In college I lived across the hall from these two amazing women. Both are brilliant. Do take the time to click over and read the full piece in each case:
“Gay” was the Golden God of Comedy at my Iowa high school back in 1985. It was the sun that shined down on an otherwise unfunny and frighteningly confusing world and made it all worthy of a ridicule most amusing. Anything could be “gay”, and therefore hilarious: a pack of Lit’l Smokies dog-piled on a cafeteria tray, “True” by Spandau Ballet, the color green and all who wore it on Thursday. Behaviors were “gay”, too: raising one’s hand in class, missing a foul shot during a gym class basket ball game, wearing one’s backpack over both shoulders as opposed to the heterosexually-mandated right shoulder. The entire marching band was apparently gay, and so were the Choir and the Drama Club. But they called themselves the Glee Club and The Thespians, so weren’t they just asking for it? –from One Teenager in Ten
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A few weeks later, I was in a hospital waiting room as my sister Emily/Poof was being born. Bored out of my mind and having exhausted my beloved stash of Creem magazines, I started reading the hospital’s offerings from cover to cover. I came across a Redbook with an excerpt from a popular romance novel reprinted on pulpy, peach-colored paper. The story’s heroine described an encounter with her lover and said something about “how good it felt to have him inside me.” This concept was a complete revelation to me: The man has to be inside the woman! It all makes sense to me now!
Upon realizing that a man has to be inside the woman in order for sex to happen, and having a sketchy idea of where things were thanks to Growing Up and Liking It, everything seemed to fall into place (Tetris-style, with a few gaps here and there) thanks to books. –from I was Girl X
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I read girl X’s article with difficulty, as it resonated so strongly with me. Although I was born in 1962, I had almost the same set of problems learning about human sexuality as this gal did. I tried dictionaries; I looked at the clear plastic slip covered diagrams in our families’ Encyclopedia Britannica. I wondered about the term “morning after pill” because I couldn’t understand if it was a treatment for hangover or pregnancy. I never encountered any explicit porn as a child.
I think I finally encountered a book that had a cut-away drawing of a man and a woman having sex. It might have been in a bookstore or amazingly enough, in our fourth grade classroom.
But I felt that I wasn’t “normal” because I thought children were “sat down” and taught the “facts of life” by their parents. This wasn’t happening in my family. Asking my emotionally rigid father was out of the question. I decided to broach the subject by asking my mother the definition of a word. I boiled my choices down to two: “orgasm” or “rape.”
So my mother and I are watching TV one night, and during a slow part of the show I ask my mother what “rape” meant. She said she would tell me during the commercial.
When the commercial came my mother was not forthcoming. Once again I screwed up my courage and again asked my mother what “rape” meant. She responded that rape is when a man “roughs up” a woman.
I knew then and there that I was lost, that I wasn’t right, that I would never have the “proper” facts of life talk with my parents. Obviously sex-ed wasn’t taught in my school.
Yes, I would give my left testicle to have had access to the Internet as a child. Not just for information about human sexuality, but about EVERYTHING.
“Not just for information about human sexuality, but about EVERYTHING.”
Did you make lists of things to look up next time you made it to a library? Because your curiosity was so strong, and you didn’t have the books in your house to look it up?
That wasn’t just me, was it?