Se(x)ducation

Hello AGA; I am back from an 8-day trip to Washington and finally have a moment to sit down, breathe, and collect myself. It was quite the whirlwind, but probably one of the best weeks of my life. Some highlights: staying at Heather’s for four days, taking a bath in an actual bathtub, meeting Dani Filth, seeing—no, experiencing Cradle of Filth live, hangin’ with AGA blogger Elizabeth, giving a bone-crushing hug to my brother Andrew again, seeing The VAGINA Monologues (“Hoohaa” my ass), and pretty much spending four days in the queerest college town I’ve ever set foot in. Seriously, I felt like I’d walked into some 1970’ies butch-n’-femme bar. I’ve never had so many crew-cut women open doors for me.

Anyways. With the exception of that little intro, this is going to be a cross-over blog to help with the Scarleteen Fundraising. So if you want to hear me talk about my sex-life, read on. : P
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In my vinyl jacket pocket I always carry: some cash, my ID, my library card, my Moxie stamp card, a Starbucks gift card (that never seems to be used), and a subscription for Emergency Contraception.

How EC came to be counted amongst my essentials goes back a ways.

When I was a wee lass in Norway, my mother gave me a children’s book about a little boy whose mother was pregnant. It was an innocent, warmly written story in which the boy asks questions of his mommy’s belly and receives some honest, though simply phrased responses. The baby grows inside the mama’s womb…

As early as kindergarten, it was obvious to me how babies were made, in a two-plus-two sort of way at least. The boy puts his part in the girl part, the baby grows inside of the girl’s stomach, then comes out of her vagina the same way it went in. Ta-da. Even though I wasn’t too hot about “boy parts”, and swore I would never have kids myself, the knowledge I had was pretty healthy and age-appropriate. It didn’t harm me or traumatize me in any way; it seemed a natural part of life.

When my mother was reading the aforementioned book with me, she said it was a huge controversy when it first came out. She said that many adults were shocked that this author would tell children where babies “really come from”. My protests still ring loud and clear: “Well that’s dumb.” Why on earth would someone not want kids to know that babies come from inside the female body? What’s wrong with that? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

Mainly because I could not yet wrap my mind around the issue that was of course at hand: SEX.

It wasn’t too long after that I found my mother’s pornography. I questioned Heather this week whether parents just hide their porn really badly on purpose, because the “I found my mama’s/papa’s porn beneath the bed” story is dumbfoundingly common. But yeah, I found my mama’s porn beneath the bed.

You can imagine. I pulled out this magazine because I had been looking for comic books, and there was a photograph of a man and a woman in a bathtub, the woman sitting on the man’s lap with her head arched back.

What struck me was not that they were naked. People are naked all the time—or at least as much was my reality as a European child. It wasn’t the fact that they were in such close quarters—I didn’t even understand what must obviously be going on in that shielded region of his lap. No, what got me was their expressions. They seemed so… blissful. That personality of sexuality was what got to me; what drew me in. And from that night on I explored the seemingly endless sea of goodies beneath my mother’s bed.

Being an advanced reader for my age, I read the erotica in the magazines. I tilted my head to the side and looked at all of the photos. The parts that I found erotic were not too much different from the parts that I find erotic now: the expressions on their faces, the body language of intimacy, and… well… the breasts. (What can I say? Breasts are nifty.) I had been stimulating myself to orgasm since the time I was five, and now put the two together, connecting this intriguing physical intimacy with this and that tingling.

The one thing that I did not connect, however, was sexual activity and reproduction.

No, really.

Though I can’t fathom how, intercourse never came up in my sexual explorations. In my mind, intercourse was a completely sexless, dispassionate act, carrying zero pleasure and only done when the partners in question were mutually wanting to create a baby.

This is a perception that I carried with me until I was twelve years old. I carried a lot with me till I was twelve years old.

For example, I thought that homosexuality was a variation as common and accepted as heterosexuality. Some boys like boys, some girls like girls, and some girls like boys/boys like girls. That seemed the logical reality from my observations. It had never struck me that any of these would be regarded with distaste, or that any was considered “unequal” to the other. Perhaps this had something to do with my unchallenged belief that sexual enjoyment and reproduction were always separate, but either way I was most cruelly corrected when I hit fifth grade.

