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children's primary sexual teachers. Here is a "family value" the mainstream sex-ed establishment can get behind, something no one, least of all their conservative antagonists, can disagree with. But a seemingly harmless, parent-friendly idea is likely to have a less than child-friendly effect. I can't help suspecting that the adversaries of school-based sexuality education have been gleefully aware of what would happen if the task of sexual enlightenment were relegated entirely to families: almost nobody would do it.

Polls bear out that suspicion. Parents talk the talk: most agree that sex ed is their job. But when it comes to talking the sex talk, few can bring themselves to do it. Among the 1,001 parents surveyed in 1998 by the National Communication Association, sex was the subject they felt "least comfortable talking about" with their children. Kids reveal similar discomfort and often evaluate their parents' efforts less generously than their moms and dads might hope. 

"The pattern that stands out first is the difference in parental and teen perceptions" of at-home sex talks, wrote the sociologist Janet Kahn in 1994. When she interviewed both generations of the same families, the kids consistently remembered talking about fewer topics than their parents did. ^[*2]  

The 1998 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health found that more than half of teens believed their parents understood them pretty well. The bad news was that almost half thought Mom and Dad got it only somewhat or hardly at all. The same survey discovered that nearly 85 percent of mothers disapproved of their teens having sexual intercourse and had communicated this value to their sons and daughters. ^[*3]  Under the circumstances, not every mom makes the perfectly askable confidante for asexually active young person.

Even sexually "progressive" parents aren't problem-free. In the late 1960s, when my mother started suggesting I get a diaphragm, I did not quite need a diaphragm. But rather than explain to her that while I was sleeping with my boyfriend, I was still a "technical virgin," I instructed her in full-decibel fury to mind her own bleeping business. Laudable protective parental instincts notwithstanding, an intimate consensual sexual relationship, including one between . minors, is private business.

Children absorb from their families attitudes toward love, the body, authority, and equality; they are trained in tolerance and kindness or their opposite at home. A few live in families comfortable enough to discuss the nitty-gritty details of sex. But the vast 

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they started proliferating in cyberspace, where kids are wont to read anyway. The cheap and wide-open World Wide Web began to offer a bounty of witty, hip, pleasure-positive, credible, comforting, user-friendly sites on sexuality for kids and by kids, as well as those not specifically targeted to youngsters but useful to anyone engaging in sex or contemplating it. 

(In fact, at this writing the two best recent sex-ed books are compilations of the contents of Web sites: The "Go Ask Alice" Book of Answers, from the Columbia University Web site of the same name, and Deal with It! from gURL.com.)

Yes, any twelve-year-old with a jot of computer literacy can quickly click to a postage-size photo of a man in scuba gear forcing a female amputee to have anal intercourse with a sea cucumber (well, the sea cucumber is blacked out unless you type in your credit card number). "Boy, I go on the Web and I'm seeing stuff that makes me feel Amish!" exclaimed a member of a group of not exactly prudish propagandists called the Safer Sex Sluts. But in his job as a freelance sex educator, this man, Rob Yaeger, encourages kids to search out all the sexual information they can find. And he knows they can find it, up-to-date and uncensored, on the Web.

Because Web sites are here today and gone tomorrow, the designation of any sort of a sex-educational cyber-canon is impossible. Instead, I'll name names of sites extant at this writing as exemplars of what a good resource should be.

Detailed, Playful, Egalitarian 

Go Ask Alice, Columbia University's sex and health information site staffed by a half dozen writers in occasional consultation with the university hospital's doctors, answers hundreds of questions a day from nervous first kissers and unsure bisexuals, HIV-positive teens and those wishing to avoid becoming so, virgins and pre-orgasmic lovers in more than fifty countries. ^[*6] 

"I am 16 years old and I have never been kissed and I have so many questions about it, but I am very nervous about it because I think I am really going to mess up," writes Freaked Out About First Kiss. 
"What is the common age for a girl to be kissed? When you kiss someone, do you both move your tongue at the same time? And where do you move your tongue? God this is driving me crazy. And since I have never kissed anyone, I am afraid to go out with a guy because what if he freaks out when I tell him that I have never been kissed, and, if he tells a whole bunch of people, I would feel so stupid.  

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respect them. Sex is enjoyable when everyone involved is into it, and when everyone has the information they need to take care of themselves and each other.

Even while they espouse such wide-open values, many of the sex sites post warnings that their discussions might occasionally be "graphic" {this may be to mollify fretting moms and dads or zealous politicians or federal agents). What this means is that the information is detailed enough to be useful to someone who actually intends to use it. 

