I think anyone who has the balls to teach sex ed (see what I did there) is commendable in their own right, because let's be real, we were total monsters in middle school. Even the best behaved among us couldn't resist laughing at the word "scrotum". I genuinely think the whole ordeal would have been 90% less awkward, though, if we'd just let Bill Nye teach it, because now that I've seen Bill Nye teaching the evolution of sex on StarTalk, I'm kind of disinterested in anyone else talking to me about sex ever again. (Make of that what you will.)
What I love about Bill Nye is that he just gets exponentially more baller with age. I mean, you remember back in elementary school when the substitute teacher rolled in that monitor and every single organ in your body was like BILL Bill Bill (bill billbillbillllll). I honestly feel like Bill Nye covered everything we ever needed to know about the universe no matter where we were in our life and times, and most importantly, he never condescended even when we were bbs and really had no idea what "dark matter" was. (Well, to be fair, nobody does. But I feel like I kind of get it better now? Oh, God, adulthood isn't even real, is it?)
Look, my existential crisis aside, Bill Nye is every bit as frank and hilarious about sex as he is with every other topic he has graced us with a lesson about. I feel like nobody says it better than Neil Degrasse Tyson:
One point that Nye makes is how humans, more than any other animal, are driven to have sex not just to procreate, but for pleasure as well. Like, if we were ordinary animals and not sex maniacs, we'd do it a whole bunch of times in the winter the way people salt their driveways for snow and hope for the best.
But more and more there is an evolutionary trend of animals having sex for pleasure as well. I mean, it makes sense—the animals who like to have sex are having more of it, and therefore making more animals that might also be genetically predisposed to enjoy ~the sex~. Bill Nye didn't say this, but it basically seems to me that humans are the most powerful species on earth because we're just really into getting laid a lot. Not a bad position to be in, TBH.
Oh, yeah, and enjoy that extremely subtle panda sex. You're welcome.
Of course, it wouldn't be a Bill Nye video if something like this didn't happen:
I thought I was obsessed with him as a kid, and I am obsessed with him in adulthood. Petition to just have a hologram of Bill Nye help kids with their homework all over the world, because he basically is science. What came first, science or Bill Nye? '90s kids will never know.
Here's the full clip of the StarTalk guest spot below:
Images: Getty Images, YouTube (4)
