Time for Some Sex Education

W. Bruce Cameron

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2007.

By the time I became a fifth-grader, I’d heard enough about sex to know it was something I never wanted to do.

This didn’t mean I didn’t desire a girlfriend — what did sex have to do with something like that? I was desperately in love with a girl named Susie, who played ponies during recess with a herd of other skipping, neighing fifth-graders. I was so berserk with longing I even tried to be a stallion once, much to the derision of my buddies, who were playing apes on the jungle gym.

The girls dissolved into helpless giggles — apparently, whatever I looked like as I gamely whinnied and galloped, it wasn’t a horse. Susie seemed disgusted, so I retreated to the monkey bars and threw a mud clod at Brad Smith. The brown stain on Brad’s T-shirt made me feel a lot better, and everyone thought it looked cool, like a bullet wound or maybe a grenade explosion, so even Brad was grateful.

Then one day, it was announced that the boys and girls would be separated and taught “sex education,” which we decided, in a hastily assembled meeting of the apes, meant we would learn all about women — enough, I thought to myself, to get a girlfriend!

Most of the first few days of class were not about girls, but about ourselves, which was pretty boring. We learned that things called “hormones,” which I thought was probably just another name for “cooties,” were infecting us somehow, and that when we got around girls, it made our hormones mad.

We learned that our sweat was stinky, which we already knew because Brad was so proud of his mud-wound T-shirt he hadn’t worn anything else for two weeks. We learned that girls mature much faster than boys, which maybe explained why they were so much better at being horses.

None of this was very helpful, but I got excited when the teacher passed out photographs of flowers — giving girls flowers, I’d heard of this! I figured we’d learn which brand of flower would make a girl quit scampering around making horse noises and pay some attention to the boy who was the obvious choice for her one true love.

No such luck.

We learned about “pistils” and “stamens,” which seemed bewilderingly irrelevant to our current situation. Meanwhile, at recess the girls seemed really smug — what were they learning? The horse game had stopped, the girls electing to sit together in tight groups and whisper conspiracies about sex education, clamming up whenever the boys left the ape house and wandered over to see what the heck was going on. At lunch, I looked over at the girl table, and Susie shot me a glance that was dark and mysterious. What were those teachers saying about us?

Our own instructor seemed blithely unaware of how much ground we were losing, so I took things into my own hands and, during a description of how amoebas divide themselves into two separate beings (something else I was never going to do!), I held up my hand and asked whether it was a good idea to give a girl chocolates.

Everyone seemed to think this was hilarious, but I noticed they all turned pretty eagerly to hear the answer when the teacher cleared his throat. “Sometimes,” he finally allowed.

What followed next was a torrent of questions that revealed that we boys were united in pure perplexity. We wanted to know why girls would seem to like us one day and then not talk to us the next — was it their hormones? How do you get a girlfriend, and what did that even mean? Brad Smith confessed that his next-door neighbor had kissed him on the arm once, and that it made him sick to his stomach but he kind of wished she would do it again. When would the stupid horse game end? What was wrong with Susie?

The school apparently decided the boys weren’t ready for any more sex education, because the lessons ended abruptly after that day. I never did learn how to get a girlfriend.

In fact, even today, I remain in a state of pure perplexity.

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com. To find out more about Bruce Cameron and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at http://www.creators.com.

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