Bedsider

Bedsider: 5 Things I Wish My Mom Had Told Me About Sex

bedsider:

Recently I asked how you learned about sex. From what I gathered from the people I spoke to, most of us did not get the “sex talk” from our parents. We talked about sex with our friends or older siblings, or just learned as we went along. This got me thinking: What would have been nice to have…

My sex ed talk came first from my dad. We were in the car and a commercial came on that was something like, “Talk to your children about sex before someone else does.” I don’t know. It was the nineties. Anyhow, there was a pause and my dad said, very seriously, “Heather, I want you to remember something. L-O-V-E spells S-E-X to guys.” Then he took a deep breath like he was very pleased with himself, and switched the conversation back to dinosaurs or some shit. I was really confused, because I’d gotten the vague idea that S-E-X was bad, but I had no idea what it was. Also, L-O-V-E? Gross.

My mom came into my fifth grade sex ed class and proceeded to talk about pregnancy. Her pregnancy. With me. I’m surprised that my heart didn’t give out from sheer embarrassment. I have a memory of trying to sink through my desk/hiding in my best friend’s lap/under her arm. Then I think she tried to tell me about blowjobs that night when I came to ask her about my math homework. Um, ew. Gross. Don’t you realize that you almost killed me today? Kthx.

That being said, I learned about sex from sex ed (genital warts look like cauliflower!), from The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy (what is this tingly feeling in my lady bits, I don’t understand!?), from the Barnes and Noble relationships & sex section (where my ex encountered his first diagram of the vagina and was able to figure out where the clit was), from comparing notes with my friends, from romance novels (all completely useless information), and from experimentation.

When I was fourteen, my friends asked me if oral sex was when you talked about sex. A girl I almost never talked to messaged me in a mild panic to ask how you went down on a guy who wasn’t circumcised. Another friend would ask me if I thought she was slut after every guy she hooked up with. For my part, I’ve been running a poll on why sex occasionally hurts so damn much since I was fifteen.

There are a lot of things I wish someone had told me about sex. Like, maybe, sex isn’t a substitute for being emotionally unavailable. Or, if the only way you can get your boyfriend to come over is to promise to fuck him, something is wrong. Or, the fact that sex hurts so much sometimes doesn’t make you a shitty person. You’re not a bad person because you can’t always stay wet. Or, it’s ok to tell him to stop. No, really. It’s ok. Or, the entire point of sex isn’t just to get your boyfriend off, which ties into one of the suggestions that the OP has: You deserve an orgasm just as much as he does.

No one said any of that to me until I moved to California. Having a vague idea about it just made me feel worse. I was too scared to even coordinate going to the health department for birth control when I was a teenager, and my crazy I-had-sex-in-this-park-and-was-caught-by-the-cops-I-am-awesome stories were pretty much my claim to fame. I had a reputation to protect.

I’ve heard people argue that the biggest failing of abstinence education is the lack of knowledge about STIs and birth control, but that wasn’t the case for me. They gave us worksheet after worksheet about the efficacy of birth control. They showed us a dozen movies about different STIs and how to identify them. I wish they had told us the early warning symptoms of pregnancy, like “You can spot while you’re pregnant and it can resemble a period, so…”

The biggest failing, to me, was the “Sex is bad” attitude. If you love yourself, you won’t do it. Guys are generally evil and lie to you and only want you for your pussy and will do anything for a piece of ass. The “I know you’re having sex, but I don’t want to know about it” conversations. The “You can come to me if you ever become sexually active and I’ll get you birth control” conversation that turns into the “You’re a dirty slut! Why are you sexually active at fifteen?!”

It’s hard to take care of yourself and to be positive about something, if you’re full of shame.