Having never been an individual with many friends, I was overwhelmed when 5th grade suddenly cast me into the center of the “girl crowd”. You know… The girls that sit together in class and giggle about everything, who wear each other’s clothes, who tease and gossip, who go to the bathroom in groups. Those girls.

It was a pretty nasty experience when I was just sitting around at lunch one day and made some offhand comment about the attractiveness of some girl or something to the like. The “leader of the pack” (who ironically was named Heather), looked at me with a blank look before laughing and saying, “You don’t like girls, do you, Irmelin?” Her tone snapped me into attention immediately, looking around at the others confused. Their eyes were burning into me and “No” was the only thing I could stutter defensively, which was of course the right answer as the threat fell silent around me again and they launched into a conversation about how “gross” and “unnatural” homosexuality was. I sat there and listened a bit frozen—my first kiss, my fantasies, my attractions suddenly things that were revealed to be unclean and socially sinful.

You can bet I changed my act. Oh yeah, those gays, eesh, how gross, boys all the way!!!

…except that I had never liked boys. And yet “crush conversations” become an increasingly important part of our social group. So, I joined the club and affixed my interests to some poor boy named ***, who—like most the other boys that age—had no interest in the attentions of some girl.

Yet the question seemed to come up much too often. Out of nowhere, girls I had never met before would stare at me for a little while, and then just come out loudly and rudely, “Are you gay?” Each time my face would turn red, my body would freeze up, and I would think to myself, How the hell can they tell?!, before shouting, “No! Ew!”

Besides this type of self-denial, I learned a lot from my 5th grade friends. Intercourse was a sexual act for which they all longed with some surprising vigor; virginity was a holy state of being that only a boy could take away; our goal in life was to be sexually desirable; never take “oh we won’t look” as proof that you’re safe when changing your clothes during a sleep-over.

I called them on one piece of bullshit, at least. First day of middle school, I walked up to *** and told him I wasn’t interested anymore. After that, I came out. I came out in middle school. Hah. There was no announcement of any sort, just a decision to live as myself, and to answer honestly the next time somebody got in my face and said in their screechy voice, “Are you gay?”

Well that’s all well and good, but because of my timing and because adults encouraged the persecution of homosexuals, my sexuality suddenly shifted from being something that I enjoyed to something that brought me pain. No one would help me, of course; if I tried to report any bullying that had happened as a result of my orientation, the adult would more often turn their attention to me and ask, “Now why would you say that you are gay?” as though I had been the one to do something wrong. I also became more conscious of the fact that the non-pornographic media around me indulged only one type of romance, and that was the male-female one. The nature of sexuality became clear: something that I was on the outside of. No one else was gay besides me. I’d heard of these mysterious gay people, but they didn’t exist. Masturbation was the only sex I would ever have. Being anything but androgynous in public was a disaster.

I found myself bouncing in and out of the old “safe zone”, which was of course just to act het so that I could avoid bashing. Toss in a comment about how you’d love to screw Leonardo DiCaprio, and no one will bother you about your sexuality for the rest of the conversation. But I found myself doing this less and less, and by the time I was heading into High School, I was “Yes, already, I love vaginas!!!” out.

The summer before my Freshman year was also when I started Lesbian 101, and in the worst possible way, because the young woman I formed an attachment to was incredibly abusive and took unfair advantage of my first-relationship enthusiasm. She learned pretty fast that she could do all kinds of shit to me and still have me crawling back. She learned that she could bash me to the ground, spit on me, grind my face into the gravel, and then have everything be OK again if she just said, “I’m sorry, I love you.”

The dirty little secret that was this relationship would follow me throughout my High School career and eventually contribute to the premature end of it, but in the meantime, I was starting to wonder about Sex Ed.

“When are we gonna get it?”, I asked. Someone had told me that we were supposed to get it in 7th grade, but when I got to 7th grade, they said 8th. When it didn’t happen in 8th grade, I asked again, and they said 10th. By the time I got to the end of my 9th grade year, it was pretty clear what the reality was: no more sex ed. No sex ed at all.

