Celibacy is not normal.

There are only a few requisites in life, things we have to do: breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and having sex. (I may have forgotten something.) Yes, we should exercise, but you won't die if you don't do it. And we should work for a living, but lots of people don't have to and get along just fine, even better than fine.

There is no disputing the first four -- breathing, eating, drinking, sleeping -- but the problem arises at number five: sex. It's necessary for the species to keep re-generating, but is it essential to your or my individual life? Can such a fundamental urge be suppressed by any of us?

It is, in various ways and for various reasons, but with mixed results. There are certainly people among us who don't have much of a sex drive, but I'd bet they're in the minority. Most of us yearn for it even before we know what it is.

But among those who choose not to have sex, probably the most prominent are the religious types who take a vow of chastity along with their professed faith in God. Be they priests or monks or nuns or whatever, they spend what I would have to guess to be a big part of their next years -- when they're just coming into the prime of life -- doing their best to keep their almost overwhelming urges -- those down there -- at bay, while secretly praying for sexual release. Of course it's forbidden by the church -- sex outside marriage, and you not allowed to marry --so what's a frustrated nun or priest to do, knowing these urges are not going to just go away? How do you come to terms with that?

Well, you do or you don't. You either learn to relieve yourself "that way" or you have to be super-human about pretending those desires don't exist -- and here's your Oscar for Best Actor/Actress . Or, in the worst case, you act out your sexual fantasies on kids who have no idea what you're doing until it's much too late. Maybe years later.

I'm sure that most of the priests and nuns of the world -- and their celibate counterparts in other religions -- are upright and moral to the highest degree, but there are some among them who can't deal with the ban on sex. The sexual urge is just too strong.

And I'm not, of course, only talking about religious people when I'm discussing those who don't have sex but desire it to the point that it involves children. They're everywhere among us, our fellow citizens who never had a satisfying adult sexual relationship and who will never know the joy -- and sorrow -- it can bring. Maybe they were abused as children and introduced to sex way before they knew what it meant by monstrous predators. Or maybe they were raped at a young age by somone older. Whoever they are, victim or predator, they're locked into a pre-pubescent state where the sexual urge is just starting but where sex makes no sense. They don't associate sex with flowers and candy and tender touches.

They're crazy.

Right up until my day of death -- assuming I'm not run over by a truck while riding my bike --
when I'm lying on the bed in my home, a very old man, hospice workers shooed away, wishing my gathered relatives the best while sucking down my last breaths -- I will never understand any religion that doesn't allow its men to marry its women. To do anything else is inviting trouble. A man who loves his wife and his children is much more likely to render a just judgment on any miscreant who comes before him. And he's also much less likely to take out his sexual frustration on a child.

Any man or woman denied sexual satisfaction for a lifetime is a bomb waiting to explode.

To refuse to acknowledge and even honor sex is the height or depth of irrationality.

It's built into us and can't be denied. The best any of us can do -- individual or religion or parent -- is to channel it into a form that won't hurt women or children.

Pardon my being graphic, but a boy's penis is, at some point, going to get hard, and something in his primal brain tells him that he needs to insert it into the private parts of a girl. He knows nothing about those parts or how his part will fit in there, but he's got to do it.

Girls and women: if you don't want sex with a particular guy, don't let things go too far. If you've decided that this guy is not for you, shut down the date before his penis gets hard. Sorry to be so blunt, but that's how it is. Guys past a certain point are crazed animals. It's who they are, who I am, for better or worse. Biology did it to us. Of course we can override biology, being intelligent beings, but that takes a really smart and disciplined guy. Is the one you're about to have sex with smart and disciplined? Or is he someone you just met in a bar?

The repercussions are likely to fall on you, not him. Are you ready for all that?

(I'm not addressing homosexual urges/yearnings because I don't know about them, but I'm pretty sure the same principles apply: sex, after all, is sex.)

A not-so-radical suggestion: Why not train our daughters to jerk the guy off?

(Not so radical because smart girls have always known about it.)

All it takes, at that age -- maybe at any age -- is a few quick up and down motions, and the stressful moment is over. The guy needs a few seconds to regain his senses, then looks embarrassed, hauling up his pants. He can't believe what just happened -- probably is grateful to you for it -- and nobody got pregnant or a disease. Make him kiss you to show how grateful he is.

That scenario, of course, leaves the girl un-satisfied. Maybe she was getting aroused, was ready for that penis to be put into her vagina, to see what it felt like. But she was too smart to let it happen, knowing that he didn't have on a condom. Now she's gotten him off -- and maybe even been kissed -- but is still aroused. What to do?

Lots of women use vibrators which stimulate the clitoris, but I would recommend your own fingers. It's what a smart guy would have done for you -- what older guys with more experience will do -- but you can do it yourself. Just buy a tube of that jelly stuff (K-Y?) and think of Brad Pitt or whoever and bring yourself to satisfaction. You know where your center of pleasure lies.

Let me repeat: celibacy is not normal. We're supposed to have sex. Ideally with others about our own age, and willingly. If necessary by ourselves. All living beings except for a few weird uni-cell ones have sex. It gets us into lots of trouble, but it's unavoidable, and I think it may get us into even more trouble if we try to deny it, to pretend it doesn't exist.

As the old map-makers used to write of the unexplored world: "There be monsters."

The un-expressed sex life is a kind of unexplored world. And there be monsters indeed.

Let's figure out a way that we can all -- pardon the vulgarity -- "get off" when we need to. If we take the lid off sexual frustration -- let it spew, so to speak -- we'll eliminate most if not all of the sexual offenses against women and children.

Praise the Lord, salvation is just a hand-job away!