You should subscribe to the site's RSS feed here or bookmark the page in your browser. Also, submit your own story for inclusion on the site here. When we were kids, our parents used medical terminology about our bodies. I don’t remember whether it was always that way: I remember when I was very young, about four, watching a TV programme with nobody else around and then proudly bursting into the room declaring that I had learned the “proper” names for genitalia. Whether that memory reflects reality or not, I don’t know.
One day, when I was six– I can place it quite well, because I remember the classroom– I was allowed to choose what reading books I was reading. And I picked out a book called The Body Book, which at the time looked quite fascinating. I remember my teacher wrinkling up her nose in thought as to whether I should be allowed to take a book with naked people on the cover home, and my mother telling her it was all right.
Anyway, so I devoured this book. It had a lot of information in it about such interesting things as emotions and death, but then I got to the page about sex. In case you didn’t bother to look, it explains that boys and girls have “baby-making bits”. A boy’s “baby-making bits” are named as “a penis”. However, not only is the vagina the only part of a woman’s equipment whose existence is acknowledged, but the book even affirms that its name is “a baby-making hole”. Being a knowledge-thirsty kind of kid, I soaked up this information and forgot that I had previously been aware of any other words.
Now, a few months later, it happened that we were doing some Disney songs in the school choir, including the song Twitterpated from Bambi. When we were waiting by the front door getting ready to go to school one morning, my brother (a year younger than me) got bored and decided to pass the time by parodying the song. He sang:
Things begin to happen when a boy meets girl,
The boy puts his penis in the girl’s vulva.
(Somehow he managed to get the second line into the metre. I don’t think we learned about scansion at school.)
Anyway, I turned on him and said, “He doesn’t! He doesn’t!”
My mother fixed a steely eye upon me. “Really, Thomas?” she said. “And what does he do?”
“He puts his penis in the girl’s *baby-making hole*,” I said proudly.
To her credit, my mother kept a straight face.
–Submitted by Thomas
I grew up in a reasonably liberal Orthodox Christian home, and I am Orthodox to this day. I don’t know if it has to do with my parents’ conservatism, or with their feelings concerning my choices and my right to choices, or even if they simply decided that because we were getting sex ed in school, it was unneeded at home, but somehow, they made the decision to refrain from having The Talk with me. To this day, I am profoundly grateful for that choice, as odd as it sounds – I don’t think I could face having that particular chat with my shy, quiet mother, or worse still, my traditional Greek dad. The thought is painful to contemplate! But I still had access to complete, accurate information (we had sex ed in school in grades five, seven, and nine, and I read most of the books in the public library on the subject).
It was never discussed in Sunday school, either (I suppose they assumed that our parents were talking to us about it), but I knew that devout Orthodox Christians were supposed to wait until marriage to have sex. It’s a choice that I question almost every day (with my boyfriend, you would too, believe me), but one that I know in the end is appropriate for me, at least for now. It is not a choice I wish to impose on anyone else, but I do wish that others would respect my right to that choice. Being as liberal as I am in most other aspects of my life, my friends are always stunned when they hear that I’m a virgin, and they immediately question my choice: have I not met the right guy, am I scared, is it a self-esteem issue, am I just not on birth control yet…?
I feel that this is an aspect of sexual education that is often neglected: it is absolutely crucial that every young adult receive accurate information about sex, contraception, STIs, pregnancy, abortions, and all the rest, but it is just as important that we make it clear that choosing to not be sexually active is equally valid, and not a sign of prudishness, close-mindedness, or conservatism. It’s just a different choice. I don’t question your choice; why do you question mine?
In my case, it’s a choice I made out of respect for my own body and out of respect for the person I eventually choose to marry. I’m still young enough to be a romantic at heart: I want my future husband to know that I loved him before I knew him, enough to save at least that for him and for us. I don’t know why others make the choices they do, whatever choices they make, but I respect them regardless. As expressions of sexuality become more openly accepted (and it’s high time they were!), the choice to refrain from such expressions needs to be equally accepted.
I plan to talk to my children about the importance of good, healthy, and safe choices, and about what those choices are, but I want to make sure that they understand that all the choices are equally valid. I can only hope that others will do the same.
