The first porn I ever saw was planted by a pervert. At least, in retrospect I think he might've been a pervert. At the time, I trusted him. I was sure he was a normal teenage boy. At the time, it was pretty great.
I got my period for the first time when I was twelve. My mom was ready. I don't know how. She drove me to the library and pulled two books off the shelf. What's Happening to My Body? Book For Girls and What's Happening to My Body? Book for Boys.
"We're going to read them together," she said. "It'll be fun."
I was nervous. It didn't sound like fun.
On the way home, Mom stopped at the Shoprite to pick up a few things for dinner.
"Can I stay in the car?" I asked. I wanted a minute alone with the books.
"Okay," she said. "I'll be right back."
I waited five seconds and then took the Book for Boys out of the canvas bag. I opened it and something slithered out from between the pages and landed in my lap. It was a glossy page from a magazine, and it had a picture of a hot dog on it. No, not a hot dog... something else. I knew immediately, instinctively, that whatever I was looking at was bad. It was something forbidden and secret and grownup. I slid the magazine page back into the book, and shut it firmly. I put it carefully back into the bag.
Later, at home, I took the bag up to my room. Mom saw me carrying it toward the stairs.
"Honey — we can go over everything in those books together, so that I can explain it to you," she said. "And you don't have to read the one about boys if you're uncomfortable." She thought about it for a second and then added, "Maybe I should look at it first, to make sure there isn't anything you're not ready for in there."
"No!" I croaked. "No, it's fine. Don't worry. I should probably read it, because I got my period and stuff." I wasn't sure why my period meant anything beyond the ruin of my pretty new white pants, but she seemed to think it was much more important.
Alone in my bedroom, I locked the door and again took the book out of the bag. Again, the single, shiny page fluttered out. I began to make sense of the image. There was a man, standing on a playground, with his pants unzipped. He was holding his... thing in his hand. It was definitely not a hot dog. Kneeling at his feet was a woman wearing pigtails and a pink dress with balloons on it. One of her breasts was popping out of the top of the dress, you could see the nipple and everything, and she was sticking her tongue out like she was about to lick the man — on his thing. Penis. I knew the word. She looked pretty happy about it. He looked very serious. There was a caption under the picture. It said, "Things are getting naughty at the playground!" Then there were other captions, for scenes on a different page, that hadn't been included. I wished that they had been. What else was going on? What did "Sex in a hay wagon! Halloween heats up!" mean?
I knew one thing for sure. What was happening in the picture — that was sex. That was the secret thing that adults did and kids didn't do. The thing that the characters in the novel I'd "borrowed" from my great aunt were always hoping to do.
I thumbed through the book, setting the sex picture aside, but within easy reach, in case it started to float away and I had to grab it. There was a whole chapter about penises, and I skipped to the illustrations of stages 1-5. There was also an illustration of a flaccid penis sitting next to an erect penis, which was standing up. But there was something better than all this. Someone had written in the book. Comments were penciled into the margins in neat, masculine handwriting.
"Mine is like this," with an arrow pointing to stage 4. And then, next to the set of images that showed pubic hair growth, "I have this." This time it was stage 3.
Immediately, I imagined that he was a teenage boy. A teenage boy with a surprising amount of hair inside his underpants. I imagined that he had pimples, like teenagers always did, and wore contact lenses, and had slightly greasy hair. On his head. He wasn't good-looking, in my imagination. That wasn't his purpose. He was there to instruct. And instruct he did. I flipped through the book with feverish urgency, looking for his comments.
He thought the girls in the illustrations from the chapter about girls were sexy. He thought all of the pictures of breasts were equally good except for stage 1, which was a little kid's chest. Fascinatingly, he liked to put his finger in his butt. I knew, because he told me. There was a drawing of an asterisk-y anus, and then a long, empty space, and then a penis, high above. It was as though the artist had crouched between some man's legs as he lay on his back. The commenter had pointed at the asterisk with a thin, hard line. He wrote, "It feels good to put your finger in here." I wasn't sure I believed him, but then, I didn't know a whole lot about boys' butts.
