Turtle Sex

Ho hum here we go again. Child gets reading list from teacher. Child hates reading, not only that but no one has made a movie of it so that Child can watch the movie and act like they read the book. Reading is work, Child hates work, and Child especially hates books that are 366 pages long.

Instead, Child finds a juicy part in the book, shows it to parent who goes ballistic. Next thing you know, book is now removed from required reading. There's a bazillion books out there and it isn't worth a battle at the Board of Education level to make Child read book. Child learns valuable lessons about hypocrisy and how to game the education system.

The Bean Trees is the book in question and it sits on the State of Georgia's recommended list of books for ninth graders, but was assigned to an 11th grade class. As the Valdosta Times hasn't bothered to read the book, either, I'll tell you what the problem is.

Turtles have sex.

Yep, you heard it here first. This is a coming of age story of teenage girl who runs away from her rural Tennessee mountain home to avoid becoming a teenage mother. She ends up taking on an orphaned infant and finds out about life. The juicy parts are when she fantasies about having sex and decides that it’s not for her.

Teenage boys caught in their own coming of age stories deal with this problem all the time. It usually involves a bottle of cheap wine and Prom night. This is why you don’t find many boys-coming-of-age books on High School reading lists.

Anyway, in part of the book she watches turtles have sex and wonder if it was good for them. I Googled this line of inquiry and have found that along with humans and some apes, only turtles enjoy having sex for pleasure; however, they prefer flamingos and not each other.

I join the Child in being upset that there isn't a movie of this book. However, there are plenty of videos of turtle's having sex on You Tube. The link there gives you a whole lot of R rated turtle material. Warning, turn the sound down because the male makes a lot of noise.

Oh, one last part of this drama has yet to play out. Soon we'll get the "Valdosta's a so-called metro area and we have to put up with this silly stuff all the time" Rant and Rave in the paper. Hell, maybe I'll just submit it myself since everyone else is busy watching Ivan raping the Gulf Coast on the Weather Channel. That's known as Weather Porn, folks.

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Updates: This page is the most trafficked page on my entire site. In fact, it is the most read of all my essays going back to the early 90's. Google "Turtle Sex" and this shows up. Welcome perverts!

Update: The teachers who got slammed in turn got a State Board to slam back at the Board of Education for non-professional behavior. The Lowndes County BoE ended up with a large black eye.

Update: 8/10/08 I updated the text to give everyone a link to real turtles having sex. You have to prove you are an adult at You Tube in order to watch.