–anonymous
I just read the story about a girl telling her family members about a vibrating doodle pen and I had to share my own story about the things.
I had my first orgasms with one of those pens as a young teen! I got it for Christmas a few years earlier, as did all of my younger cousins, but I noticed that the adults were snickering and knew there was something naughty about them. I don’t remember what persuaded me to slip it into my underwear one night, but I remember making quite a habit out of it.
I knew that girls were supposed to masturbate by putting their fingers inside themselves, but I was scared to put anything inside me because I knew that I could hurt myself if I stuck my fingers into my other orifices (or so I was told). I was especially frightened when I first began to get aroused and found myself getting wet, because somehow in all of my sex-ed classes (including a pretty detailed sex-ed book for teens!), no one had ever mentioned that women get wet when they are aroused and I thought I was sick. I had been told that if anything strange came out of there, I should tell my mother or ask to go to the doctor. I wouldn’t get my period for a couple more years yet.
It never occurred to me to rub my clitoris with my fingers, and even when I got older and tried using my fingers inside myself, I didn’t feel anything special like I thought I was supposed to feel. But the pen worked. I used to steal the batteries out of all my old toys to power the thing. When I burned out the motor after a couple years of frequent use, I rode my bike to all the stores nearby that might carry another one, because I was too young to buy a real vibrator. Heaven forbid a sixteen year old girl be allowed to masturbate!
Hopefully by the time I am a parent I will figure out a graceful, caring way to give my teenage daughters their own safe vibrators without totally mortifying them.
–Submitted by M.
Awesome post from random babble… explaining how she learned about menstruation:
I spent the next few nights holed up in my room reading about female and male anatomy, puberty, necking and petting, snickering to myself and re-reading the part about intercourse and ogling the scientific drawings of penises. The books were full of pictures of sanitary napkin belts and never even mentioned STIs or contraceptive. I am absolutely sure it taught that one should abstain from sex until marriage.
And that was that.
That was my big sex talk.
My big lesson on the “birds and the bees”.
I didn’t even know that periods didn’t last forever.
Read the rest of this post at Talking to Kids about Sex.
It makes me so sad to think of a child — any child — worrying unnecessarily about what’s happening to his or her body. Read the rest of the post for the authors quite sensible suggestions on how to bring up sex-ed topics to kids. (Hint: She suggests starting before the age of the first menstrual period.)
random babble…
The following story lay dormant in my memory for many years. It, along with other experiences, explains a lot of things about how I relate to my family. I have recounted this recollection in the third person. That is just how it came out, and who am I to argue with my muse?
***
“Jon showed me something strange today.”
The little girl, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, addresses her family as they drive in the car together. Bellies filled with eggrolls, wonton soup, fried rice and the like, they are motoring home from the local Chinese buffet in Dad’s trusty old Oldsmobile Delta 88.
Dad, a solidly built man with a blond thatch of curly hair atop his large head, is in the front seat, driving. Petite, dark-haired little Mom is riding shotgun, though the little girl wouldn’t learn that term for another five or six years.
In the back, the little girl, little in stature as well as age, sits behind her Dad, while her teenage brother sits behind their Mom. All was customary.
“What was it, honey?” Mom asks.
“It was this vibrating pen. He said he got it from the dollar store.”
Lanky framed Brother begins to giggle.
“Yeah, I bet it was a pen,” he chokes out between guffaws, that mocking, know-it-all tone all teenage boys use in his voice.
“No, no, it really was. Beverly looked at it. She said it had four different colours and that her little brother had one.” The little girl valiantly defends her story, wanting to convey that if a little boy from a Fundamentalist Christian household had this mysterious toy, then it must be okay. It couldn’t be whatever Brother was thinking it was.
Brother keeps giggling… Mom joins in.
“What…what’s so funny? It really was a pen.”
The little girl is starting to tear up, as she is wont to do when she is confused. Dad remains silent, as he is wont to do when he doesn’t want to get involved. Brother and Mom continue to laugh.
A child’s toy that has adult implications. A child’s story that isn’t taken seriously.
