There are some memories in life that you always carry with you, no matter how hard you try to forget them. Your first kiss, your first major boyfriend or girlfriend, the first time you boinked it.
And then there is that time, probably way back for most of us now, that our innocence was finally smashed, and we somehow realized what sex was.
For some, I’m sure it was in health class that is, if you didn’t have an older sibling or a creepy older student on your bus who fed you lies about what sex really was and what it was really all about (Note: condoms are not popsiclesticks and sucking on a girl’s boob will not make her pregnant. Thanks, bus kid.)
Going to a Catholic school from kindergarten until eighth grade, it was a little different for me. There was no older sibling to warn me of the lovely lust to come, but there was one magical device that managed to beat my dad to the totally clich ‘Birds and Bees and everything between your knees” speech.
Well, my friends, my first encounters with the until-then baffling world of human instinct was through the television.
I’ll probably remember that very moment until the day I die. It was a night just like any other, and I wasn’t expecting my eyes to see sights that would make a prostitute scream (and not in the way you slip them a five for).
I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but let’s say I was 10. My poor 10-year-old self was flipping through the channels, and fate happened for me to flip past either the
Discovery Channel, the Nature Channel or something like that.
Anyhow, my finger stopped as I saw two beetles on screen, and slowly, as the person filming narrated, the beetle on top inserted his penis into the bottom beetle’s vagina.
Now, why the hell beetle sex was on TV I’ll never know. But at that moment it all clicked, and I was no longer the little kid I was before picking up the remote.
I now had the knowledge of good and evil, I had taken a taste of the fruit, I knew how babies were made and, best of all, I finally knew what sex was.
It was not the best first memory of it, unfortunately.
Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I think everybody has had his or her sexual encounters with the television. What 14- or 15-year-old didn’t stay up late to watch ‘The Man Show” or has memories of ‘Girls Gone Wild” commercials on Comedy Central being his first introduction to the wonderful world of the naked female body?
Truth be told, a lot of sexual education happens on television. That creepy old lady with the dildo show comes to mind. I mean, I’m sorry, but nobody wants to listen to a wrinkly 90-year-old talk about her giant new sex toy getting her off. Make it a 20-year-old blonde
in a bikini, and I have a feeling ratings would improve drastically.
And then of course there is the barrage of sex we get from normal television shows or movies that, when you are little, seem tame. Try watching ‘Grease” again.
I bet you didn’t know that Grease Lightning could make girls cream their jeans when you were watching the movie 10 years ago either.
But really, for as much as television teaches us, it does get some stuff wrong. For the record, I have been in college for almost seven months now, and nowhere have I seen girls running around topless willy nilly and making out with each other as they do in,
‘Girls Gone Wild” commercials, Thanks for the boner kill. Thanks for building up the dreams of every little boy in the nation, then crushing them in one giant corporate porn-fueled lie.
And remember folks: Dildos are funny in movies, but scary in real life. Avoid them at all costs.
Clark is a member of the class of 2012.
