Bully Pulpit: Anatomy


I’m going to go out on a limb and tell you everything I know about sex in 500 words.

I’m convinced that little boys and little girls have sexual feelings when they are quite young. My first girlfriend and I shared juicy kisses when we were barely 5 years old, which led to regular meetings in her basement, where we played doctor nonstop for hours.

I can’t recall ever being instructed in how to play doctor. We must be born with these basic medical instincts. My companion and I re-invented the concept of practicing medicine whenever we snuck off to the basement for Anatomy 101. It was only a year later that we secluded ourselves in a bathroom for our first totally nude show-and-tell. I showed and she told.

Fast forward to the fourth grade. I remember a small girl the boys called “Sooty.” She was dirty and unclean from head to toe — and there was little doubt that this quality came from deep within her. Everything she did, said or thought was somehow seen as evidence of her wantonness. Rumors flew like mosquitoes over a hot swamp, and a handful of boys distinguished themselves as imaginative liars. Gullible as I was, I believed them, convinced I was the only virgin in the fourth grade.

In the sixth grade, certain girls started sprouting chest bumps, but they seemed to be misplaced, usually riding suspiciously high. Certain boys also started sprouting bumps lower down, which by seventh and eighth grade became problematical when the teacher called us to the front of the classroom for blackboard exercises.

My older brother, Mike, a senior in high school, told me about the birds and the bees about this time. We shared a bedroom, and late night conversation about sex felt like cramming for a final exam. Mike was a master at reducing female anatomy to its simplest terms: “There’s a good hole and a bad hole,” he said one night. “Stay away from the bad hole.”

About a year later, when I was a freshman in high school, my brother found the good hole, but somehow it seemed bad. His girlfriend got pregnant, which ruined the plans my parents had made for him. My mother pulled me aside and told me if I planned on following in my brother’s footsteps she would cut off my balls and lock me in the closet.

I was confused. If this was the outcome of finding the good hole, God forbid that anyone should stumble into the bad one.

Terrified, I played it safe in high school, dutifully participated in sports, studied nights at home — and had no fun. By the time I went away to college, I no longer wanted to be a good boy, so I enrolled in Obsessive Tracking of Female Bipeds. At 20, in between my sophomore and junior years, I became paralyzed — but there was no sexual curriculum for that.

I can honestly say that paralysis gradually freed me from obsessive preoccupation with sex and set me on a course of learning how to truly enjoy it, and more importantly, her — all of her.

Now I know: The secret to successful sex is to focus on the whole, not the hole.


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