lock up your kids.

it happened while i was working at a christian camp. i've always been a sucker for irony.

hovering between freshman and sophomore years of college, i had absolutely no life plan beyond vague notions of studying french, which was the primary reason i found myself back at the summer job i held down during high school, "doin' it for the kids," as they say. i spent the bulk of my days playing four-square with 7th-graders and thinking about my boyfriend, who was 300 miles away.

it happened by accident. about midway through the summer, one of the girls came up from taking her swim test and i told her to make sure she took her wet bathing suit off so she didn't get a yeast infection. and then -

"what's a yeast infection?"

seriously? these pubescent girls had no idea about the inner workings of their vaginas. obviously they didn't have a mother who constantly walked around the house naked and showed [yes, showed] her how to put a tampon in at age 8. i gathered them up and did them the biggest favor of their young lives: let them know that your vagina has to be able to breathe to do its thing.

they were awestruck. it was time for dinner, so i said, "well, that's your lesson of the day" and thought no more of it.

the next day, one of them came up to me and said, "so what's our lesson of the day today?" getting about 5 hours of sleep a night for a month kind of wreaks havoc on the short-term memory: i had no idea what she was talking about.

"you know, the bathing suit thing, from yesterday?"

they wanted more. and i, being born with a rotten anti-establishment streak, was more than happy to provide it to these girls, the majority of whom went to catholic school. so every night, just before lights-out, i would tell them something else. we talked about periods, tampons, boys - anything i could think of that would be interesting to them but wouldn't get me fired if one of them happened to let slip to their parents. on the last night, i let them ask me questions. "does semen really come out at 60 miles an hour?" one of them asked. the cabin erupted in giggles.

of course i had no idea [in case you're wondering, it's true], but the fact that they were comfortable enough to ask me that remains one of my proudest moments. and the more i thought about it, the more ridiculous it seemed to me that they didn't know anything about this stuff. there was certainly no lack of curiosity, but these girls lacked basic knowledge about their bodies. most of the girls i know who've started their periods at camp get this constant deer-in-the-headlights look until their mom invariably comes to whisk them away and "clean them up".

i decided at the end of that week that i wanted to be a sex educator, and i haven't looked back. unlike many of our esteemed legislators, i've worked with kids, and they are not the pristine, asexual little angels we so often make them out to be - and that's not necessarily bad. the bad part is the whole "don't ask, don't tell" thing we've got going on, promoting unsafe behaviors by omitting anything resembling empirical information and reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes. it's no fluke that the teen pregnancy rate is up for the first time since '91 or that 1 in 4 teens has an STI.

rant, rant, rant. anyway, that's me.