It never ceases to surprise me how squeamish so many adults can be when it comes to public discussions about sex. This is despite the fact that many of them have had it or are thinking about having it.
Somebody, somewhere once came up with the statistic that men thought about sex every seven seconds. Cleverer people than me worked out that added up to 514 times an hour. Or approximately 7,200 times during each waking day, which, let's face it, sounds excessive.
That unscientific estimate has since been dismissed and back in 2011, researchers from Ohio State University found that the average man in their study had 19 thoughts about sex a day while the women in their study had about 10 thoughts a day.
While these later figures sound rather more likely, you wouldn’t know it by our prudishness about it.
I remember an incident back at my all boys primary school when in standard six the subject human reproduction came up. Our regular science teacher was a woman, but on the day of this discussion, she was replaced by her husband who also taught at the school.
The poor man was obviously very embarrassed as he rushed through the lesson, and did his best to discourage questions from the class.
Quite a few years before when my parents were expecting my younger sister, they had taken what I realised later was a bold and unusual step of educating me about where babies came from with the aid of a book written for children.
This book published in the 1970s contained straightforward, child-friendly explanations about physical maturation, sexual intercourse, foetal development and the birth process, and was a great help for me to begin to understand human sexuality.
I realised my parents had been unusual among their peers when the science class finally ended and we left for our morning break.
One of my friends pulled me aside and went on a tirade about how the teacher had told us a pack of lies about human reproduction. He said his parents had told him that babies came into the world once people were married and God smiled on them.
I couldn't believe all this garbage, and felt very sorry for my friend. Years later when he and his wife had their firstborn, I remember asking him: So God smiled, did He?
It took him a few moments to register and then we laughed about it. I can only hope that he was more forthright with his kids about sex.
More than 30 years ago in August 1991, the American hip hop trio Salt-n-Pepa released what would become a worldwide hit, Let’s talk about sex.
That song, as Wikipedia reminds me, had lyrics about safe sex, the positive and negative sides of sex and the censorship that sex had around that time in mainstream media.
It’s sad to think that over 30 years later, we are still not openly talking about sex
And it is not just in Kenya. In South Africa, there was recently a kerfuffle in Johannesburg when a billboard appeared showing the image of a woman’s backside with “The Sex Expo'' written on one cheek to advertise the forthcoming opening of the controversial annual trade fair.
Every year the Sexpo features engaging and informative discussions covering all aspects of sexual health and lifestyle by world-renowned sexologists and expert speakers and the organisers see their mission as educating and opening minds.
The promoters of the Sexpo love the outrage and the publicity as it guarantees them more participants, a point the critics don’t seem to get.
The Sexpo is the kind of thing I remember hoping would be sparked in Kenya back when one of the most popular columns in the country, Sex Aunty by Getrude Mungai, was to be found in this newspaper.
But then remembering the 2016 Communications Authority banning broadcasters from airing “explicit content” between 5 am to 10 pm, and the budding theocracy that we seem to be sleepwalking into, I suspect we won’t be having a Kenyan edition of the Sexpo anytime soon.
And that’s a crying shame.
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