Sex 101

The first time I had sex education was in the fifth grade. The stereotypically fat, dumpy-looking health teacher with a terrible smoker’s croak of a voice would come from the city’s middle school to my elementary school twice a week to replace phrases like “predicate nominative” and “subject-verb agreement” with “engorged penis” and “cervical mucus.” Going over our weekly spelling list on the overhead projector was replaced with filmstrips of paper chickens doing it, and when it was all over our regular teacher had lost none of her dignity and could go back to teaching us about Jamestown without a scarlet red “SEX” patch sewn to her chest. (Incidentally, when the same health teacher taught us sex ed again in junior high, everyone who passed the final exam received red construction paper lips that said “I’m a SEX-pert!” with a safety pin glued to the back so you could pin it to yourself with pride.)

The only problem with this set-up was that also twice a week all the so-called “gifted” kids in the school district were bussed to a separate school to do things that were too advanced for the average kids. So while my hip – but evidently intellectually inferior – peers were learning about what goes where and proper lubrication, I and three other unfortunates from my class were learning how to make origami boxes in order to make us more culturally aware. Because apparently sex is too culturally narrow for knowledge of it to make us informed citizens of the world, able to communicate with a wide range of nationalities, but origami, now that is a skill of a diplomat.

Worse, we didn’t miss all the sex ed sessions: only every-other one. Try being a ten-year-old girl and being present for the day on basic reproductive anatomy – geography for the body *yawn* – but missing the day on menstruation and ejaculation. One day I discovered that I had eggs – with the similarity to a chicken being reinforced by the cut-and-paste filmstrip – the next day I was being culturally sensitive by making an origami swan to send to a pen-pal in Tokyo whose name I could neither spell nor pronounce, and the day after that I was being shown a doom of stretch marks and non-stop urination due to a baby inside of me, with no understanding of how this havoc-wreaking being had gotten there, except for a suspicion that it had something to do with those eggs. As if being the smart kid with an overbite wasn’t bad enough, it seemed the school system was intentionally trying to keep me from ever getting laid.

It’s not as if my parents hadn’t explained sex to me before. I wasn’t going into this thing blind. When I was in second grade and my brother was in fourth, we were coming home from vacation, facing a long car ride in the dark, when my father boomed out enthusiastically, “Hey, kids! What do you know about sex?” We twittered and snorted and covered our mouths with our hands. In truth, we didn’t know anything about sex except that it was hysterical. My parents patiently – but probably with a bit of laughter themselves, not being prudes and all – explained the whole process to my brother and me, and our giggles quickly turned to interested questions.

But that had been when I was seven years old. I was now ten. Do you know how many things you have to learn between the ages of seven and ten? There was cursive writing to master, multiplication tables and long division, all the state capitals and their locations and spellings, untold numbers of vocabulary words, American folklore and propaganda to recite, “O Hanukkah” to memorize so that we could say we were having a holiday pageant instead of a Christmas pageant, weight, volume, and length conversions to understand, fractions and Black History Month, dioramas to make, and book reports to write. With all that learning, there wasn’t any room to remember anything about sex, which wasn’t going to be on a weekly test and for which I didn’t have to memorize an entire pack of flashcards.

So while I went into sex ed with a haughty air of having heard it all before, the truth was that I remembered absolutely nothing about either my own body or boys’ bodies, much less what they did together, and having to miss every-other session that would answer all my questions was deeply distressing, particularly since my classmates – who the administration outright told me were not as smart as I was – now held all the knowledge that was rightfully mine. I didn’t want to ask my parents, not because it was an uncomfortable topic, but because we’d covered this ground before. We’d already gone over this, didn’t I remember? Why should they have to tell me again? Evidently, I did not hold this same attitude about being told to pick up my belongings, or being told to be home by dark, or any number of other things that my parents could tell me a thousand times a day without my feeling like a failure. But I was old enough to know that the Sex Talk was a big deal and I could have at least had the courtesy to remember it so we wouldn’t have to go through it again.

Unable to ask my peers or my parents about this whole sex business and living pre-Internet, I decided to put my library to good use. Unfortunately, I was too embarrassed to look up any useful words in the card catalog. What if that glowering librarian who already seemed to be looking at me suspiciously for being on the adult side of the library instead of the children’s side happened to walk past when I had the drawer opened to “sex”? Would she think I was actively doing it and call my parents? I had no interest in actually having sex: I just wanted to know what it was, beyond the entirely unsatisfactory dictionary definition of, “The sexual urge or instinct as it manifests itself in behavior.” But I knew that a lot of adults disapproved of people my age knowing anything about their own bodies. Might they put a black mark on my library record and refuse to let me check out anything above a certain reading level? The video section used a blue dot system to identify movies that kids were allowed to check out. If the video you wanted didn’t have a blue dot sticker on it, there was no point in trying to sneak it past the librarian. I had recently been caught trying to peel off a blue dot from Bambi to put on Anne of Green Gables, which was ludicrously missing one of the sanctifying stickers. The Gestapo guard threatened to revoke my video-borrowing privileges altogether. As a kid who lived within walking distance of the library and frequently visited it multiple times a day, the imagined threat of never being able to check out a book again just to try to find out something about what exactly a penis did down there wasn’t worth the risk. I would have to find a less direct way to get answers.

