Learning About Sex, Part 1

I know I talk a lot about sex. I like talking about sex so much that I majored in it. But it wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I knew nothing about sex, and that was well into my late teens. Even though my first sexual experience was at the tender age of 14, I didn’t know much at the time. Everything I knew was through stories I heard from friends or at sneaking a peak at a Playboy magazine.

My first really confusing discovery was about periods. A younger brother of a friend was teasing her because she had just gotten hers. I was confused so I asked an older cousin and he told me that every month, women bled. That’s how they made babies. What the fuckity fuck?!? I called him a liar and when I did, he told me to go look for pads in my mother’s cabinet. As luck would have it, I could not find anything in my mother’s bathroom that could be used to stop blood every month, so I concluded that it was a big lie. Women bleeding every month to make babies?! Seriously? How could I ever fall for that one? Not me! I’m too smart for that.

I remember the first time I saw a naked woman. I was about 12 years old, sitting on the footsteps of the church of my catholic school. Every afternoon, I would wait for my mother to pick me up on those steps, along with friends. The faithful would walk by us, go inside the church, drop their sins off, and come back out, refreshed and cleansed, ready for more sinning.

Anyway, a friend of mine ran towards me and started whispering that he had his older brother’s backpack with him, and he was certain there was a porn magazine in there. We both got strangely excited and opened the bag, where we found a biology book, a bible study book, and a Playboy magazine that had clearly been used many, many times. Completely oblivious to our surrounding, we grabbed the magazine and tried to open it inside the backpack, so as to be discreet. I don’t remember what we saw, but I remember being surprised at how hairy naked women were. I really wasn’t very impressed, though I didn’t think much of it at the time. By the time we had seen a couple of naked pictures, I lost interest and wondered why people thought that this was exciting. My friend kept on looking at pictures for quite some time though.

A couple months later, at a bake sale, a classmate came up to me and asked if I thought there was anyone that still didn’t have any pubic hair in our class. I had no idea what pubic hair was. I pretended that I knew exactly what he was talking about. He then pulled down his pants, just to the pubic area, and showed me his growing hair, very proudly. I then pulled down mine and as it turned out, I had pubic hair and didn’t even know that’s what it was called. I felt embarrassed that I didn’t know the proper term for what was growing on my body and became obsessed with finding out more.

But, in pre-internet days, that was pretty impossible, especially in a Catholic school.

Part 2 is here.