ENCORE ISSUE

Article

by Aimee Moiso

In the second grade, my teacher gave us an assignment, probably for Valentine's Day. "Write about love," he said. "What is love?"

Most kids put pencil to paper to espouse the love expressed in a mother's kiss or a day at the ballgame with dad. Not me. I had just learned about the birds and the bees.
"What is love?" I penned. "This is a special kind of love. It may sound funny but it's true. When a man's penis goes into a women's vagina it is a very, very special kind of love."

I still remember how proud I was of my essay. That two people would love each other so much as to have sex seemed sacred wisdom. I wasn't embarrassed by it; I felt grown up. So grown up, in fact, that I wasn't particularly worried about having to ask my teacher how to spell "vagina." It was a grown-up word and he was a grown-up. I walked right up to his desk and asked. He politely gave me the correct spelling and that night he called my parents. Maybe it would be a good idea if they could help me write a new story about love, he said. He appreciated my parents' openness with me, but these essays were to be posted in the hallway at school.

My parents explained to me why I needed to rewrite my story. I remember being frustrated that I had to redo the assignment when there wasn't anything wrong with it in the first place. But even at my young age, I got the idea. My more conventional revision went up in the hallway with the other essays about cookies and hugs and new dolls. Still, deep inside my seven-year-old soul, I treasured my new knowledge. Whether I got to write about it or not, I knew sex was something extraordinary-a very, very special kind of love.

A Statistical Anomaly

Nearly two decades later, I'm writing about sex again, arguably to a larger audience than would have seen my essay in my elementary school hallway. Surprisingly, my message is still the same: sex is very special. I believe sex is the physical expression of emotional, spiritual and intellectual intimacy present in marriage. So at age 26, I'm still a virgin.

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