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Not Eudora   By Harry Welty
Published
Nov 10, 2005

Five Anecdotes about Sex

My Dad's a Boy

One day I told my seventh grade Geography class how I hadn't wanted to be one of those parents whose children grew up embarrassed and confused about sex. I told my students that I was quite pleased with myself until the Sunday I took my family to Perkins.

We were seated in the middle of the restaurant which was packed with people dressed in their Sunday best. My three year old son stood up on his chair and made an announcement to all the diners. "I am a boy and I have a penis!" he said proudly. As I blanched, my son pointed to me and added grandly, "My Dad is a boy and he has a penis!"

My students burst into a paroxysm of laughter at the first mention of genitalia. I twisted my face into a close approximation of the horror I had felt at Perkins. "I DIDN'T WANT ANYONE TO KNOW THAT I HAD ONE OF THOSE," I whined as my student's sides split spilling guts across the floor.

"And then," I continued, "my son pointed to our waitress and announced: "She is a girl and she has a vagina!"

As my students clutched their aching sides I added, "I'm sure it wasn't true."

Vagina Monologue

I had some tough kids in my eighth grade American History class. Many had failed the class the previous year and had to take it again before they could go on to high school. One day I annoyed a particularly surly girl who took her revenge by calling me a "douche."

I looked at her coolly and wondered whether she knew what a douche was. This was 1987 and the Massengale Company had been advertising douches on television for over a year. "Do you know what that word means?" I asked her.

"Nooooo," she replied with a smirk.  I defined it for her so that she could never again claim ignorance.

"It's a vagina cleaner," I told her evenly. She just smiled maliciously and that was the end of that or so I thought.

A few weeks later I was summoned to the principal's office. The girl's mother had come to ask me to cut her daughter a little slack. She told me that her daughter disliked men because her grandfather had sexually abused her. I was taken aback and instantly acquired some sympathy for my young tormentor. I described the name calling incident and glanced over at my principal. He was horrified.

A few days later I got a letter from the Director of Secondary Education, my Principal's boss. It told me that using language like "vagina cleaner" was reprehensible, unprofessional, and might determine whether I would be given tenure. The letter was put in my personnel file.

I was denied tenure later that year and gave up teaching. Never again would I have seventh graders rolling on the floor laughing.

AIDS Lesson

A couple years later I was at my own children's school along with volunteers from a girl's college basketball team. One of the players asked me if I had ever substituted at Washington Junior High. I told her that I had and asked how she happened to remember me.  She told me that it was a lesson I taught.

This was back in 1983 when the AID's epidemic (then incurable and always fatal) had America in a panic. My lesson had been a simple one.  I wrote the name of a boy and girl on the blackboard, "Mary" and "Bill" perhaps. I told the class that while Mary was a virgin "Bill" had slept with one other girl, "Miranda." I drew lines between the partners which took on the appearance of a family tree.

I explained that Miranda had been sexually active with three boys two of whom had been virgins while the third was more experienced. The third boy had had sex with twelve girls. This prodigious number elicited guffaws from the class.

For each of the twelve new girls on the blackboard I wrote the number of sex partners they had had. It was mostly, but not always, zero except for the twelfth girl. I told the class that she was addicted to drugs and had to prostitute herself to pay for them. I said that she had slept with, oh I don't remember, something like 212 men. This figure made the class burst out laughing again although more nervously than before.

I pointed to the relatively inexperienced Mary and Bill on my chart and told the class that if just one of the several hundred people on the blackboard had AIDS it meant that Mary and Bill could be infected as well.

Radio News Report

I have always been "pro-choice." There is no way I would risk the life of my Mother, Wife or Daughter for the "life" of a newly fertilized egg. Even so, I have always been troubled by the extreme philosophy which holds that every female should have an absolute right to an abortion at any time during a pregnancy no questions asked. In Republican circles this means that I am a "baby killer" who should never be endorsed for public office if it can be prevented. I recently heard a speaker at a Republican convention accuse people like me of committing more mass murders than Hitler and Stalin combined.

When my daughter was eight or nine she overheard part of a radio report I was listening to about abortion. She asked me what an abortion was and I told her.

"Oh that's terrible! How could anybody kill a baby?" she asked me. I would have been appalled if my daughter had reacted any differently. I'm still pro-choice.

Helping hand

A couple days ago I heard another story on the radio. It was about Uganda, an African nation which had managed to reduce the percentage of its population infected with AIDs from 20% to 6%. Since it achieved this milestone President Bush pledged 15 billion dollars to fight AIDS in Africa. Under US pressure Uganda abandoned its successful campaign against AIDS which stressed the use of condoms. The Bush Administration frowns on condoms because they promote immorality. As a result the percentage of Ugandans suffering from AIDS has jumped up to 9 percent. 800,000 Ugandans have gotten AIDS since America began helping them. Now that's what I call pro-life!

Iraqis don't know how lucky they are.

Harry Welty is a small time politician who lets it all hang out at: www.snowbizz.com

Here's a  tough rebuttal for advocates of the pro choice cause

Also, look at the two emails my column elicited in the column on this page's upper left from an ex student and ex classmate.


Harry Welty is running for Congress: www.welty4congress.org 

Harry blogs at: www.lincolndemocrat.com


Send Harry Welty an email