Staring at the comment about where the writer liked to put his finger, I suddenly realized that I had stumbled upon a secret communication between the boys of the world. I was like a spy, intercepting their transmissions. These messages weren't meant for my eyes. They were meant to guide boys through the complications of their own bodies.
If the boy with the pencil could see me now, he would be annoyed. "Hey!" he'd snap. "What's that little girl doing with my book?" He considered the book his property. He was lending it out as a gift to the world. And there was a gift inside the gift. He had intended the glossy present from the magazine for another boy. It was a form of initiation, and it had fallen into the wrong hands.
But I wasn't about to give it back.
"Kate!" my mom called from downstairs, her voice muffled by the floor between us. "Dinner!"
I leapt up from the edge of my bed and slammed the magazine page back inside the book. I stuck the book in my underwear drawer and faced myself in front of the mirror over the dresser. I looked about the same. It was hard to tell from my face and my knotty hair that my mind was completely different. That I knew infinitely more about the world than I had when I'd come into this room.
I avoided Mom's eyes at the table. My little brothers were talking about which dinosaur was the most dangerous. My dad was making up dinosaur names. Everyone was being normal. They had no idea what I knew. I was sure that none of them had ever seen a picture like the one hidden in my underwear drawer.
After dinner, as I loaded the dishwasher, Mom approached me. "Let me know if you'd like to start looking over those books with me tonight," she said.
I kept my eyes on the utensils. "I don't know," I said, playing it cool. Don't blush. Don't blush. I knew I was a bad liar. But if enough of my hair fell in my face, maybe she wouldn't notice.
She was washing a bowl in the sink. "Maybe we can start tomorrow," she said. "We'll read the chapter about menstruation."
Oh! Right! I'd forgotten about the girls' book.
"Okay!" I said, too eagerly. "I should learn more about that, probably." I had to keep her distracted. There was no way I could let her see the Boys' book. If she did, she would be horrified. She would be upset at what I'd seen. But more than that — her motherly innocence would be interrupted. Her eyes would be opened. She would know too much. I had to protect her.
That night, with the secret knowledge of boys' burning a hole in my underwear drawer, my mom sat on my bed and read the chapter about menstruation aloud to me. It wasn't very interesting. And I felt awkward, looking at illustrations of tampons and pads with my mom. She was trying not to be awkward. She was trying to be really upbeat about the whole thing.
A few days later, I asked if we could go back to the library. I told my mom it was because I wanted to pick up a Sweet Valley Twins book. But when she went into the little kids' section with my youngest brother, I hurried over to the returns counter, pulled What's Happening to My Body? Book for Boys out of my book bag, and tucked it into someone else's stack of books. No one saw me. Thank God.
It took her a few weeks to ask me if I'd gotten a chance to look at the other book — the one for boys.
"No," I lied. "I don't think I'm really ready for that."
She smiled. "That's okay. You don't have to be."
I went upstairs and opened my underwear drawer. Buried under piles of pink socks was a wooden box with a silver lock. My aunt had given it to me for Chanukah. It was a little treasure chest. I fitted the tiny key into the silver lock, and turned it. I opened the box. Inside was a tightly folded piece of glossy paper. My perfect secret. I unfolded it, bit by bit, until it was whole again. I had folded and unfolded it so many times that it was creased and worn, flecks of white showing under the once-shiny image.
The next boy who read the book would see the comments, but he wouldn't know about the picture. The glorious, forbidden picture. It was mine now. I would face adolescence with a blank, innocent face, armed with the secret knowledge of boys. I knew exactly what a penis looked like. In full color. I had nothing to be afraid of or alarmed by. I was ready.
Kate Fridkis blogs at Eat the Damn Cake and tweets at eatthedamncake and has grown up reasonably well-adjusted, despite everything.
this was Amazing.
People who write in library books should be tied to stakes and beaten with sticks, then left to be eaten by vultures.
