Of course, I continued to read. And search. And wonder. WTF? WTF? What are you going to do with your life? What's worthy?

Sometime during this period, puberty finally kicked in, the testosterone started pumping, and I discovered this new animal roaring in my BVD's.

I had grown up learning about sex from a very early age, courtesy of the encyclopedias I'd read. I knew all about what went where and why long before I was old enough to do much about it.

I had my first sexual experience.

I recall thinking how much more fun it would have been if someone else had been there. :-)

I remember my smartass reply to my dad when he clumsily broached the subject. He told me he wanted to talk with me about the birds and the bees.

“Sure, Dad, whattya wanna know?”

This to the father of six.

He popped me one. End of discussion.

But now my dry academic knowledge became, shall we say, an order of magnitude more urgent. I needed to look into this sex thing.

While I found a lot of hypocrisy, weak theology, muddled thinking and outright lies, nowhere did I find the teaching and doctrines of the organized Xian religions more screwed up than in their attitudes toward the Deed of Darkness.

They contradicted everything scientists, biologists, or anybody with an objective view had to say.

The Church preached that masturbation was bad, psychologists said it was healthy.

Preachers said homosexuality was a sin, biologists reported that same sex behavior is observable in nearly all species from insects on up, and seems to be due to random genetic mix-ups.

Gee, do beetles have Original Sin, too?

The Scientists had Proof. The Church had Faith. I knew who I was betting on.

I read the Kinsey report, Masters and Johnson, and all of the other sex surveys I could find.

I read about the rates of divorce, of adultery, of all the, “deviant,” behaviors. I read everything I could get my sneaky little hands on, and I knew the library pretty well, as you might guess, and I babysat for the neighbors, who always left a copy of Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid To Ask on their coffee table.

I decided that there is no area in which our society is more neurotic than that of sex. This neurosis manifests itself quite openly.

This is where I need another 10 pages on idiotic nudity taboos, sexual violence, prostitution, censorship, yadda-yadda, but breathe easy, folks, I'm not gonna go there …

I was maybe fourteen.

(A funny aside here. I knew what and where a clitoris was, what it looked like, on paper, anyway and what you were supposed to do with it, when I was about nine or ten. But I didn't know how to pronounce it! It was years before I ever got the nerve to ask. Why I didn't look in the dictionary, I'll never know.)

I finally got to use my booklearnin' at about age sixteen, when I finally stumbled across, (in drama class, funnily enough) an older girl who took enough of a liking to a bookish little runt from the boy's school next door to hers to let him get some real life experience.

I dated her for awhile, and then through the rest of high school had several more relationships, all of them pretty pleasant.

My book learnin' was serving me pretty well, as I've been told since most adolescent males don't really have any idea what the hell they're doing.

I went to college, finally got a growth spurt, started pumping iron, and filled out. I was pretty cute in them days. I could make 'em laugh, and that's halfway to their bedroom.

So, while all this philosophical disquiet simmered on the back burner, I stayed pretty busy chasing that bird dog whenever he started barkin'. :-)

But not so much that I stopped reading.

This being the 60's and 70's, the Hippies were revolting, preaching free love, "Open Marriage" was a best seller, and several outspoken primatologists were discovering and reporting that our closest genetic relatives, the bonobos, are very promiscuous indeed, and based on common physical traits, a substantial degree of promiscuity would be predicted in humans.

More grist for the mill.

In high school and college literature courses, I learned how the notion of lifelong romantic attachment was a modern invention. It's a derivative of the concept of courtly love, pretty much a fiction of some sixteenth century Italian poets, popularized during the Renaissance by authors such as Shakespeare.

I learned that throughout most of history, marriages were arranged, for economic reasons, and the idea of actually being in love with your husband or wife was pretty unknown. It is surprising to many people that have not studied the issues to note this: today, the rate of successful marriages, in the cultures where arranged marriages are still common, is about the same as when couples choose their own mates.

Well over fifty percent of all marriages fail. We would not tolerate such an abysmal rate in nearly any other human institution, yet we are so conditioned not to recognize the truth that few see it, and even fewer are brave enough to speak out and say that the emperor has no clothes.

Amazingly enough, people still seem to assume that when a realtionship dies, it is somehow due to the nature of those in the realtionship, and not the nature of the institution.

I read of alternatives to the nuclear family, of new (well, not new, rediscovered) types of marriage; polygamy, polyandry, communal marriages, line marriages, open marriages. All of them seemed to have both strengths and weaknesses, but most of them seemed to be clearly better alternatives to the high divorce rate, broken homes, single parent households, and all of the other difficulties that our present system breeds.

Even at that age, I knew that what my parents have was very rare, and bound to be even more so, as more women began to work outside of the home, thus giving them the economic freedom to live independently.

This is the dirty little secret that no one, (or few, to be fair) wants to shout. The traditional marriage was economic subjugation of the female, and women have long been forced to remain in unhappy marriages or starve.

But this economic liberation is not without it's drawbacks.

Now they get only a slightly less palatable option, work and pay a minimum-wage stranger to be the mommy, the Child Care Solution. Or course since Everybody Does It, it Has To Be Good.

Don't even get me started, it drives me into a Fucking Rage every time I think about it. Kids need a parent at home until at least he age of six, and no, I don't give a cat's ass which one it is.

I also knew from my childhood how happy and secure it was to live in a large extended family.