I finally settled on a copy of The Trouble with Thirteen. I knew it would talk about sex because I was versed enough in cliche to know that all books targeted at pre-pubescent girls in which the main character is thirteen are bound to talk about sex. This was reinforced by the fact that the cover was black with two black-and-white pictures of adolescent girls. The title was written in yellow and magenta splashed on like paint. It was published in 1985 and it showed. I checked it out, somewhat slyly, wondering if the librarian thought I was thirteen. (I also didn’t subscribe to Seventeen in junior high, opting instead for Teen because I thought you had to actually be 17 to read that magazine. I had lost interest in such magazines by the time I was 14, so I never got to enjoy what I imagined to be the much more sophisticated and worldly articles of that admired tome.)

I don’t remember anything about the book. Amazon tells me it involves a girl whose parents are divorcing (which I imagine was a hot topic for young adult fiction in the 80s). That central storyline was completely lost in the dramatic subplot of her getting her first period. I had heard the phrase “getting your period,” of course, but I had no fully developed sense of what it actually meant except that it was to be viewed with a strange mix of dread and envy, much like being a bridesmaid would later be viewed. The book did little to improve my understanding so I turned to my trusty pal the dictionary. Going from “period” to “menstruation” to “menses” I must have discovered something similar to the definition in my current American Heritage: “The monthly flow of blood and cellular debris from the uterus that begins at puberty in women and the females of other primates.” Cellular what, now? Debris? Coming from where? And, maddeningly, still no explanation of why. I had managed this long without eliminating the … debris … why not indefinitely?

I decided that novels and the family dictionary were not going to be sufficient. It was time to turn to my mother. I had been casually reading the book with its flamboyant cover around my parents so that they would be expecting questions of this nature in case the novel failed to satisfy my thirst for knowledge. Had she been paying attention to her daughter’s reading material, she would be expecting such a question, so I approached her boldly with something like, “Mom, this girl keeps talking about getting her period. What’s a period?” “You remember when we talked about sex?” she asked, putting down her magazine. (I’m certain she was reading a magazine, which strikes me as very odd because I do not remember my mother ever reading a magazine in the entirety of my existence. Oh, sure, she subscribed to them, but read them? No. That would be like reading the newspaper that she also subscribed to. It simply wasn’t a part of their purpose, which remains elusive to both me and my father.) I admitted that I did, but that I had forgotten “that part.” Within about three minutes all my questions had been cleared up and all the gaps left by my origami-folding afternoons filled in. By the time I took seventh-grade sex ed I was already a sex-pert. Sort of.

I got my first period in April of seventh grade. I was twelve. I was in eighth grade and thirteen before I got it again. While I had secretly envied my friends who started before I did, the event was apparently unimportant enough to me that I forgot to write it down in my diary. I was far too busy filling my diary with what had happened with Chris Davis that day. (In college I often envied that 12-year-old ability to turn “nothing happened with Chris today” into six pages of drama, heartache, and hope.) But while my diary doesn’t reflect it, I was quite concerned with the long absence of my period. I knew that this wasn’t unusual, of course; I knew that not getting your period again after the first time was common. But I also knew that not getting your period meant one thing: pregnancy.

It didn’t matter that I was a virgin. It didn’t matter that I had never so much as kissed a boy. It didn’t matter that I had never even been on a date. As far as the public school system was concerned, getting pregnant was the Easiest Thing in the World to do, and everyone was at risk. Furthermore, there was no known cure, and pregnancy was always fatal, if not to your life then certainly to your soul. Perhaps I had sat in the wrong place, not noticing the puddle of semen on that gymnasium bench; it had seeped through my jeans, and the sperm – which everyone knows are determined little bastards – whiplashing their way upward, ever upward, had managed to find their way into my inner sanctuary.

I knew my fears were irrational but I also knew that getting pregnant at my age was the absolute worst fate that could possibly befall me. Nothing worse than bringing forth life was imaginable to my white, middle-class, midwestern consciousness. I couldn’t express my fears to anyone because they too would know they were irrational, and accuse me of making up a ridiculous scenario to cover up the fact that I was, in fact, an 8th grade whore who had gotten knocked up through much more conventional means than a public puddle of jizz. It was safer, far safer, to keep my fears to myself and closely monitor my body for other signs of an extra life form. There were none, of course, but that didn’t stop my elaborate imaginings. What about those girls who gave birth unexpectedly, never even knowing they’d been pregnant? Admittedly, all those stories seemed, in retrospect, to point to a pretty ignorant and/or deceitful girl, but surely not all of them.

Rather anticlimactically I got my second period about eight months after I got my first one. I definitely wasn’t pregnant and I didn’t have to worry about running off in the middle of science class to give birth in the girls’ bathroom. My period came at its regular monthly intervals thereafter and I didn’t have the internal drama of feared pregnancy again until there was actually a chance that it was a valid fear. I was always careful (thanks for the warning, Dad!), and there was never any really good possibility that I was actually pregnant, but I fretted anyway, mainly because my family is notorious for being inept at preventing pregnancy. But then, aren’t most families?

Last February when my husband and I realized that we just may have managed an oops baby, we each spent hours scouring the Internet for the most reliable (and outlandish) resources on symptoms of pregnancy, as well as what exactly is going on in the weeks before you actually know for sure that you’re with child. I found myself suddenly so attuned to my body that it was actually an out-of-body experience. Was that a metallic taste in my mouth? I was definitely way more thirsty than usual. Did my breasts look fuller? Was that implantation bleeding? Was my cervical mucus thicker today than it had been yesterday? What do you think, honey, is it time to pee on the stick?

And do you know what conclusion I came to?

Sex is still pretty damned hilarious.