MultiO Studies

Boys and Girls and Sex >>
A Guide for Boys and Girls and their Parents
by Wardell Pomeroy, John Tebbel, and others*
(Excerpts include: Boys and Sex; Girls and Sex; Your Child and Sex)

This book is fondly dedicated to our children and wives

Introduction
1 A Boy’s and Girl’s Sex Life: Growing Up in a New Sexual World
2 Learning about Your Body: the Anatomy and Physiology of Sex: How the Machine Works
• • • Nudity
3 Discovering Sex: Sex Play before Adolescence: Learning about Sex
• • • Sexual Education
• • • Allow a Child to Become Acquainted
• • • The Pioneers of New Sexual Life-Styles
4 Masturbation: Sex for Yourself
• • • What an Orgasm Is — and Isn’t
5 Homosexuality: What Being Gay is All About
6 Dating: Getting to Know Girls, Getting to Know Boys
7 Petting: Going on and Going Out: Learning About Sex with Girls and Boys
8 Intercourse: The Real Thing
9 Sexuality in Family Life
Afterword
For Further Reading

Introduction
This may be the best place to tell you how I feel about sex. I believe that we’re all sexual beings and that sex ought to be one of the most pleasurable activities available to human beings, one of the great joys of our time on earth, and one of the happiest parts of our lives, from our earliest days until we’re old. It happens to us in one form or another all our lives. It should be simple and beautiful. We have unprecedented freedom to express ourselves sexually, and we take advantages of that freedom.

Those who still think that it’s something boys and girls can just postpone until they’re in their twenties don’t understand human sexuality. The great majority of boys and girls, with only an insignificant percentage of exceptions, have already engaged and are engaging in some kind of sexual behavior, and once started, they aren’t likely to stop. How to help boys and girls understand what they’re doing, and how to deal with any problems that may arise from it?

What boys and girls do sexually is not nearly so important as how they feel about what they’re doing, and what kinds of relationships they develop with other people. I think, what’s important in the relationship between two people is how they feel about each other, not whether a penis enters a vagina. These are the factors that help determine what kind of human beings they turn out to be, and so the specific sex information given to children is not nearly so important as the attitudes that accompany it. What are those attitudes?

Simple, old-fashioned things like self-respect, responsibility, and openness, leading to a sense of what a lifetime pleasure sex can and should be. Boys and girls understand that they are far more likely to make good social and sexual adjustments to life if they learn to be warm, open, responsive, and sexually unafraid. Fear and guilt are deadly enemies of a happy, healthy sex life. Sex may not be shameful, but it is private.

My basic feeling is that sexual behavior for both boys and girls is something that’s pleasurable and desirable, just as long as certain rules are followed:
       1.    Accept your own sexuality as a fact of life, something to be nurtured and used for your own and others’ enjoyment, energizing, and rejuvenation.
      2.    Don’t do anything that will harm or hurt someone else, especially a sex partner. In short, be responsible toward the other person.
      3.    Whatever you do, do it so that the other person doesn’t get into trouble. Individual’s sex life shouldn’t get him or her or other people into trouble.
      4.    Respect those who choose not to engage in any sexual experiences. That’s their right. Don’t force sex on people who reject it for one reason or another, don’t go against the other person’s wishes or desires; any sex that’s worth having has to be mutually desired.

Lack of Consent:
• Not knowing what is proposed
• Dissimilar knowledge of standards for behavior
• Dissimilar knowledge of potential consequences
• No ability to freely choose without repercussions
Lack of Equality:
• Obvious differences in age, size, intellect, responsibility
• Being in charge; babysitting
• Subtle differences in strength, popularity, self image
• Role differences: leader, boss, fantasy roles in play
Coercion:
Manipulation, Trickery, Peer Pressure, Bribes
Threats of lost relationships, privilege or esteem
Threats of force or harm, Intimidation
Physical Restraint, Force, Weapons, Violence

Boys and girls are going to get sex education of some kind from their earliest days, whether parents like it or not. They keep learning in one way or another as long as they’re at home, regardless of whether the word “sex” is even mentioned. When an embarrassed father covers up his genitals hastily if he happens to be in the presence of a child who is only two weeks old, he’s providing that child with sex education. When he embraces his wife warmly in front of the child, expressing his own sexual feelings, that’s educational, too. Children absorb knowledge from what they see and hear.

Where sex is the problem, very often it occurs either because people don’t have the information available to them or because they can’t relate what they think they know to their own lives. Knowledge is the most important element. We watch sex on movies or television, and read about it in books and magazines, but not necessarily to understand why it’s happening, or what it means to your own life. I can’t count the times I’ve heard patients say to me, when I was a practicing sex therapist, “If only I’d been given more information about these things when I was young, or if only I’d had a more open attitude about sex, then maybe I wouldn’t have made such a mess of my life.”

I intend to cover every kind of sexual behavior, beginning with preadolescent sex play, then masturbation, sexual activity with girls, the whole business of “dating,” now called simply “going out,” intercourse and its consequences, and other aspects of sex. I hope that from reading about all this, boys and girls will be able to construct a framework that will help them to understand and deal with their sexuality, no matter what form it takes.

Everybody has sex of some kind, but what people do is as individual as they are. Everyone is different, and there are as many varieties of sexual behavior as there are people.

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