This confused me, and I looked for it forever. Was it an after-school thing that we had to sign up for? Was it a library book that we had to check out? They certainly weren’t stupid enough to not give any sex ed whatsoever… were they?

My mother asked me here and there, “You know about STDs, right? And about condoms?”

Yeah yeah, mom, I know about STDs, and I know about condoms. But I didn’t—not really. I didn't know what the different STDs/Is were, how they were transmitted in a way more specific than "through sex", nor how to properly use/store/apply a condom. And honestly, the “diseases and condoms” speech was rusty, limited, and not covering some essential information that I needed at the time.

I didn’t just need sex education, I needed sexuality education.

But I wasn’t the only one. Girls at my school were getting together after hours and—get this--beating each other in the stomach as a form of birth control. I was horrified when I learned this, and started paying attention—started picking up in some of the “sex myths” that were popular at my school. What follows is a genuine list of sexual myths that I have heard first-hand in my sex-ed-less school:

• Having sexual intercourse standing up (or standing up right after sex) will prevent pregnancy because the semen will “drain out”.
• Being drunk during the time of sexual intercourse will prevent pregnancy because it makes you temporarily infertile.
• Taking a shower or wiping right after sexual intercourse will prevent pregnancy.
• Bringing the female to orgasm will keep the sperm from getting through.
• There will be no sperm in the guy’s ejaculate if he has come once before that day.
• ETC.

Oddly, all of these myths concerned pregnancy prevention, not disease/infection prevention, and they were all myths that were relevant amongst the girls. The boys didn’t even seem to think about it.

I wonder what on earth the adults would think if they looked at this. Oh, teenagers aren’t that stupid. Oh, this is just a rare few. Oh, most of them aren’t having sex anyways.

Ok. I was in High School. Recently. I just got out of there a year ago, and I was there during the Abstinence Only seminars. Let me say it frank, loud, and as clear as I can humanly get: WE WERE HAVING SEX. NEARLY EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US.

There.

Oh, and by the way, when I say sex… I don’t mean that we were all putting our penises in each other’s vaginas. We were giving handjobs, fingering each other, and sucking each other’s privates. But you told us that this wasn’t “sex”, so when you asked us if we were “virgins”, we told you “Yes.”

Something that eventually came to my attention was that there was a form of “sex ed” going on. But I wouldn’t have called it that myself, and I was shocked when I realized that this thing—this thing called “abstinence education”—was in fact the replacement for sex ed.

They lied to me.

Even when I was in middle school, they had people come to our schools and give speeches about “abstinence”. They handed out fliers and gave us stickers. I tried to ask them a million times, “What is abstinence?”, but they would not give me any answer that involved “sex”. So instead of defining it, “Abstaining from sex”, they said to me, “It’s teen pregnancy prevention.”

Yeah. That was the only definition of “abstinence” that I was given. I wasn’t told that it meant avoiding sexual activity. I was just told it was a word that meant teen pregnancy prevention, and was made to sign an “abstinence pledge”… with zero idea that what I was actually doing was signing away my sexuality.

It wasn’t until High School that abstinence became “don’t have sex”, but no one told us what sex WAS. They just assumed we knew that sexual intercourse potentially caused pregnancy and disease (when unprotected), so without explaining how it did either of those things, they just showed us graphic photos of people mutilated by STDs/STIs and said, “This is what sex does.” They also showed a video in “health class” of a woman giving birth; no context, no explanation, just a video of natural child-birth—which of course is painful and can be downright traumatic to watch without context—and told us, “Girls, this is what sex will do to you.” They said nothing to the boys on that matter, though they were forced to watch the video with us. The males walked out of there shrugging and literally saying, “I don’t know why they made me watch that; it’s not my problem.”

No one talked about any type of sex besides intercourse. They just said “sex”, and we were made to believe they meant penis-in-vagina, while the majority of us who had already engaged in some other type of sex sat there wondering how all this applied. Did “sex” cover oral sex to? Could oral sex “do this” to us? Including making us pregnant, perhaps? Or was it a completely “safe” form of sex?