@The Lady of Shalott I'm in agreement 99% of the time, but there are some topics where just physical evidence that someone else, someone in the same community, went through this (miscarriage, caring for a parent with Alzheimer's, cancer diagnosis, etc.) seems to bring a great amount of relief to the next patron to check it out.
Also, if we're relying on vultures, it's going to take a while.
@wharrgarbl Yeah, you'd have to put them in some sort of pig-suit...
@Fodforever Maybe staple bacon to them? Weight them down with whole hams? I imagine this whole thing taking place in sight of a pair of sacrificial pigs, who are giving the offender filthy looks throughout the beating, because they aren't the ones who wrote in the book, but here they are.
@The Lady of Shalott I couldn't agree with you more. Reading this piece reminded me that someone drew a horrible, enormous, bulbous penis on every single Smurf in the Smurfs book I always wanted to read in my pediatrician's waiting room. With the only good book in the office vandalized, I had nothing to take my mind off of my impending vaccinations. I curse the pervert who did that.
@wharrgarbl or secrets tucked in Postsecret books. It's become my standard practice when I'm at the library to go look at a Postsecret book and see what's been left behind. I've left a few of my own...
@The Lady of Shalott Toads disagree!! I love books, but even more I LOVE LIBRARIES. I have never written in a library book. But, baby, books are meant to be used. Enjoyed. Touched. Shared. The very tactile nature of books is endangered these days. So I say, if it brings you joy, or you don't want to or can't buy your own books to write in: Shine on you crazy diamond. That sharing is at the core of libraries, that connection with the next person who wants to read this book, the sense of physical sharing. It's actually amazing to me how FEW library books I've seen with writing on them. I like that people respect the books, too, for the most part: there is no guard watching over them to stop them, no one would trace that vandalism back to them, there is no real penalty. I like that respect, too, but if someone has something they want to share, to reach out through the aether and try to communicate with another human, I don't mind! Of course, I know it's usually not pure or beautiful or anything. Still, I just don't see the sense in trying to preserve a book in it's new, shiny, original state, when it is so much more interesting and beautiful just to let people live and appreciate it and use it and see what happens.
Although, honestly, drawings of penises don't count because if we just let people draw penises, they would abuse it, penises would be everywhere and the very fabric of society would collapse. People just can't be trusted with the power of penis drawings because they can't stop themselves. The lure is too strong.
@The Lady of Shalott I have to agree with Marzipan. I'm a bibliophile but I LOVE to see the weird shit people will write in book margins (also a big fan of bathroom graffiti).
@Marzipan I love you. And I wanna do that thing where you draw pictures with all the ~~***{{ kinds of keys and draw a penis but I don't know how and also I'm afraid it would get removed.
@The Lady of Shalott I have to disagree. The idea that marginalia somehow "ruins" a book is a very new one. There was a time when people were encouraged to write in books - turning the book into a dialogue, of sorts. Often the marginalia would end up being the most interesting part of the book. Often it's the only way historians* can learn about how a particular text was read and interpreted.
Now, I certainly don't think people should actively destroy books, say, by ripping out pages or scribbling over the text so much as to make it illegible. But finding a library book with writing in it is such an awesome experience. It reminds you how many people have laid hands on this book, and gives you an idea of how they might have experienced it. I write all over the books that I own, and I hope that their future owners (you know, when I'm dead or whatever) will find my notes useful in some way.
Highlighting in library books, on the other hand? So annoying. Why would anyone do that, seriously.
*Full disclosure: I am a historian.
I live to find writing in books and especially library books. Yes, a TON of writing is obtrusive and unpleasant, but seriously, few things make me happier than imagining the lives of other people reading the same book before me. Or after me.
@Brett Phillipson@facebook Hee. Old marginalia is the best. A professor was once describing how you had to be a little leery of copied manuscripts sometimes, like "If a passage seems a little mangled and there's something close that makes way more sense, it was probably scribal error. You have to remember that these guys were frequently working long hours in cold rooms without proper lighting or meal breaks." And one of my classmates asked how we knew that. "What, did they write 'I'm so cold' on it or something?" The look on the professor's face when he was all "Yeah, actually, that's exactly what they did. Some of the marginalia in these books was really not the most dignified in retrospect."