What the family doesn’t know, what the family can never learn, is that when Jon, one of the “big boys” (at sixteen or seventeen years) said to the little girl that morning:
“Robin, hold out your hand. I want to show you something.” That when he had said that, she had been fearful, fearful in a way she only half understood, of what he would show her. Holding out her hand, reluctantly, but with fascination, to feel something round, and long and hard, but blessedly buzzing and plastic.
The Delta 88 (a 1985 model) pulls into the driveway, and a normal family gets out. Yet at least one member of the family isn’t the same as she was when she left for the coveted treat of a trip to the Chinese buffet. She has learned subtly, from her usually loving mother’s laughter, that there are some stories she should keep to herself.
Submitted by RM
I have Asperger syndrome. It’s a lifelong condition, but I was only diagnosed as an adult. It’s only now that I can look back at the way I learned about sex as a child and as a teenager that I can see how it made things difficult. One particular way this happens is the need to order one’s life with rules, and not to be able to understand when they should not apply, as others might.
I know my parents must have had The Talk with me at some point, but I retain only one memory: my father reading a sentence from a book saying, “the penis becomes hard and filled with blood.” I responded with disgust at the phrasing. I was young enough at the time that no other memories remain: having had the one discussion, there were never any more.
The Talk presumably focused on penis-in-vagina sex. It’s true that everyone needs to learn about that, but it would have no practical relevance to me until my mid-twenties. About the far more topical issue of masturbation, I learned nothing. Nor was much useful information forthcoming from school sex ed; the TV programmes we were shown explained only that “a boy may hold his penis and get a tingling sensation. A girl may get a similar tingling sensation by stroking the front of her vulva.”
But at the age of about ten, I discovered masturbation independently: I had my own name for it and rules about how to do it, and I thought I was the only person in the world who knew how to do it, or I’d surely have heard about it before then. So for a few years, I masturbated happily with no regrets. Meanwhile, my parents took me to church every Sunday, and I was trying to pray and read the Bible. One day I came across the line in the Book of Revelation which describes heaven– “Outside the gates are the murderers, the idolaters, the sexually immoral…” I realised clearly that what I had been doing was something to do with sex. And a terrified voice in my head asked, “Is that *me*?”
For the next six or seven years I had no peace. If lusting after other people was sinful, it had to go: I made myself stop fantasizing. If sex before marriage was sinful, and masturbation was a kind of sex, it had to go. That wasn’t so easy: I put dozens of rules into place and none of them worked. I tried giving it up permanently, and failed every few days, hating myself more each time. I tried throwing dice or coins when I was horny, so that if God didn’t want me to do it, he would have a way to stop me. I tried praying for wet dreams every night, to no avail. I tried only masturbating on Fridays, as a stepping stone to stopping entirely, but I *lived* for those Fridays.
In short, I spent most of my teenage years in the certain knowledge that I was an evil person, and that part of my very self, my sexuality, was inevitably going to send me to hell. And I don’t know how I could have been loosed from the trap. I wanted to talk to someone about what was troubling me, but I had nobody except my long-suffering diary. I would have been mortified to talk with my parents about it, I didn’t have any teachers I could raise the issue with, I had no friends at school to speak of, and though I read everything in the library I could get my hands on, nothing would reassure me as to the morality of masturbating. Maybe if someone had raised the issue at the beginning, or maybe if I’d had someone from the start that I could talk over any problem with, things would have been better. I don’t know.
I’m not the first, nor will I be the last, to propose that the socially acknowledged terms for sexual orientation leave a lot to be desired. I’m a woman and on the Kinsey scale (which I consider far more user-friendly) I would fall somewhere in the range of a 2. It’s taken me a while to get there and understand what that means for me.
Only in the last few months has the memory surfaced of the first I thought I might like girls. I remember very distinctly standing in the enclosed back porch of my cousin’s house. I was, perhaps, seven or eight and we were taking a brief break before foraging back into the pool. She, six months my junior, had always been a bit of a bully, but I tried to make due with my lone playmate. Being an only child with overprotective parents lent me to very few excursions outside the house, so I knew to enjoy the time I had while I had it.