So, unlike abstinence-plus educators, who might teach condom application using the ever-firm banana, or the abstinence-only educators, whose goal is to make the condom sound so icky and unreliable that students will reject the whole ordeal of penetration, the designers of safe-sex pages proceed as if the condom is going to be rolled onto a penis, which is then going to be inserted into a bodily orifice of another person. 

These sites universally discuss a crucial, and too often neglected, component of condom use: lubricant, which renders the latex prophylactic more pleasurable in sensation and less likely to tear. On Just Say Yes's site, an animated limp penis stands up to receive its rubber hat, applied by someone else's hands, then goes limp and starts allover again, endlessly. "Get it on," the text advises, noting the other vital detail that the penis has to be erect before the condom goes on it. The organ, by the way, is healthy-looking but not intimidatingly large.

Youthful, Compassionate 

Equally important in the interactive universe of the Web are the kid-to-kid chats and personal stories featured on many sites. On gayplace.com, a site maintained by the SAFETeen Project for GLBTQ (that's gay, lesbian, bi, transgendered, and "questioning") youth, ^[*8] "Jason -- A Story of Love, Determination, Hope, and Death," tells the autobiographical (and possibly embroidered) tale of a fourteen-year-old, "innocent, young, [Mormon] boy ... struggling to understand myself and my sexuality," who falls in love with Jason, a twelve-year-old in his Boy Scout troop. After some months their 

"relationship bloomed into a powerful bond of love. We became one in spirit, soul, and often enough, body." 

Kicked out of his house, Jason runs away, becomes a porn actor, and eventually kills himself. A melodrama, perhaps, but judging from the number of similar stories online, a direct arrow to the hearts of isolated gay and lesbian kids.

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worrying about pregnancy, STDs, or even, for the most part, emotional involvement. If the action gets too hot, she can politely absent herself or delete an overanxious suitor.

The same anonymity that gives cybersex its fluidity and safety also lubricates the dissemination of sexual information. The namelessness of its correspondents, usually flagged as the Web's inherent peril, shelters youngsters from the mortification of appearing klutzy or uncool, slutty or prudish. Questions that are virtually unaskable in person are easily asked virtually. 

One boy queries Alice about the etiquette of oral sex, specifically, whether to come in his girlfriend's mouth and how to talk about it. The correspondent closes his letter, "I realize this question may sound rather juvenile, but who else can I turn to?" Alice's answer: Discuss it beforehand. Then, when the big moment arrives, say, "Where would you like me to cum-in your mouth, or somewhere else? ... I'll tell you when I'm about to go ... or I'll bark ... or something." Alice congratulates the writer for his maturity in being so considerate of his partner.

And then there are the postings whose responses might save a young person from more than embarrassment. 

On the Web, the lonely can get fast companionship; the clueless, compassionate, non-moralistic support and crucial practical help. At best, a kid in need can find a community of kindred souls struggling with a marginalized sexual identity, with violence or date rape, hostile parents or depression -- and then bookmark it for the next time.

Plentiful, Accessible 

Many adults would argue that there's too much sexually explicit material on the Web, in the form of pornography. Doubtless, there's lots. Will it hurt kids who look at it? I asked the constitutional lawyer and writer Marjory Heins, who has probably reviewed the literature on this subject more thoroughly than anyone else in the United States. Her response (replete with lawyerly and scholarly qualifiers): 

"As far as I'm aware, there's very little psychological research on the effects of viewing pornography on children at all. And to the extent one can even talk about scientific proof in social science research, it's my opinion that it has not been proved that 

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percent of those making less than fifteen thousand dollars and 21 percent between fifteen thousand and twenty-five thousand did. ^[*11]

Government and privately funded efforts to provide Internet access to schools and libraries in poor neighborhoods may do little for sex education anyhow. For, under community and political pressure, many of those institutions have installed filtering software, and Congress has required it on every publicly owned computer accessed by minors. ^[*12]  Such filters, as we saw in chapter 1, block the very information that might forestall a pregnancy or HIV infection or help a kid extricate herself from an abusive relationship. To get the facts, kids need freedom.

Truthful Fictions 

Another thing Freud observed was that when factual information is unavailable or improbable, the child's sexual impulse turns to the invention of explanatory "theories." Child sexuality, commented Adam Phillips, "partly took the form of a hunger for coherent narrative, the satisfying fiction." ^[*13] 

Such narratives are more than stand-ins for the truth. Because so much of sexuality resides in the interstices between the body and what can be said about it in a textbook, these inventions are also the truth. Children need two kinds of information: the "facts" and the truthful "fictions," the stories and fantasies that carry the meanings of love, romance, and desire.

The purpose of this book is not to exegize sexuality in commercial culture at the turn of the twenty-first century. Suffice it to say, images of the erotic are myriad and complex enough to allow critics to decry the dearth of sexual "realism" and, simultaneously, the surfeit of explicitness in prime-time TV and Hollywood, including such teen-steam dramas as Dawson's Creek, Burry the Vampire Slayer, and Felicity. 