Everyone was more worried about whether the sex they were having still made them a “virgin”, since that’s the only thing the abstinence only education put emphasis on.

Not our health, not our happiness, not our safety. Our virginity. That was the only thing that was made to matter, and so it was the only thing that people “protected”.

I’ve godda tell ya, 90% of the girls who were walking around with “promise rings” and who signed “abstinence pledges” had swallowed semen and thought themselves in no violation.

And even though I was gay and never imagined that I would have intercourse, I bought into it. I guess I was never going to have “real sex”.

Part-way through High School, I had a suicidal breakdown.

My girlfriend had run off and screwed some fellow or another. After years of emotional abuse, I finally lost it. I remember being talked to by some snotty cops, and I remember my mother speeding me to the hospital while my forehead lay pressed against the back car door, my hand on the handle, thinking about how I just wanted to open it and let myself fall out onto the freeway, but feeling afraid that I wouldn’t die right away.

Life afterwards was sort of a haze. I decided to be busy; to work lots and lots. I got a starring role in the next school play, I took two very time-consuming AP classes, and I started spending time with other people when I wanted to for the first time since I’d committed to my girlfriend. (She wasn’t too big on me having other friends.)

I wasn’t sure about my own sexual nature at that point. I’d been bending and melding into what she wanted me to be, and couldn’t really remember how to orgasm from my own independent desires anymore. My emotional state was very volatile, and I was still trying to understand what it meant to have attachments to other people, much less what it meant to have healthy relationships. Most of my adolescence had been sucked up by one big, fat, bad one.

It was in this state that my long-term friend D, a man of twenty-six, started paying some pretty hefty romantic attention to me. For as long as I’d known him (since my 14th birthday), he had been engaged to another woman. Someone his age, someone with plenty of sexual experience, someone he often spoke of in a loving way. So I was a little confused when, all of a sudden, he professed to being in love with me.

But I was also excited. He said all the things I needed to hear at the time: I’ll take care of you, I’ll support you, I’ll hold you, I’ll let you cry on my shoulder, I’ll take your pain upon myself.

I was ready for something completely new, and I deeply needed the sudden onslaught of affection. So I latched onto him, I told myself that the feelings of friendship I had for him were romantic in nature, and eventually it turned true.

He flew up to visit me very soon after I expressed my returned love, and we had “real sex”. I was seventeen, and remember thinking how old I was to be doing this for the first time, comparatively speaking.

It wasn’t safer sex.

Even when we went and bought condoms the next day, he used them pretty inconsistently (without getting my input on the matter), and complained about wearing them.

Oh, it’s not that I didn’t know that I was supposed to wear condoms. It’s that no one had ever even mentioned how hard it was to stand up on such a matter if your partner didn’t think this was the same big “duh”, and most especially hadn’t mentioned how to discuss sexual safety issues with a partner almost a decade my senior… who I trusted way too much on simple virtue of his age.

My relationship with him continued for another year and the sex all throughout was a disaster. Not only was it not safe, but it wasn’t particularly pleasurable either, and as I recovered more from my breakdown and started regaining my sense of self, I realized that I had entered the commitment for all the wrong reasons and that my feelings for him probably weren’t more than friendly. However, I simply didn’t know how to speak up for myself, I didn’t know how to effectively enforce condom-wear (though I tried), and worst of all, I didn’t know how to walk away when my needs and desires weren’t being met. Because of all the weight that had been put on virginity, I felt super obligated to somehow give way more commitment than I actually felt towards this partner with whom I was really not at all compatible. If I didn’t, then the “first time” that had such universal importance would have been pointless, right?

My first-ever GYN visit happened sometime during the course of this relationship, because he was pressuring me into getting birth control pills, which I really didn’t want but finally cracked on. (After all, he wasn’t being mean about it: just sighing and saying, “Ohhh if only you were OK with using birth control pills, sex would be sooo much better for me. Oh well.”) My mother just assumed I knew what a pap smear was, though the details I’d heard didn’t entirely prepare me. Scarily enough, the GYN found a vaginal infection that I had been totally oblivious to, and gave me some antibiotics to take. I had never noticed anything unusual down there, so it really made me wonder how long I had been walking around with that infection and what damage it might have done if left in there longer.

