We need a new story!!!

[sebbie]

James was baffled. Really baffled. He got up for school the next day and he couldn’t help but keep thinking about all that had happened to him when he had tried on his new swimsuits in his room. He thought he already understood everything he needed to know about being a guy, but now clearly not. There was still stuff to be learned. His body was playing stupid tricks on him, doing things he didn’t know would ever happen. What was going on, anyway?

To start with, why should just trying on a few swimsuits get him so excited “down there”. It was if his private parts had a mind of their own, and were telling his brain what they were thinking. Just the thought of shoving his private parts into a little swimsuit suit was somehow extraordinarily exciting. James was apprehensive, but in a weird way, he felt really good. He was suddenly hooked on the whole idea of just getting into a suit.

The connection between all of this and getting aroused by being with a partner was equally a mystery. Why did he think it was so much fun the other day to watch Bryan also struggle to get into his own little suit, perhaps struggling with the exact same feelings and sensations James was struggling with? Did this mean that James had a “gay” side? And why did the girls at school who had not before paid any attention to him suddenly seems so interested in James when they saw him wearing his team suit? All a great mystery.

There were other puzzles. Never before had he observed a wet spot quite like the one he saw at the tip of his penis when he got into his first new suit. The wet spot was definitely not pee. And he knew it was not semen either, as he wasn’t even erect or certainly not having an orgasm. Instead, it was a clear, gloppy, viscous liquid that looked almost like his plastic model-building cement coming out of a tube. No one had mentioned anything about that in his 8th grade health education course. What a puzzle!

James would have loved to understand all of this better by doing a Google search on the Internet. But he did not dare. The school was very fussy about not letting students do any searching on the school computers on any subject remotely related to sex. That was unfortunate. His other option was to go to the school library and pull down an encyclopedia. The encyclopedias they still had in a dusty corner of the school library were old, and out of date. Besides, what article title was he supposed to look for? Certainly there was not an article titled “Getting aroused by pulling on a swimsuit.”

James was baffled by a host of issues. Really baffled. He only knew two things for sure. First, if he was going to wear one of his new suits for swim team practice, he had better steer clear of that little Sporti for now, at least, and second, he really wanted to repeat the same “experiment” he had conducted with the three suits the day before another time, to see if his body would again respond in the same way, as soon as he thought he could once again be in private. James kept thinking about this, with the same thoughts somehow going over and over again in his mind. And he certainly did not want to tell Bryan what happened to him. Bryan would likely just laugh. Or maybe mutter something like “if that happens to you, get into the pool as fast as possible.”

[sebbie]

I'm debating where to take this story line next. I'm not able to write story lines involving swim-team shenanigans, and I am probably not the most knowledgable on the subject of first love infatuations. What i do feel comfortable writing usually ends up learning about and discovering ones' own body while going through and just after puberty. I think I can clearly understand what is going on inside Jimmy's head, but I am open to ideas. What do you think? Jimmy clearly needs to do some research on the issues about his body that are puzzling him right now. This can run as a story line parallel to the swim-team exploits. OK, so he finds a tattered-but-interesting book in a dusty corner of the school library no one apparently knew was there.

[Dooley67]

Originally Posted by sebbie

I'm debating where to take this story line next. I'm not able to write story lines involving swim-team shenanigans, and I am probably not the most knowledgable on the subject of first love infatuations. What i do feel comfortable writing usually ends up learning about and discovering ones' own body while going through and just after puberty. I think I can clearly understand what is going on inside Jimmy's head, but I am open to ideas. What do you think? Jimmy clearly needs to do some research on the issues about his body that are puzzling him right now. This can run as a story line parallel to the swim-team exploits. OK, so he finds a tattered-but-interesting book in a dusty corner of the school library no one apparently knew was there.

Sebbie,

While I think that going through puberty while discovering one's own body is very important, I'm uncomfortable with it when the subject itself involves text with sexual overtones with minors involved. I think that gets into risky territory. I'd rather see the story continue about interactions with team members, attractions to girls or boys, whatever the case might be, testing the limits as far as rules are concerned, similar to how STS continued the story and I piggybacked on it. It's the whole idea of coming of age and what all that entails. This has been my very first attempt at fiction and I'm just feeling my way along. I don't know if this has been helpful to you - I hope it has.

