In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

How can you have sex when you don’t even know what sex is?

Erica

Working at Planned Parenthood, I tend to get a lot of questions about sex and sexual health. I’ve met people at parties and had them tell me about their crabs. I’ve had folks I just met at a bar, only half-jokingly, ask about a rash they had in their nether-regions. And I’ve become the resident expert at family dinners about all things sexual (or political, but that’s another matter).

On the one hand it’s ridiculous — I am not a doctor and can’t give medical advice. But on the other hand it makes perfect sense — so many of us have gaps in our education and need some answers, preferably from someone more reliable than Web MD.

This next story relates to that — and how we can be so out of touch with our bodies, or just uneducated about our bodies, that we don’t even know what’s happening.

    The first one is short: Until I was about twelve, I didn’t understand how a tampon could work. I figured you’d have to swallow it to get it inside yourself. (You can tell I wasn’t very in touch with my body as a kid.)

    The second one is a little longer and significantly more embarrassing: When I was thirteen, I lost my virginity. Except I didn’t. I was pretty sheltered, and had no idea about the workings of my body (see above), and my boyfriend told me we’d had sex, and I believed him. It wasn’t until about three years later that I talked it through with someone and realized that there had been no penetration at all, that I guess he just got off like between my butt and the bed (it was missionary). Clearly he was just as clueless as me. 

PS – As I mentioned in my first post — Planned Parenthood of New York City has some great guides on how to talk to your kids about sex, and is currently running a campaign to make sure all kids in NYC are taught accurate, age-appropriate sex education.

Posted in Sex

21 thoughts on How can you have sex when you don’t even know what sex is?

  2. I am not going to write about my sex life on a public blog, but I can certainly relate to being out of touch with your body, and that certainly effects my sexuality. So does being undereducated – I finally got the courage to visit ScarleTeen a few months ago, very ashamed as am nearly 24.

  3. Thanks for sharing Astrid, and there’s absolutely no reason to feel ashamed. It’s amazing at how much we’re all learning with each new experience. I have the luck of being immersed in it for work, but often am amazed at how much I don’t know. The only thing I’d be ashamed about is assuming you know everything already.

  4. About ten years ago I taught a physiology and anatomy class for women returning to the work force as medical office workers. All of the women in my class were over thirty and most had at least one child. During the lesson on reproduction one of the women (a mother) asked me, “Ms. S, my cousin says if you empty the tiny time pills out of a Contac capsule, fill it with Vaseline and put it in your coochie, you won’t get pregnant. Is that true?” After asking her how many children her cousin has, and repeating the old saw that the only way that pill will work is if you hold it between your knees, we talked about where babies really come from and how they get in there. Holy cow.

  5. I wrote a post along these lines some time ago. My sex education was slightly better than that – I did get told where penis goes and how babies happen – but it was still woefully inadequate. It doesn’t take abstinence-only to ruin sex ed: apathy is enough.

  6. I can certainly sympathize with the tampon story. I was in college (and not the first year) when I finally figured out how tampons worked. I was too shy to ask anyone, and for some reason never read about them. Thankfully, I have now figured them out, but there are some days I really wish I’d had the courage to ask my mom about specifics when I was a kid (she would have told me, bless her, but I would never let her).

  7. I sympathize with the tampon story as well. I was terrified of tampons because they required touching myself, and it took me ages to figure them out.

  8. Cue another one who’s down with the tampon story. When I got old enough that my period could arrive at any moment, my mom bought me a ton of feminine products so I could pick the ones I liked best. Plus one for Mom!

    When I finally decided to try a tampon, I didn’t get the whole applicator vs. cottony bit…I figured that one out pretty quickly, though…some things are just too uncomfortable to be right.

  9. Intercrural sex is sex – the preferred sexual act for pederasty in ancient Greece, actually. Suggesting that sex needs to involve penetration to be “real sex” is hetero0- and cis-sexist.

  10. I was pretty well-informed (I read a LOT, and far above my grade level, and my parents didn’t have any problems with what I read). But even so, sexuality and/or your body involves a ton of complex stuff.

    It’s freakin’ hard to know everything. I didn’t even know until I had a consult with my first ever gyno (I’m 27) that you aren’t supposed to have PMS symptoms on the pill.

