Sex. Ed.

I had the pleasure of shadowing the wonderful sexual health educator, Lyba Spring, to a 5th grade French class today for the introductory class of their series of four Sexual Education classes. It was lovely to see the children participate and giggle to a dramatic rendition of the pubescent years to come.

This experience had me thinking of my own few memories of SexEd in 5th grade, which was a free antiperspirant stick (great... so now our glands are so dependent we can hardly do without it) and a disposable sanitary napkin. At the time I had no idea, my mother had given me a book that I'd only perused through and any other information probably came through from my siblings.

Recently, I have been finishing Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography that I have mentioned here before, but I thought this an appropriate time to highlight another passage that I quite liked.

So the ovary isn't pretty. So it is gray and pitted and as lumpy as oatmeal. We would expect nothing less of an organ that works as hard as it does, tending to the disparate but joined needs of the known and possible. The ovary is a seedpod, the domicile of our fixed portion of eggs, and you are supposed to use some of those eggs, inasmuch as life strives to perpetuate itself. The ovary is gray because it alone among residents of the pelvic cavity is not covered with the pinkish peritoneum, the springy membrane that encloses and protects other organs. The ovary cannot be enclosed because it must give up its belongings so often. It gives up eggs, yes, but it gives more than that. It gives up a kind of pudding, a yellowish tapioca of hormones that feed the reproductive cycle and the bodies we own. The ovary operates as a physiological and allegorical bridge between stasis and sexuality, between anatomy and behavior. Through its periodic hormonal emissions, the ovary makes itself known to us.

Book cover from Natalie Angier's website, see it here: http://www.natalieangier.com/