One Easy Stop

With sex on everyone’s mind these days due to the tragedy in Inglewood and the carnival in Florida, it was inevitable that the subject trickle down to the learning level in the form of controversy.

I’m not talking about public schools, where there’s always chaos, and I’m not talking about condoms, which are being distributed throughout L.A. like Mickey Mouse balloons at a Disneyland party.

I’m talking about (gasp) sex at a school of nursing. So.

In this era of mind-bending knowledge, most kids know everything they need to know about sex by the time they reach third grade.

Madonna, movies, magazines and videos fulfill that area of non-curricular education once provided only by unauthorized dirty Popeye comic books smuggled into school between the pages of more traditional reading matter.

These were miniature magazines which, when flipped through quickly, took on the form of a primitive motion picture, thus allowing a more beguiling view of Popeye’s sexual achievements.

That there were benefits beyond eroticism to the material was a hallmark of the innocent era in which they were offered.

For instance, it was after I saw my first such publication in junior high that I began to appreciate the nutritional value of spinach.

Unlike that time long ago, however, sex is no longer a secret subject. Then why, I hear you ask, is a school of nursing refusing to acknowledge its marketable elements?

Good question.

The school I’m talking about is the Valley College of Medical and Dental Careers in North Hollywood, which recently refused to allow a field trip to a sex shop, despite the educational value of pornography.

I heard about it through an outraged student. An advanced nursing class in medical surgery voted to visit such an establishment as part of a study on human sexuality. The teacher, Sheryl Price-Robinson, thought it a legitimate request and began arranging a trip to Hollywood’s Le Sex Shoppe.

“You never know what you’re going to come across in real life and I wanted my students prepared,” Price-Robinson explained. “I’ve worked in an emergency room and people have sex problems you wouldn’t believe.”

There were, she reasoned, devices around that some students had never even heard of before. If they were going to be nurses, they’d better hear of them now.

Apparently, however, a student in the class telephoned his or her objection to the state Board of Nursing. All you need is one moral protest to anything in the field of education and everyone panics. God save us from that old devil sex.

Word came down from Sacramento that such a field trip was out of the question. The school’s director of nursing, Edda Coughran, who ultimately canceled the trip, responded to my questions by saying tightly, “A visit to a sex shop is not a functional part of our curriculum.”

Price-Robinson said the student who blew the whistle thought they were going to a peep show, which was not the case at all. They were going to look at sexual devices, not peep at nudes.

They’d have to learn about peeping on their own.

Angered by cancellation of the field trip, several students took it upon themselves to visit Le Sex Shoppe as, well, “civilians.”

They were led by class President Glenn Comfort, a 30-year-old training to be a licensed vocational nurse.

“It was no big deal,” he said later. “We wanted a look at another kind of life and we got it. It just wasn’t right that one student could force a trip to be canceled when 38 others wanted to go.”

“It wasn’t offensive, it wasn’t dirty, it wasn’t clean,” Maria Barbieri said of the trip. “It was adult and it was life.” She’s 22.

I visited Le Sex Shoppe just to see what I had failed to learn on my own wayward journey through the educational process a long time ago.

I’m pleased to report you can buy everything from love lotions that heat up when breathed on to glow-in-the-dark bikini panties and electric sex kits.

I took my wife with me because she would never allow me to visit a sex shop alone. We went disguised as tourists from Boise.

“It’s a supermarket of eroticism,” she whispered, “one easy stop buys it all.” She flipped through a paperback book called “Sex Witch.”

“Listen to this: ‘Oh my God,’ Anna whispered, breathing very hard. ‘What is this new thing I have learned? I know I shall never have enough of it.’ ”

We had enough of it very quickly, however, and left to catch the first bus back to Boise.

But I see nothing wrong with nursing students field-tripping to a porn palace to glimpse that kind of life. I’d hate to think I was being treated in a hospital by someone who learned all they knew about sex from a flip-through Popeye comic book.