A post about sex.

When I turned fourteen I discovered that suddenly I wanted to have sex with almost every female I came across, or at least the ones within a few years of my age. This caused me some difficulty because I wasn't a jock and wasn't particularly charismatic. Brainy types with offbeat senses of humor don't gather much attention from the opposite sex in high school. So I wanted to have sex with them - any kind of sex, anything that resembled any kind of sexual activity - but most of them showed no sign of even being aware I was breathing the same air they were. That meant I spent an awful lot of time thinking about sex: on the way to school, during class, while eating meals, while reading books, while doing homework, in the gym and, inevitably, in synagogue, especially during the interminable stretches when the Torah was being read or the rabbi was speaking. Thinking, but only thinking. You can just imagine.

Constant thoughts of sex accompanied me through my teen years. My hormone-addled brain somehow managed to focus well enough on studying that I got good grades, but of course back then nerds weren't ever cool, so getting good grades never helped me. By the time I got out of high school my mindset was fixed: things having to do with sex occupied some mythical, mystical, magical land, distant and unattainable. It was the stuff of fantasies and dreams, not anything people like me actually ever did. And "girls" - well, they were creatures of great beauty and charm, but totally unreachable. A different species for all I knew.

Yes, there were girls in my day to day life, but they had nothing to do with sex. I was fifteen before it occurred to me that "hey, every single female on this planet has a vagina." Yup, my sister and mother, too. The fat lady across the street, the school secretary, the next door neighbor - yes, these women whom I knew well and paid no mind whatsoever, all of them had real live vaginas! What's more, every one of those females that had kids had actually, and beyond any doubt, used her vagina and done the old wicky-wacky. Just think of it: there were actual vaginas everywhere! Fifty percent of the population had them! And they were being used! What a revelation!

Of course that only made things worse. That meant I was conscious of being literally surrounded, every day, by the intensely sought-after but utterly unattainable. At that time I had never actually met a vagina face to face (so to speak), and the prospect of actually coming in contact with one filled my mind with a combination of intense longing, deep melancholy, despair, excitement and desire. It was everywhere, and I couldn't have any. It was pretty much all I thought about until I was well into my college years. Well, except for getting good grades.

In college things got better. Nerds weren't shunned anymore. Queens College is a commuter school, so there weren't any dorms, there weren't any fraternities, there was no varsity football team so far as I was aware - so the usual markings of the classic collegiate social pecking order just weren't there. And I discovered that girls would actually talk to me. Some even would go out with me. And though I'm not going to get into the sordid details of what passed for a sex life back then, what I will say is that by my senior year I was going out with a girl I have mentioned before (I'm referring to her here as Karine). All I'll say about her right now is that she was wonderful. Even all these years later, I still have a very fond spot for her. (And I wonder from time to time where she is and what she is doing.)

But having a girlfriend wasn't quite as life-altering as I might have expected it to be. The mental habit hadn't changed. Girls were still mysterious miraculous creatures to me -- I just happened to have lucked into a relationship with one, totally inexplicably. Sex was still something unattainable, ethereal and magical -- I just happen to have apparently fooled the universe's powers-that-be, and mysteriously found myself engaging in various sorts of sexual activity that, if it were ever discovered by whoever polices these things, would doubtless result in monstrous upheavals in the very fabric of nature. After all, nature must revert to equilibrium. E=mc2 was no less an immutable law of nature to me than "boldface gets no girls or sex." For some reason that wasn't then apparent to me, I had managed to do the equivalent of bending time and going faster than the speed of light. I was sure it couldn't last.

One late summer day I took Karine to the Bronx Zoo. I hadn't been there since I was a little kid. At that time, the Bronx Zoo still kept a lot of its animals in buildings, so the "Monkey House" really was where the monkeys were kept. (Nowadays they are mainly outdoors.) When i was a kid I always liked looking at monkeys, so the monkeys is where we went. Just inside the Monkey House, in the first cage, was a bunch of the little primates swinging and screaming and having what I'm sure monkeys consider a great time. There was a little narrow plank suspended from the ceiling, too, so that the monkeys would have a place to stand when the swinging became tiresome. One monkey was sitting there, mellowing out. And then, as I watched, another monkey came up behind and started thrusting his hips. The one in front - obviously the female - looked thoroughly bored, but didn't try to move away either. After a few minutes the one in back moved away and strutted off with a satisfied look, obviously very pleased with himself.

I watched the spectacle and started to laugh. I called Karine over to watch, and she joined the laughter too. Right there, in front of a steadily growing audience, these shameless monkeys were doing the nasty, seemingly oblivious to the assembled admiring spectators. And truth to tell, it was funny. Especially when you realize that what we were observing was, quite literally, "hot monkey sex."

But after the laughter died down and my brain went back to its thinking mode, I realized something. How special can sex be if even flippin' monkeys do it? It obviously takes no great talent or skill to copulate. There are no secret instructions or occult mysteries about it. In and of itself, it's just a bodily function -- a fun and fascinating one, to be sure, but just another bodily function.

So what makes sex so special? What on earth is so fascinating about it? Those monkeys made me understand that what makes it special is what makes us human: the mental interaction and the bond with the other person. Without that human element it's no different than monkeys copulating out there in public, a few thrusts and it's over. Monkeys don't think about it much, but humans have to use their minds. Understand, I'm not saying people should have sex only when they're in love. There are literally hundreds of reasons to have sex, and love is only related to a few of them. People in all kinds of relationships, casual and not, can have sex, and very good sex - but what makes it interesting, even the most casual fling, is that there is another person there, someone to think about and take into consideration. Otherwise it's just another bodily function, a couple of thrusts and good-bye, precisely like those monkeys.

So that was my epiphany about sex. Less mystery, less occult aura, more simple interpersonal exchange. And that's what makes it interesting in the first place. And that's the boldface theory of sex. It's about the other person, because if it was just about you, you'd be a monkey.

OK, enough of that heartwarming stuff. It's all true, but there is a punchline to this story. See, as I sit here all these years later, I realize that what I saw the monkeys doing might not even have been sex in the first place. Monkeys fornicate when the girl monkeys are in heat, I believe. I can't imagine the zookeepers just leave horny women monkeys in extreme estrus hanging around to display their behinds at the roving bands of man-monkeys in the same cage unless they are anticipating problems. But who knows? Maybe it was monkey sex, maybe not, but I sort of doubt it. So for all I know, my greatepiphany about sex might have been triggered by just some primate back-scratching.