Somehow it came to me in our conversation that day that I might like girls. I didn’t understand the social ramifications of the information, I hadn’t been given the ‘gays burn in hell’ speech yet, I only knew that, for some reason, I sort of liked girls the same way I liked the freckle-faced boy at school. I shared this information with her and she, giggling and wide-eyed, accepted it with no more issue than had I told her I sneaked an extra cookie before dinner. At least, that’s what I thought.
Later that afternoon I decided to exact my new-found power of using the telephone on my own. We took the cordless phone from its holder in the kitchen and dialed the number of my aforementioned freckle-faced crush. I don’t remember what we talked about (what does one talk about on the phone at that age?), but I remember the absolute shot of panic that ran through me when she snatched the phone and declared, “I’m going to tell him what you told me! I’m going to tell him you like girls!”
I somehow managed to talk her out of it, and I’m not beyond wondering if I actually grabbed the phone out of her hands and hung up on him. I know there was a brief period of begging, of desperation, but she never did say anything and I never spoke of my vague interests again.
I liked boys well enough and, as single digits turned to double and upward, I tended toward boys almost exclusively. In fact, I don’t remember the thought of girls crossing my mind for several years after that. I can only guess I must have severely pushed the information away. During those years I also came to understand that God thought same-sex intimacy was abhorrent, and that those engaging in sexual immorality would be permanently cast out. Between you and me, looking back now, I think Paul was just bitter he wasn’t getting any.
In the mid-late years of puberty I came to the realization that the idea of sex with a woman was not only interesting to me, but desirable in the right circumstances. I realized I was watching women more than men when I was out in public. I didn’t know what to make of it, I was a little afraid of it. I remember driving home, on the interstate south of Richmond with my mother, and telling her that I thought I might like girls too. I came out and said, “I think I might be bisexual. I sort of..like…girls?”
She gave me an odd sort of look from the driver’s seat and laughed, “No you don’t! You wouldn’t want to kiss a woman, would you? Gross!” This, followed by another sort of finial laugh was enough shut me up entirely.
Since then, I’ve shared the information with only two people: my best friend (who doesn’t care, particularly given I’ve never been attracted to her), and my male partner. He is a solid 3 now, perhaps a leaning 4 on the Kinsey scale. He had predominantly (nearly exclusively) male partners before we found each other and, for some reason, we fell in love. We work well together, we have a great sex life, and when I told him about my interest in women he laughed and said, “Fantastic. Now we can really look at people together.”
I don’t know if I’ll ever have sex with a woman. If our relationship continues as we both foresee it doing (that is, marriage and children), I have no interest of bringing other partners into the picture. It may be that I quietly admire from the sidelines and enact fantasies on my own or with him when the mood strikes.
I know this for sure, though: whatever gender preferences or interests our children have, we will never, ever, laugh at them.
While I am certain that my mother had (or tried to have) The Talk with me roundabout sixth grade, I seem to have blocked that from my memory. Or perhaps I blew her off to stave off embarrassment and avoid the whole thing altogether. I likely said “Mooommmm I already know that, they gave us a class” and turned my back. She gave me a crude 1980’s era clinical pamphlet from the doctor’s office. I can recall looking at it in secret but I didn’t fully grasp the information.
But I still recall a few moments from my first Sex-Ed class. It was tradition at the time for the sixth grade class to take a field trip into the big city; both before and after the mortifying group class we took little jaunts to the Aviary, the Museum, etc. So we had bits of normalcy to cushion the shock, so to speak.
It was taught by a nurse and there were slides of health book style drawings and diagrams. I believe the moment she completely lost control of our sixth grade class was when she got to the “penis in vagina” part of what intercourse is. The whole class laughed. For a good five minutes. There was the usual nudging and giggling throughout but for the most part the boys and the girls didn’t acknowledge each other. We now KNEW THINGS that couldn’t be taken back.
But between the forced-group initiation and my discomfort on discussing such subjects after that with the likes of my mother, I actually didn’t learn much. In fact I clearly did NOT learn much even after the Sex-Ed portion of the eighth grade health class because when it came time for me to be in a sexual relationship four years later……I didn’t know much about my own genitalia. When my teenage boyfriend tried to lick my clit, I didn’t know what he was doing – but I didn’t like it and said “I think you’re in the wrong spot.”