My teenage life in terms of sex and relationships downright SUCKED.

I should have found Scarleteen at 12 years old because my mother sat me down and said, “This is a useful website.” Not because I found myself, one day, posting in the emergency section asking where I could get an abortion because I was convinced that I was pregnant.

These are the things I wanted that Abstinence Only “education” NEVER gave me, but that SCARLETEEN did!

• RELATIONSHIP education to go with my SEX education! I wish someone would have told me how to conduct a healthy, safe, mutually beneficial relationship. How to set boundaries, how to enforce them. To make the should-be-obvious connection between a communicative relationship and the bedroom sheets. I wish someone would have told me that there is a lot of complicated work involved with having a romantic partnership, much less a sexual one. Guess what? Scarleteen did.
• ABUSE education. If I would have known then what I know now, I would have been able to recognize the signs of an abusive relationship and rejected it before I became trapped by it. But no one told me that I was at risk for an abusive relationship: they made me believe that because of my age and orientation, abuse would never happen to me. They made me believe that only physical abuse was valid abuse. They made me believe that the pain I was suffering was somehow “romantic”. Guess what? Scarleteen gave me a pretty firm reality check.
• PRACTICAL, COMPREHENSIVE, and INCLUSIVE safer sex ed. How was I supposed to know that such a thing as a “dental dam” existed? Heck, how was I supposed to know anything about protecting myself as a lesbian? And even the things that I did know, well, it would have been very helpful if someone had told me how to practically apply those things. “Use a condom.” …ok? What does a condom look like? What’s the right way to put it on? How do I negotiate safer sex with a partner? What are my other options?! Thankfully, Scarleteen had all those answers.
• BODY IMAGE. “Don’t let anyone make you feel bad.” Gee, thanks. By the way, is my labia minora normal? I saw her’s, and it was large and folded like a rose’s petals. Did mine just not develop right? What about my boobs? My butt, my arms, my teeth, my nostrils; are they “normal”? Hey wait a second, what is “normal” anyways, and where am I getting all of these ideas from? Why do I feel bad about my body to begin with, and how can I practically and realistically go about improving my body image? Scarleteen shone some light on the confusion.
• SEXUAL HEALTH education. Why didn’t anyone mention that there is more to sexual health than the creepy things you can catch from sexual activity? I was made to believe that GYN visits were only necessary for people who were sexually active in a heterosexual fashion, and as such waited that long to go myself. My health was in jeopardy, and I didn’t even know it. Guess what? Scarleteen cleared that up for me.
• VALIDATION of my sexuality! I’m a teenager! I’m horny, I’m sexual, and I am having sex! All kinds of sex! I’m having sex that adults want to tell me doesn’t exist. I’m fingering other girls, I’m receiving and giving oral sex, I’m engaging in anal play, I’m masturbating. ADMIT that it’s happening, and instead of thinking that you’ve done something “wrong”, give me accurate, inclusive, comprehensive information so that I can have the sexual life that I deserve. Be happy for me, or not, and then let’s just stay out of each other’s sex lives already, ok?

For me, the information that Scarleteen has to offer came too late in many respects… but the fact that it came at all has radically improved my life. It has helped me to make sense of the things that have happened in my past, it has given me a wonderful support network, it has unraveled many of the myths about me as a woman, it has educated me in a realistic and wholesome way, it has acknowledged my unique sexuality and given me real-world info to go with it… but most of all, SCARLETEEN has helped me to be a person who is not just sexually safe, but sexually happy; not just aware of risks, but active in taking care of my own sexual health; not just a sexual powerhouse for myself, but a fabulous influence for all those around me who used to beat each other in the stomach behind the art building after school. It has given me sexual agency so that I no longer have to carry an EC subscription around in my jacket pocket.

PLEASE DONATE. Scarleteen is my hero.