.

"Two men can't make a baby," D.J. finally said.
That's true, I told him, two men can't make a baby.

"Then you and daddy have sex for no reason," he said.

Dreger has a nine-year old son, whose class has just begun sex education. Some of it clearly isn't going very well.

So the morning of sex ed, I found myself wondering whether they were going to mention pleasure. Or would it be all about disease and pregnancy, all gloom and doom?

As it turned out, I’m not even sure they mentioned sex at all. Over bagels the Saturday morning following sex ed day, I started my inquiry by asking our son what he learned about HIV. “It’s an inherited disease,” he told me. “You get it from your mother.”

I'm a gay man without children, so maybe this is none of my business, but it seems we need some sex education for parents and teachers.

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