Jon's Ego (in print form!)

The Biggest Nothing that Ever Somethinged: Just Like You

In an effort to do more non-work-related prose writing, I’ve created this new Tumblr to just write random stories and stuff. If you follow it, it would make me very happy. Happy enough to maybe even continue it for more than three weeks like all my other random Tumblrs.

biggestnothing:

Recently, I was having dinner with a female friend of mine when we both realized we knew disturbingly little about each other’s genitals. I don’t mean our, like, specific genitals (although that would be an endearingly emotionless way to propose sex; “Can I get to know your genitals?”). Instead, I mean, the genitals of the opposite sex in general. By that, I’m referring to the inner workings, the nitty gritty, the parts whose affects on our own lives aren’t instantly apparent.

Take for example, I don’t know, periods. I know everything about menstruation that I, as a man, need to know. Basically, I know “If it happens, no baby. If it doesn’t happen, baby. My girlfriend’s birth control sometimes makes her not have them. Or have them less. Or have lessofthem. One of those. Also, it like hurts or something.”

What if I had a daughter? What if, when there were no women around, she had her first period. How would I, a fairly well educated and fully grown adult, handle this most basic of human functions?

I imagine the conversation being fairly unimpressive on my end.

“What should I do?”

“Well, we need to get you a…uh…thing.”

“Should I use a tampon or a pad?”

“Uh, well, you should definitely use one of them…or…bothof them?”

And it wasn’t just me. When the wet dreams was brought up, my friend’s response was akin to the way I talk about those fish with lights coming out of their heads; I know they exist but, like, what the fuck, right?

This is ridiculous. How could we be so pathetic? Is it possible that it isn’t entirely our fault.

My friend and I began talking about middle school and, specifically, our sex ed classes. Isn’t it fucked up the way our puritanical educational system forces boys and girls apart when we teach them this stuff. I mean, obviously you should do that for some of the lessons, but not all of them. We teach kids a bunch about their own bodies and then, for the other gender, we just give them a stick figure diagram and call it a day. We’re breeding generations of people who are completely mystified by the inner workings of half the population.

I think it’s this silliness that causes tons of our society’s problems.

If I was in charge of our nation’s schools, I’d do it differently. For my sex ed curriculum, the first thing we’d do is put the boys and girls in the same room together. We’d show them a movie. It’d be called “Just Like You.” It’d be 45 straight minutes of men and women farting…identically.

I know this sounds crazy, but I think it’d fix tons of problems. No longer would teenage boys view women as inscrutable aliens. They’d just think, “Gosh, those girls are farting human beings just like me. They’re not turning me down for dates because they’re monsters. They probably just want me to wear deodorant and work out a little.