D67

[sebbie]

I confess that I'm a bit lost here as I was not thinking of heading in that direction at all. I was thinking of moving this in the direction of how a young person learns about his own body growing up in the current world with all its fears and restrictions. I was definitely not thinking about writing details describing sexual contact between individuals underage or not regardless of gender. As I indicated, I couldn't compose a suitable story line of that sort anyway.

i guess maybe one option is to just stop the story line where it is now.

But, young people really do need accurate information in order to understand what is going on. Growing up, my main source was encyclopedias and other old books. But currently, schools are so sensitive about having anything in their libraries that would be regarded as sexually explicit by any possibly-somehow-offended parent that they have cleaned out any of these materials as well.

I can go on Amazon and find any number of recently-written paperback books written by authors directed to teen youth with the expressed objective of providing underage youth with positive information about human sexuality along with details about how sex works in both sexes. Some of these books are quite good, but also would be considered by many people to be quite explicit. And the underage kids who need the information are not going to be able to flip out a credit card and somehow privately order a copy of what they want to read and have the book delivered to their home without their parents finding out. Their parents might think the book is explicit as in offensively explicit.

Nor are they likely to have the courage to go to their parents and say "I need you to order me this book because I have questions I am too embarrassed to ask you" So all sorts of questions go unanswered---questions where accurate information is very much needed. The youth are forced to rely on bits and pieces of information mainly picked up from peers who are equally uninformed.

Alternately, some of this same educational information is readily available on the Web, including some Web sites purposely set up to provide detailed sex information for young people. But then schools are so sensitive to the notion that students should not be able to search the Web and find "sexually explicit" materials that they use electronic screeners to prohibit students from finding ANY site that discusses sex or sexuality regardless of purpose or intent. The sites designed for sex education get screened out the exact same way a pornographic site would get screened out. For example, searching on even a simple term like "masturbation" would likely get screened no matter what.

I now feel badly about the sexual education mess we have gotten ourselves into where adolescents cannot now find any reliable source of information related to sex without someone calling out that this could somehow be interpreted as a form of "sexual abuse". Are even parents comfortable now living in a world that labels any detailed sexual information as a form of sexual abuse?

The young people are back to pretty much stuck relying on peer friends for information, and we all know how accurate that is.

Swim team escapades are an ok story line I guess but have almost nothing to do with the story line I was thinking of here, which was related directly to the dilemma young people seeking information about sex and sexuality now find themselves in. This has never been easy for young people, and quality information has never been as accessible as it should be, but things are getting worse in this regard not better.

OK, so Jimmy finds a book, a book in a dusty corner of the school library no adult seemed to know was there, and somehow didn't get tossed in the last "purge" of materials from the school library that the school board decided was to be banned because it was "sexually explicit." Can Jimmy ever get access to a computer to search terms he wants on the Web without having them screened? That is a related story line. Maybe the book will prove useful in coming up with terms that the school screener doesn't catch. Or, maybe not.

Sebbie

[SwimTeamSpeedo]

Originally Posted by sebbie

Swim team escapades are an ok story line I guess but have almost nothing to do with the story line I was thinking of here, which was related directly to the dilemma young people seeking information about sex and sexuality now find themselves in.

Sebbie, I guess I am really confused. If you had a plan and a plot that you wanted to write about then why did you ask other members to join in (and you never gave any plot rules)? If you did not want it about swim team why did your very first chapter start with a swim team named the Tornados? Once you gave the story a "take it from here" invite, you opened it up to flow where the next writer was going to take it. Since there are only a small number of members who actually write stories on the board, and the plot lines of many of those stories are very consistent to how you started this one, I would say you got exactly what you asked for.

My suggestion, you simply take the story exclusively from here. It sounds like that is what you wanted all along. D67 and I, along with any others who want to jump in, can continue the Tornados story line at its new home, under the a title that more reflects the story than "We need a new story".

STS

[sebbie]

I'm ok with that, I guess....I thought I could keep up a subplot to the story going irrespective of where the story headed on a continuing basis, and was hoping another writer or two would be able to and want to add to that plot as well, but apparently that isn't going to happen. As you might expect a some of this is tied to my own experiences growing up in dealing with these issues with a character built around that, and I expected others would add elements as they worked as well from their own experiences growing up. My problem is that I have never been on a high school or college swim team so I can only vaguely relate to that. The stuff I write about is very real to me as I have been in that situation not knowing and voraciously seeking out information wherever I could find it.