Not talking to teens about sex, for instance, has been consistently shown to lead to more babies and more STDs - outcomes that, in theory, all that not-talking was meant to prevent.īut many of the undesirable outcomes of our reticence are harder to measure. The silence/giggling doesn't change the realities of human sexuality, however, and to the extent that it changes outcomes, it's pretty much only ever for the worse. We don't like to admit the banality of the human sex drive, the sheer, boring ubiquity of genitalia, or the commonplace occurrence of frightening, sad, or unpleasant outcomes that often result from the human physicality of everyone involved. In America, we like our sex titillating, or silly, or transcendent, but mostly covert, with women's bodies serving essentially as props. Yet these moments are joined at the hip by American attitudes immediately familiar to anyone who's spent any time in America: a deep and abiding discomfort with sex, and an even greater discomfort with the intersection between sex and women's bodies. On the face of it, they were very different events: The first represents what most would consider a brave and generous honesty the second was for many a case of oversharing the third, of course, reminds us that Trump will always be Trump.
