on dental dams

On Friday night, W and I, after going out for ice cream & Daily Show clip watching marathon [my horoscope said I would meet my dream date that night. The stars have reconfirmed Jon Stewarts’s status as my imaginary boyfriend.], we ended up bored, sitting in a room with a guitar. W started playing and making up songs. The most epic of her creations was a song about a dental dam. Not destined to be a top 40 hit, but entertaining. I bet her a dollar to go perform it for the most fratboyish of the housemates who were downstairs drinking Natty Light (W had accidentally called it Natty Ice earlier in the night & they were offended.) and watching West Wing DVDs.

W performed the song with gusto, earning her dollar, & the boys didn’t react. We learned later that they didn’t know what a dental dam is. One of them made the argument that dental dams must be fictional because if they were real, he would have heard jokes about them in the high school locker room. Another couldn't figure out why they were necessary and asserted that they would "ruin the mood" and present logistical problems.

But dental dams do exist. And these boys, all sexually active, all children of red states who insist that they did not go through abstinence-only sex education, have never heard of them. I was and continue to be amazed and flummoxed. Their educators should be held criminally negligent. [W told me later that last year there was a herpes outbreak at her Brethren college. Everyone involved was a virgin.]

I explained the sex education that I received growing up Unitarian Universalist, how I learned that being gay is okay, how we had discussions about how to have physically and emotionally safe relationships, how we watched film strip and animated porn, how I learned that one of the little kids in the church was an accident “you need to get a new diaphragm after you have a child,” how they took us condom shopping, how the Planned Parenthood lady taught me what an abortion really is. Everyone was amazed that such things could happen in a church. I always knew such things were rare, but I was reminded again Friday night of their importance.

So W is not planning to convert, but she wants her kids to become temporarily UU for a few years in their early teens.