Television sex, it is true, is "unrealistic" in one way: nobody is fat or disabled or even pimply (even old people are beautiful), nobody pulls out a condom in the heat of passion -- and the passion is almost always heated. On the other hand, the young people on these programs are engaging in "realistic" sex practically full-time, including awkward kisses, pauses to ask for permission (on Felicity), unwanted pregnancies, and, needless to say, betrayals, heartbreaks, and post-sex post-mortems at regular intervals.

Yet, notwithstanding the prodigious quantity of sexual jokes and stories, the quality of the product is drudgingly uniform --

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description of Madame Bovary's trysts may be obscure to many teenage readers. But never mind. They can gorge themselves on the anticipation and frustration, jealousy and deceit, the despair and ecstasy of forbidden love (not to mention the clothes}, as good as anything on As the World Turns.

The language of the erotic, like the erotic itself, can be subtle or rough. 

"When the writer doesn't hit the nail on the head with full-frontal language, it sends the reader back into herself to discover similar complexities," 

commented the poet and teacher Barry Wallenstein. He recommends, for its veiled sexuality, Elizabeth Bishop's poetry. 

Chuck Wachtel, a novelist and writing teacher, extolled full-frontal language, which he calls the "ordinary, domestic language of eroticism," such as the bawdy jokes and songs of his Italian Jewish working-class childhood, which ring through his own fiction. In the classroom, Wachtel says, he is constantly reminded of the evergreen capacity of erotic art "to acquaint ourselves with ourselves," no doubt the endless appeal of Romeo and Juliet in its many incarnations.

Concerns about exposing kids to sexual materials before they are "ready" were dispelled for me when I watched the firecracker of a poet and impresario Bob Holman teaching a Sappho fragment about erotic jealousy to a group of sixth- and seventh-graders at a middle school literary festival. The kids got it-got the extravagant disarray of emotion distilled into a few bracing lines -- enough to craft their own imitative verses. 

And for youngsters who aren't up to the challenge of "adult" literature, the late 1990s produced a few rare works for young people that explore the nuances of love and sexuality with power, humor, and style. One outstanding author is the hippie surrealist Francesca Lia Block, whose eponymous heroine Weetzie Bat describes with the kind of florid verbosity that many young readers seem to appreciate: 

"A kiss about apple pie a la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate when you haven't eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the Strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs." ^[*15] 

Visual art opens the door equally wide, if not wider, to the feelings and mysteries of sexuality. Pictures can be literally erotic, with bodies in sensual or religious ecstasy or pain. But they don't need to

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be figurative to move sense and sensuality. 

When Vanalyne Green, a child from a working-class home, saw and made her first paintings, it was a revelation. " Art gave me a language for things I couldn't feel other ways," including sexual things, said Green, now an award-winning video artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, whose work often explores sexuality. 

Ann Agee, a ceramic artist in her forties, described with perfect visual recall a dress of her mother's that hung in a garment bag in the attic. "It was a gorgeous turquoise and green, a watery pattern, silky," she told me. At the age of four or five, 

"I used to go up and unzip the bag and look at the dress and touch it and smell it. It was beautiful and special and secret. I didn't have the language for this yet, but I think that was when I first knew what sex was."

These are seminal developmental experiences. Yet as schools have turned utilitarian, organizing their curricula to produce the high-paid computer scientists of tomorrow, the arts and humanities are being shoved off the program. 

And when religious zealots search the public libraries like mine-sweepers for every breast and screw, every scene of masturbation or sex without retribution, and replace them with their dry sermons on abstinence, they do not deprive children of erotic information. Instead, they abandon the younger generation to a broad but shallow slice of sexual imagery -- to the Hollywood hokum of puppy love and rape, the soulless seductions of the sitcom, and the one-size-fits-none spandex beauty of MTV. It makes sense to offer an alternative.

Does reading Jane Austen reduce teen pregnancy? Or increase orgasmic capacity? One reviewer of these pages worried that this chapter is too anecdotal, that I don't make a strong enough case for the sex-educational value of literature and art. 

Apparently studies show that listening to Mozart makes kids better at math, which presumably helps them become those future techno-millionaires (maybe I'm a statistical outlier, but I listened to Mozart as a kid and I'm terrible at math). So perhaps research exists; I confess, I didn't look for it. The point of this chapter is somewhat different: that the pleasures of artistic eros are self-evident, and it also seems self-evident that a rich imagination is the soul of good sex.

The Right, as it often does, understands this well. It is not overreacting to all those art exhibits it deems harmful to minors. The arts are dangerous. That is why painters and poets are in prison under every repressive regime in the world. There is no getting