It took another five years at least until I admitted to my then-boyfriend that I wasn’t sure where my clit was; he showed me. And it was another couple of years (late 20’s) until I was masturbating “properly” and experiencing something close to an orgasm. I truly had a number of years of being sexually active and not getting a whole lot of pleasure from it. I liked the idea of the act, and the pleasure I was giving my partner, more than the actual act of sex itself.
I wish I had been taught better, in more comfortable environments. Not in a classroom full of giggly peers and not by my mother who I didn’t like much. I would have been much more receptive if the teaching was done by a female I liked and looked up to, like any one of my cousins.
I know that should my future daughter refuse to let me talk, I’ll enlist outside help. But I also know that I want my daughter to know so much more than me, including how to masturbate and derive pleasure from sexual activities when she’s ready. I feel like I missed out on a number of “good sex years” by not knowing how to enjoy it.
I always thought kinks, fetishes, or new sexual interests were something concretely formed early in life. Exposed to fetish at an young age (on accident by my own discovery, being that I was curious child who read a lot), I sorted out on my own that the dominant/submissive roles were simply something that one had from sexual awakening. This thinking was, I thought, confirmed, when I hit puberty and realized my interest was much less in the boys my own age and much more in their fathers. After all, the fathers seemed very well in control, some of them were teachers who easily handled a classroom of adults without fear. These things (and the submissive side they brought out) appealed to me and, with my fascination for hands, I thought I had my kinks well sorted.
Then, one day, my boyfriend expressed his interest in me wearing a strap on.
Well, that sounded good. Hot, even. The more I thought about it, even the dangerous thrill I got from thinking about him sucking my ‘cock’, I quickly and easily tucked it away into my list of interests.
He brought up the idea of me dominating him, albeit perhaps more subtly than one would think. I was game, though a little nervous.
Then, we got into a discussion about me wearing his boxers and how sexy he found it. He laughed, asking if I’d feel the same way about him wearing some of my underwear. I started to laugh too, amused at the image, until I thought about it a little more. He has great legs, and how good would he look with my underwear pooled around his ankles while I suck him off? Well, that one got tucked away into the proverbial filing cabinet too.
Much to my surprise the kinks and interests have continued to pile up. We talk through them as best we can, working the delicate lines of trust and control, gender and play, exploring our fantasies and having a blast while doing so.
I wonder, sometimes, how we’re going to discuss kinks with our children (when the come, and when they’re old enough to have that level of a sexual talk). Until then, I think the best thing is to keep talking and keep having fun. Practice make perfect, and practice, I’ve found, makes more kinks.
At my school, we were given Sex Ed in grade seven. It was a fairly comprehensive program covering the anatomy and reproductive cycles of both the male and the female, the general mechanics of sex, pregnancy and some time devoted to topics of pleasure, relationships, masturbation and anonymous Q&A sessions.
During one class when we were learning about menstruation and the laundry list of symptoms that accompanies this monthly cycle, my teacher told us “The body is mourning the loss of a potential baby”.
I remember instantly disliking what she had just said. There was something about that statement that grated against me like nails on a chalk board. But I couldn’t tell why. For several years, whenever I thought about that class, I would flush in anger. I felt there was something fundamentally wrong and insulting about the comment, but I couldn’t put my finger on what bothered me so much. I eventually put it out of my mind.
Many years later, when I was in university and hanging around with friends in the Women and Gender studies program, and blossoming with my own ideas of sexual liberty and equality, I recognized that statement for the misogynistic bullshit that it was. I was able to finally put into words exactly what it was about that statement that bothered me so much — how it suggests that a woman can not be complete or truly happy unless she is pregnant. That her entire purpose is to carry children because even her own body demands it and “weeps” when it is denied every month. It represents the manipulation of biology and science to justify social inequality and misogyny (similar tactics have been used to suppress other minorities as well).
I am sure that was never my teacher’s intention, who for the record was a woman herself. However, those words represented my first encountered with institutionalized sexism and how we as a society can so easily perpetuate this type of inequality and ridiculous social attitude, even against ourselves, by what we say or do not say.
I will always be proud of myself for being bothered by those words, even if I didn’t understand why. I was able to recognize that there was something wrong and I was unwilling to accept sexist bullshit.
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