Mother Would Be Proud

At first I thought it was just another sex survey. You know: how often, when, why and with whom?

They are being conducted all the time in order to determine the sexual habits of just about everyone for the purpose of properly categorizing us for, well, future groupings.

There have been sex surveys conducted among poets, hod carriers, shipping clerks, certified public accountants and sex surveyors themselves without much fuss or interest.

In 1972, the Burbank Institue of Human Behavior and the American Society of Unfrocked Editors even attempted a survey on newspaper columnists, but the responses were so vague and wordy that the effort had to be abandoned.

Now comes news that RAND and UCLA are cooperating in an anonymous sex survey to be conducted among students at Santa Monica High, and all hell is breaking loose.

Angry parents have rallied in front of City Hall and have shouted their objections at school board meetings, and are now threatening legal action to stop the survey.

They feel that their children, whose sexual knowledge is presently limited to how Prince Charming awakened Snow White with a kiss, will become drooling, lusting, groping animals if they are allowed to take the RAND survey. Some might even become Navy fighter pilots.

A pediatrician writing in the Santa Monica Outlook nails it down with precision when he says, “The survey itself encourages unchaste and lascivious behavior.”

That’s when I became interested.

If there is anything that captures my attention it is unchaste and lascivious behavior. A journalist is the ultimate voyeur, peeking in the windows of one’s soul to isolate moments of travail and passion.

So I arranged a session with one of the surveyors, social psychologist David Kanouse, a bright, pleasant man with three daughters of his own. He didn’t seem at all the type who would attempt to sexually arouse anyone through a survey, but then you can never tell about people with Ph.D.s. They’re a funny bunch.

Kanouse had granted permission in advance for me to actually see the survey in order to determine if, as the pediatrician claims, it is “shocking and lurid” and “downright lewd.”

I want to make clear that Santa Monica High was selected not because its students have more prurient interests than other high school students, but because a similar survey was conducted there last year and the surveyors want to compare the results.

Come to think of it, the school was selected in ’92 because of a newly enacted condom availability program. They’re given out like Mickey Mouse balloons. Maybe there are more prurient interests at old SMHS.

At any rate, the questions are aimed at determining sexual practices in order to better institute safe sex programs in the age of AIDS.

Many of the questions are innocuous, dealing with mom’s attitude toward one’s friends, the use of alcohol and marijuana, and whether or not a student has ever engaged in oral or anal sex.

But then comes the tough one: What are your aims in life?

AND I SAY THAT’S NOBODY’S DAMNED BUSINESS!

Wait, don’t leave.

I admit there are blunt questions in the survey, but nothing that isn’t covered in 9th grade health courses.

As Kanouse points out, “Parents who complain that the survey encourages sex may be right, but how are we to know without a survey?”

He may have been putting us on a little, but the point is well taken. How do we know anything if we don’t ask questions? They won’t let us watch.

Personally, I doubt that the survey is going to arouse anyone. I read the whole thing and still managed to take notes without sweating or trembling, two sure signs that there is something on my mind other than a column.

You’d have to be a journeyman pervert to be aroused by anything RAND publishes.

I can only recall one survey when I was in high school, but that had to do with social intercourse, not the other kind. We were awkward kids back then, and innocents too. I thought kissing caused babies.

It wasn’t until years later I learned to my surprise that the real culprits were martinis, a nice dinner and a dry red wine.

Mom was proud. “At last,” she said, “grandchildren. I thought for awhile you were vacant.” She meant barren.

The pediatrician is wrong. Questions about a.s. and o.s. (I’m only allowed to spell them out once), while unsettling, are necessary. We’ve got to know what the kids are doing and thinking in order to curtail an epidemic.

I find sex and sexual outrage amusing if not disconcerting. But there ain’t nothing funny about AIDS.