How I Learned About Sex

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How I Learned About Sex

Traumatizing the Un-traumatized

I didn’t learn about sex all at once. My parents, the primary agents of socialization, were educated people but not at all comfortable discussing anything vaguely sexual, so it was never a topic that was brought up much in our household, at least not around me. I am not sure if their attitudes came from the prudishness of their own parents or their continuing religious socialization. Regardless, I had heard only vague things about what happened between men and women and where babies came from.

I am not sure about the exact details of where I first heard sex mentioned. It may well have been mentioned more than once, without my caring. I do know that, sometime in third or fourth grade, curiosity got the better of me and I consulted a dictionary. The definition wasn’t very complete, and I was too embarrassed to ask my parents or friends. It’s odd that, before I even knew what sex was, I knew it was something to be ashamed of. Still, wasn’t afraid of or traumatized by sex, either. Not yet, anyhow.

The next place I turned to was the Home Medical Encyclopedia, which was co-written by the American Medical Association and Reader’s Digest. Like Reader’s Digest, their explanation was abridged and not very satisfying. It did offer more than the one-liner from the dictionary, giving me a somewhat more complete picture, but I still didn’t know the whole story. However, I was too young to realize what I didn’t know and my curiosity was satisfied, so I stopped looking for a while.

All eighth graders in Utah were required to take a health class, which explained pretty much the same details found in the medical encyclopedia. To take this class, we had to have signed permission slips from our parents. My mother read the slip and noticed the instructions suggesting opening a dialogue with your child about sex, so she asked I had any questions on the topic. I have never seen my mother look more uncomfortable, and I was with her when she was in labor with two of my siblings.

Since she didn’t appear eager and I wasn’t, either, it seemed simpler to just pretend that I had nothing I wanted to know about. This made her happy, and she signed the slip, which let me hear a blunt but terse teacher repeat what I’d already learned a few years ago. If anything, she covered less than my own studies had. The standard joke is that sexual education in Utah consisted primarily of identifying the boys and the girls and telling them to use their respective bathrooms, and never touch each other (until their wedding night). From the lack of interest among my classmates, I inferred that they too had done their own research, learning from books, parents or friends. In short, sex ed was a social fiction that let parents feel that they’d fulfilled their responsibilities, while leaving children ill-prepared for sexuality.

Up until the time I was in eleventh grade, I knew a bit about the mechanics of what happened to a male during sex, but I had very little detail on what happened to a female. This is because my books suffered from androcentrism and, while perhaps vaguely admitting to some sort of climax phase, did not directly mention the female orgasm, much less explain what a clitoris was for. In short, they never admitted sex could be pleasurable for the woman.

On a cloudy March day, I was sitting in the debate room trying to come up with a topic for an original oratory. I was focusing in on Female Genital Mutilation as a possible subject, and ran across the word “clitoris”. The research material was aimed at the dominant, adult culture, where a basic knowledge of human sexuality could be safely assumed. As a member of the sheltered Utah student sub-culture, this went right over my head.

While I’d seen the organ labeled in diagrams, it was never mentioned in the text, so I wasn’t clear on why it might be a bad thing to amputate it. It took a trip to the library and a bit of hunting around until I got the relevant facts and was properly horrified. And so it was that I only learned about female orgasms in the traumatizing context of forced clitoridectomies and infibulations. After this, though there was still more to learn about sex, there were no major shocks left, as little could compare to this, even among deviant practices in the Utah counterculture.

I started off quite un-traumatized, even after knowing the basic mechanics, because sex itself is nothing scary. What traumatized me was learning about sexual politics and the horrific ways that some men are scared of women and some women are scared of sex. In retrospect, it would have been better if I had learned about sex gradually, at an age-appropriate level and without the glaring omissions. I should have been informed of more than just the mechanics, taught more about birth control and given a better view of the social conflicts involved.

Fundamentally, I was kept in the dark about sex for pleasure, sex by myself, and sex as part of a caring but not necessarily formalized relationship. I was taught to see sex only within the proscribed societal roles of marriage and reproduction, with a focus on ejaculation and pregnancy, where the woman is a passive vessel. Eventually, I activated my sociological imagination and came to understand that I could be empowered about sex, that it was something I could speak and think freely about and make my own decisions. In overcoming traditional limits, I didn’t reject everything about them, defining myself solely in opposition to the norm. Rather, I still see motherhood as something important, but not the whole of my sexuality, much less my life. As Mary Ashton Livermore wrote, “Above the titles of wife and mother, which, although dear, are transitory and accidental, there is the title human being, which precedes and out-ranks every other.”

by Amanda Evans

Date: 01/28/04