Editorial: What government should do: White House ought to match policy to its new sales pitch.

Submitted by admin on Sun, 2005-10-23 11:00.

Oh, yeah, we don't have intelligent discussions about normal sexuality. This fact never occurred to me until recently, when I participated in a sexual adventure of my own. No boats were involved, but there was plenty of raucous talk and, even, snippets of pornographic websites. Actually, it was a journalism conference. And it was serious business.

The weeklong gathering, titled, "Reporting on Sex, Sexuality and Pop Culture," brought together 20 editors and reporters from as far away as Denmark. It was sponsored by the Poynter Institute, a St. Petersburg, Florida-based think tank for journalists worldwide, and was three years in the making. Part of the delay was the logistics of pulling off any complex conference. But part, I'm guessing, was figuring out how a bunch of journalists could banter freely about vibrators, vaginas and vasectomies before daily breaks for tuna salad and brownies in the institute's hallowed halls.

Reassuring? Helpful and informative? Playful and affirming? Or, would your list more likely include words such as sordid and titillating? Troubling? Confusing? Or just plain hypocritical?

If you chose the latter, I have a hunch why you did. Pick up any newspaper, from the New York Times to USA Today to the Star Tribune, and you'll get a good sense of what our world is about. Who's hot in entertainment, the latest in iPod innovations, and how the world can go terribly wrong, such as when a hurricane hits an impoverished community or a little boy is beaten unconscious for unwittingly wearing the wrong color. You'll learn about medical breakthroughs, the best mutual funds and the happy news (at least to this writer) that carbs are back.

We'll tell you who was born, who died, who is marrying and divorcing and expecting. We'll tell you about many stops along the progression of normal human behavior.

After a week of animated discussions with my peers, I now realize just how we cheat you by doing this. It's a myth that sexual coverage is everywhere. Kelly McBride, a dynamic former newspaper reporter who is now Poynter's ethics group leader, shared a study showing that, in fact, 85 percent of sex coverage appears in just two places: On entertainment pages (54 percent) or as news of sex crimes (31 percent).

That means that nearly all the sexual content we publish is either tawdry -- Vikings players floating their boats, stars doing their nannies, endless replays of Janet Jackson's breast, Madonna locking lips with Britney. Or, it's horrific -- pedophile priests, repeat sex offenders, predators stalking preteens on the Internet.

It's easy to publish troubling statistics about the prevalence of oral sex among teens, so we do. It's a lot tougher (and kind of dull) to write about the culture we've created where our kids don't even compute how casual their sex has become. So we don't.

We'll tell you about over-the-top weddings and how some grooms are becoming as impossible to please as bridezillas. But we don't report how hard it can be to stay true to one another for four or five decades, a phenomenon of modern marriage and longevity for which there is no road map. When babies come, we'll tell you what toys to buy, but not what a new father is supposed to do when his exhausted wife doesn't want to have sex. On the other hand, we also won't explore a growing industry of erotica created especially for women, many of them happily married and living on cul de sacs. And we sure won't write about the sexual needs of seniors. Puhleeze! Or people with disabilities.

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