Juvenile Courtship

The other night I was flipping through the many channels that my cable-provider provides and I started thinking about SEX. How can you not? It's all over the place--Sexity sex sex sex. Being a child of the Nixon era I still find it rather remarkable how much of it they let slide on the tube these days.

Back when I was "coming of age" there were only 7 channels being provided and two of them were run by BYU. It was a different time for a hormonally complicated lad. It was a puzzle that you had to piece together for yourself, and the television wasn't all that much help. About the most you could hope for was maybe Charro on Johnny Carson. "What does she mean? "Kootchie Kootchie?"

Nowadays you can't flip through the channels without seeing a commercial for those "Spring Break Girls Gone Wild." What a shocking thing it is that I don't dare order that tape, I couldn't pull it off. Pity really--I think I'd enjoy that one--even at my age. Those poor Crazy Coeds--little did they know how long and painful 15 minutes of fame could be. "Look Mom, that's me with my dress up around my neck. I was so damn drunk." Never have parents been quite so proud.

I wonder if all this overexposure and easy access hasn't taken alot of the fun out of one's adolescent awakenings. Kids these days have got the internet, Cable, VCRs and at the very least they've got the Victoria's Secret catalogue delivered right to their very door. Where's the challenge in that? In my day the only secrets the U.S. Mail cared to offer a fella came courtesy of J.C. Penney. Back when a bra was a bra--and things were pretty much kept under a hat.

It's all spelled out for a kid, these days. There's no mystery to it anymore. It was a whole lot different when I was coming up through the minors. We were feeling around in the dark in those days. We knew something was going on, but mostly it was alot of hearsay and wild speculation. It was a time when you didn't learn all about sex from the President of the United States.

We were on a Vision Quest--juvenile detectives sniffing around for Blues Clues. It was all dirty and exciting--hushed whispers and cousins and a flashlight in your big brothers room. We had to rely on "old school" methods to get a handle on things. For example, perfecting the technique of skimming through one of your friend's mother's paperbacks--rapidly scanning for red flag words like "ravished" "heaving" and "member." that was a handy skill. You were like a human search engine. (That's where they got the idea for Yahoo). An even more ingenious method was to simply hold the spine of the book lightly in your palm and allow the pages to naturally fall open to the sexy parts. It's a dying art.

A kid can't miss these days. Just for example, there's this show on MTV where, as far as I can tell, the plot pretty much revolves around a half dozen nearly naked teenagers whose primary goal is to screw each other. Even the networks are letting it all hang out. Did you see that Temptation Island? In my day Temptation Island was all about Ginger and Mary Ann. If you wanted to ring the puberty bell your best shot was Benny Hill. I doubt there's anything more pathetic than that.