  11. I spent about eight years thinking a tampon looked and felt exactly like a Mentos candy. I overheard some classmates on an Elementary school Earth Day trash pickup gossipping about how they found a tampon, and the book about bodies that my parents had gotten us fairly close to when we learned to read, which had some decent information but a lot of it so un-backed-up by context as to be useless, had said something along the lines of “Menstrual periods happen once a month to adult women. Pads or tampons catch menstrual discharge. A pad is worn in your underwear. A tampon is worn inside your body.” (No pictures, no real explanation of what the terms meant, so a lot of me wondering, “what’s menstrual mean? what does discharge entail? what is a tampon?”) So somehow I figured that a tampon was a small hard white globule like a Mentos candy that I was supposed to stuff inside the little hole that I’d found down there (which, I thought, was a small opening to a large round cavity like a bladder, right there between my legs, with the hole like a drain on a sink), and it would just sort of sit there and, I don’t know, evaporate all the menstrual discharge until its batteries ran out or something.

    I figured out what a tampon really was at age twelve or thirteen, a few periods in, when my parents, with their annoying insistence at continuing to have real life and dragging me places when I was having my period, took us swimming. The tampon, gotten from a vending machine and lacking an applicator, I pushed in until the padded part was inside me and figured that was in, and decided based thereon that tampons weren’t for me because they hurt when I moved.

    A year and some intense period-resentment later, I tried some more, with applicators this time, and over an hour or so of sitting on the toilet wtih the instruction sheet, and that finally worked.

    I learned about sex from reading, first an about-sex book in my grandma’s stuff, then romance novels (ugh, rape-as-seduction), then fanfic erotica on the internet. And then feminist blogs and such for the safe-sex and contraception expertese. The internet has been SO much better for sex education than the irritating sex-ed from school that featured Name That Anatomy and Look How Much A Baby Costs.

  12. I learned about sex from reading, first an about-sex book in my grandma’s stuff, then romance novels (ugh, rape-as-seduction), then fanfic erotica on the internet.

    Yeah, I learned a lot about sex from reading too, mostly fiction, and thank god that even as a child I had a healthy skepticism. I was pretty sure even without any hands-on experience that electrodes, biting, and Great Danes did not necessarily have to be involved in sex. (I read some fucked up stuff as a kid! Oh, L. Ron. Hubbard, you and your pervy-ass science fiction…)

    Some of it was helpful though, like introducing the idea the men could perform oral sex on women and like it (one book I read when I was, oh, 10ish, had a female character who regretfully had to turn down an eager offer from the guy she was currently smexing, ’cause during a bout of shapeshifting she had bit his lip and even with her anti-viral nanos it wasn’t safe. Like I said, I read some interesting stuff… :p) and that there is a whole huge spectrum of desires and sexual partners. After reading about aliens, tentacles, elves, etc. the idea that two adult human guys might wanna get it on was downright bland.

  13. It took me a while to get a handle on the whole tampon thing, ’cause I started menstruating when I was 10 years old and I was not a particularly large person yet. As far as I could tell it was just too big (though probably my nervousness didn’t help any) and I gave up until high school when I was a little more physically mature and had much better success.

  14. I got my period at age 11, and in some ways, I think getting it super early was kind of a blessing because I was too oblivious to be embarrassed about much. I even called my dad at work to tell him excitedly. My mom, however, had to put her foot down when I suggested calling grandpa. Then I learned to use a tampon at age 12 from a cousin because we wanted to go swimming. She gave me a hand-held mirror first, and helped me see exactly where I was aiming for, and there was no shame or embarrassment involved. I haven’t thought about it in a while, but I think I owe her a big thank you because she was so calm and nonchalant about it, that I felt the same way.

  15. Whit – you’re missing the point. Nobody said intercrural sex wasn’t a valid act, but that hastily blurted descriptions of sex such as “The male goes between the female’s legs” are so vague as to be misleading.

  17. Pingback: Interesting posts, weekend of … missed weekends « Feminists with Female Sexual Dysfunction

  18. I pretty much had to educate myself about sex, as I got to high school and later college. I thought I had it bad, then I got to college, and I heard people asking the following questions.

    “Does kissing cause pregnancy?”
    “Do you have to be naked to have sex?”
    “Which comes in front for a guy – the anus or the penis?”

    These were questions from 20-year-old undergraduate college girls, who had studied science (includes biology, and we had a full chapter on human reproduction) in high school.

Comments are currently closed.