Demagogue

Wait--that didn't come out right.

What I meant was: It's none of your business whose hands my daughters choose to be groped by.

(This applies equally to my son, of course, but we daddies stereotypically favor our sons' getting as much *** as possible and our daughters' remaining virgins until age 40, so I thought "daughters" had more rhetorical punch).

Yet again, your tax dollars and mine are funding propaganda that is factually false--and that's not the biggest problem. The Progress Report nicely documents the ridiculous 4Parents.gov, a site funded by at least three federal departments or agencies to help parents whose teenagers like having sex (especially sex with people who have the same kind of gonads).

If I ever get around to writing a series of posts on the benefits of expatriate life, one of the installments will be about protecting my children from a society whose official institutions view sex as a necessary evil. Sure, pop culture is awash in sex, but I hardly consider Maxim a beneficial influence on children's healthy sexual development. And meanwhile, while we grownups are watching softcore porn on Skinemax, we're supposed to believe that the ideal teen is a virgin--just as we weren't when we were young. If our kids are having sex, that's a failure. Perhaps it's a widespread failure, and perhaps we can't really do much about it after a certain age, but it's something less than the desirable situation.

With so much at stake, it is more important than ever for parents to encourage their adolescents to delay sexual involvement, preferably until marriage. Abstinence is, without question, the healthiest choice for adolescents, both physically and emotionally.

To which I say: bull. I sure question it. My father the doctor, who has studied human sexuality for decades and who has regularly taught a course on the subject in medical school, damn well questions it. If by "adolescents," you mean only 12-year-olds, then sure I agree; but this website is talking about a lot more than that.

Sex is good. Sex is healthy. Sex is fun. I want my children to do things that are good, healthy, and fun. I'm not saying that sex is the best thing in life, or the most important, or the most fun. I'm not equating sex with love, let alone saying that physical pleasure can substitute for emotionally fulfilling relationships with other human beings. And I'm not saying that I think that indiscriminately f***ing every other person who comes along is a recipe for happiness. But I am saying that sex is one of the good things in life, as is music, as is math (OK, I'm a bit weird), as is literature, as is baseball.

By the way, here's what I'm not going to do if my kids turn out to be gay (well, maybe not all of it, but I'm sure not going to send them to a shrink or tell them that they've been lured into an "alternative lifestyle" because they're "impressionable").

I don't want orgasms to be a guilty pleasure for my kids. I want them to be a pleasure full stop. I want my daughters to know that good girls do. OK, not yet; the girls are only 6 1/2, and their brother just turned 4. And not that I'll necessarily be all that wild about the idea on a certain level; when the time comes, I'll probably still think of my kids as the babies they once were and not as the sweaty, heavy-breathing snogophiles they'll have become (ugh, just writing that sentence made this daddy shudder).

But the time will come, and when it does, I want my kids to know:

1. What they want;
2. That what they want is just fine;
3. That they don't have to do anything (or anyone) they don't want to; and
4. How to minimize various physical, social, and emotional risks.

I'll be damned if I'm going to let a bunch of frightened, repressed ignoramuses (ignorami?) screw that up.