[sebbie]

Getting to go to college can be a marvelous experience. Most of the constraints imposed on you by teachers in high school are suddenly gone. Professors seem to not really care what you do except they like it when you show up for class. Parents are back home not watching your every move, and the professors are clearly not locus parentis. The dorm has a resident counselor, but he seems like a very mild-mannered junior psychology/social work major of all things, there only because he has two years of college under his belt.

Colleges give students a lot of latitude to study subjects on a wide range of topics in as much depth as each student wants to go, indeed, the deeper the better. And no subject is more interesting to study than human sexuality now without any constraints imposed by parents or high school teachers. And with the Web now completely lacking adult/parental controls, Bill was ready to do some serious reading up on all the topics he wanted to know more about. Have other guys discovered the same things Bill had discovered under the covers? How do other guys deal with all of this?

A lot of the Web sites Bill has managed to read at some level sound very scientific, sometimes using terms unfamiliar to Bill. Bill had hung out with peers in high school, and any reference to sexual parts or function always was in slang. Penis sometimes came out as dong, for example. Testicles were balls or sometimes ‘nads. Bill had always wondered where the term nads came from, but on line he soon learned that nads was really a slang shortening of gonads, which could refer to either the male or female sexual organs. Nads were like ‘rents were to parents as in I really wanted to go to the party, but my ‘rents wouldn’t let me out of the house! I was really feeling horny and my ‘nads were aching to blow. Ahh, for the vernacular peer slang language of the teen-ager.

Bill had gotten into some really interesting reading when he searched on the terms frenulum and perineum. Both searches led to some well laid out Web sites that explained some details of human sexuality Bill was not aware of, with even line anatomical drawings and an occasional photo too. These were the kinds of materials the adult firewall Web controls were blocking in high school. That seemed strangely unfortunate to Bill, because the sites he was pulling up were designed to be educational about sex and sexuality but not pornographic as such. The topics addressed some of the same issues in the high school sex and socialization class, but in far greater detail.

This whole issue of slang versus scientific term got more complicated as Bill kept digging. Bill knew that jerk-off was slang for masturbation aka solo sex. The guys in high school would say that they were horny and needed to jerk off, on occasion, but never that they needed to masturbate. In the world of high school teen boys with raging hormones, jerk-off was considered at least somewhat socially acceptable, but masturbation was done only by non-athletic, socially-insecure teen males who were uncertain of their own sexual orientation. Some difference! And then, the guys routinely referred to a peer whose behavior was in some way out of line derogatorily as a jerk-off. This was confusing, to say the least. But then guys would also refer to the misbehaving person as a dong. It was never clear whether a dong referred to any penis in any stage of erection, or only an erect penis. Then sometimes a guy would say “you penis-breath” to another guy, but usually only in jest when the other guy did something considered dumb or stupid. What exactly a penis-breath meant was not totally clear either. Teen male vernacular and insults done in jest with no serious ill will using sexual slang can quickly become very complicated.

I do not want to lose track of the story line here nor write as if I have forgotten where I left Bill in his college, sleeping in a twin bed across from Joe, but Bill’s interest is seeking out information about sex and sexuality plays right into the situation Bill is currently in sleeping in the dorm room. Bill knew that on the Web, he was seeing not only masturbation as the correct term for jerk-off,but also erection for the slang term hard-on. No teen would ever say he was getting an erection, the proper vernacular was that he was getting a hard-on.

Then there was the physiology of all of this, as in why and how does the penis get hard and erect. For a teen male, this can be an incredibly complicated subject in part because of the loopy mixture of physical and psychological invariably going on. Some of what is going on seems to be in the head and some in the body, but what is driving and controlling what? Is sex really about the sex organs or the brain? Well, Bill was starting to realize that the simplest answer to that question was some of both, but that does not really resolve the matter at all, and in fact that explanation makes understanding even more difficult. Sebbie, in his papers that Bill read, seemed to delight in messing with his readers in this regard, taking over the reader’s brains in a funny way. And this is what led directly to the funchball game and the wet dream that was so much fun for Bill last night. But the control did not stop there as evidenced by the fact that Bill raced out to the sporting goods store after classes to pick out his own funchball uniform like the one he saw in the dream and now was sleeping in it, of all things.

……..To be continued