I remember my first truly uncomfortable Sunday at church when I was about eleven. Previously I had been uncomfortable on Sundays because of the starchy new clothes I was forced to wear and because of the yelling at home before services. This particular Sunday was uncomfortable because I was on the edge of puberty and I had just that week seen my first pornographic magazine. No matter who the lady was or how old or what she was wearing, I was suddenly surrounded by females with things between their legs. I had been aware of cleavage and boobies for years. They were kind of hard to miss with the fashions of the times, the late sixties and early seventies. You could be faced with a bullet brassiere on the mother and a barely covered by a tube-top nipple on the daughter all at the same time in an air-conditioned grocery store.

The immediacy of the plumbing of sex almost crushed me that year. Breasts, however titillating, are not really sexual to me. They are furniture or plumbing, depending upon whether the lady has a child of the appropriate age or is attempting to become with child in the imminent future. But the fact that I was surrounded by people with hairy orifi tucked into their jeans, slacks, frocks and hot pants (waxing is not a topic I choose to enter into here) made my eyes widen and my pants alter every time I left the house.

I was twenty-two before I got to see one up close and personal. I've seen a few al dente and al fresco since then. Not as many as I'd have liked, but I was married for fifteen years.

Those Eleven Years, though. All the times I had to keep my hands to myself, all the times I had to sit with my legs crossed. High School was particularly irritating. I have never at any other time in my life spent so much time in close proximity with females of my own age... Who were actively engaging in flirting, only it don't work on me the way it's supposed to. When they looked directly at me and spoke to me, I had to think to remember that they weren't actually PAYING ATTENTION TO ME. Not that it mattered, there were three kinds of girls that I was aware of: Those who wanted to be friends regardless of gender or my hormones, those who had tried to talk to me and gave up, and those who delighted in my discomfort and non sequitorial responses to their silliness. I never had a "girlfriend" as a teen, although I did hold hands with Janey Passmore a lot when I was in the second or third grade.

Strictly speaking, I don't think I've ever had a "girlfriend". I've had partners, I've had live-in fiances, but never a... you-know-what.

Now I find myself living in a generation that has teen, college age and much older women running around championing their vaginae, vulvae, and clitori in a self-reverential manner that involves politics, gender politics, fashion politics, religious politics, and medical politics, not to mention Monica Lewinsky commemorative humidors and Christine Keeler action figures.

It seems that there are some women and girls who have no idea what is in between their legs or even within their abdomens. The freaks who believe in FGM are very conscious of the one and couldn't care less about the other, but the girls and women who suffer Female Genital Mutilation are aware that SOMETHING IS MISSING. I personally was not aware that I was missing a foreskin until I was almost nineteen years old. I mean I really hadn't thought about it. I knew that my culture and religion practiced the torture of male babies within the first week of life and that some other cultures and religions practiced the mutilation of preteen boys, but it didn't really hit home with me until I was in the U.S. Army. The Army was a weird place. I was hit with an overwhelming barrage of images, noises, ideas, ignorance, stupidity and just plain male denial. And yet, it was late enough in the decade that there were womens in uniform running around all over the place. I was a virgin incarcerated in a "swinging dick" enclave with "untouchable" females scooting around the edges of a culture filled with unremitting vulgarity, obscenity and just plain filth. The entire basic training experience is sexual harassment and anyone who tells you different either enjoyed it or is in denial.

At this late date there is no reason for any male or female on the planet who has access to the Internet or an encyclopedia or a doctor to be ignorant of how their reproductive organs look and work. At this late date this is no reason for any teen male or female to be embarrassed by the facts of life and anatomy. Cultural or religious stupidity that allows adults to contribute to or encourage the ignorance of other humans on these matters should be considered criminal. The politicizing of genitalia should be considered criminal also. When a young girl is accused of lesbian tendencies because she is curious about her body, then something has gone terribly wrong.
When a young girl or boy has other people's bodies practically waved in their faces as part of an agenda designed to promote shock and reaction purely for their own sake, then something is also wrong.

I may be a product of my own misery and a generation long past, but I still think the heart should be part of the anatomy of love.
For joy does not always come from a piece of flesh with nerve endings buried in it. I have known women who enjoyed sex but had no sense of commitment. I have known women who knew where their clitoris was but had no idea where my heart was.

I still have trouble going to church. When those squeezed-brain ding dongs babble ecstatically about the "birth of Christ", I cannot avoid visualizing a sweaty, pain-stricken young woman with her vulva yawning wide to serve as a funnel for a baby. If, as we are told, she had no knowledge of sex or her own genitalia before that moment, then that was truly a shocking event for her and no ecstatic mouthings about grace are going to do any good for me. Jeshuah came into the world just like the rest of us, between a woman's legs. I like to think in some of my moments of delirium that he went to the synagogue one day when he was eleven and having seen some erotic Roman art the week before, looked at all the women and girls differently and uncomfortably... And we are told by tradition that he reached 33 without ever having knocked boots... To think I felt deprived.