@Ellie I'm with you, I love to find writing in books (as long as it's not obnoxious). It feels like I'm reading someone else's secrets.
@Jennie Baxla Exactly!
Rereading my post, I hope my meaning was clear, that it's only obtrusive when there is a ton of writing in any one book, not that the general majority of writing is obtrusive.
@Marzipan
Look what happened to Pompeii!
That's why it's important never to let penises get out of hand. Heh.
@atipofthehat Feh, Pompeii. The entirety of Roman history is an illustration of why it's important to never let penises get out of hand.
@Marzipan I wish I found writing in library books. Usually it's more along the lines of crusted up boogers.
@The Lady of Shalott Oh good, I thought I was the only one who enjoyed finding a book with writing in it. I love reading an important work of literature and seeing someone else's little notes in the margins, usually very brief and abbrieviated, and wondering what they were think about the book, how they were interpreting it. Or when there are words underlined, and knowing that they found this passage significant. Love it. Love thinking about someone else pondering over the same book.
@SuperGogo And blood stains. (!?!)
@wharrgarbl That's why I miss the cards that showed you the dates when other people checked out the book.
@atipofthehat I took a class in college all about Pompeii and Herculaneum, and we spent an entire 3-hour class once talking about sex in Pompeii. There are so many dicks! I'm sorry, I mean "phalluses".
Oh, man.
My interaction with men would have been *so* much more interesting if someone had left a dirty picture in my mom's copy of "The Wonderful Way Babies are Made".
That is wonderful. I definitely feel that sex ed didn't prepare me for the realities of the male anatomy - my first reaction to a real one was "is it supposed to look like that?" (answer: yes, and nobody likes to hear that.)
@HillsideHoyden haha. I cannot believe you said that out loud. The first time I saw one was right before relinquishing my virginity. I was completely unprepared and more or less terrified. Seriously, those things are HUGE! Like, 10x the size I was expecting. When I realized I had to fit the whole thing you-know-where, I was pretty much like D:
bottom line: penii are weird. and honestly kind of scary.
@elysian fields Seriously, they are disgusting, get rid of them.
@elysian fields
I guess I just don't get the penis fear thing? They're so cool, you guys. Like Sharon Olds says:
When I was a connoisseuse of slugs
I would part the ivy leaves, and look for the
naked jelly of those gold bodies,
translucent strangers glistening along the
stones, slowly, their gelatinous bodies
at my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivel
to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,
but I was not interested in that. What I liked
was to draw aside the ivy, breathe the
odor of the wall, and stand there in silence
until the slug forgot I was there
and sent it antennae up out of its
head, the glimmering umber horns
rising like telesopes, until finally the
sensitive knobs would pop out the ends,
delicate and intimate. Years later,
when I first saw a naked man,
I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet
mystery reenacted, the slow
elegant being coming out of hiding and
gleaming in the dark air, eager and so
trusting you could weep.
@Emmanuelle Cunt And now boners-as-everting-slug-eyes has ruined boners for me forever. I hope you're happy.
@Emmanuellecunt well, I think that's fucking excellent. I really do.
@Emmanuelle Cunt I love Sharon Olds. And now I love you, too.
@vanillawaif Seriously, they are awesome; put them in you. Or not, because, you know, more for me.
@elysian fields
I always felt like they were the smallest! Especially if the guy is particularly broad-shouldered and tall, and it's just like this little bobbing thing? What a let down!
Except one time I almost had sex with a boy, and his penis was the hugest, and I laughed and laughed and said no. So really vaginas are, I'm guessing, where it's at.
@Emmanuelle Cunt That was beautiful.
I grew up as the only girl in the neighborhood, and the youngest of the group. There was a group of seven of us, from me at the youngest all the way up to my oldest brother who is seven years older than me, each one of the group a year apart. (When I was 7, the 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 year old were all boys.)
They behaved the same around me as they did around other boys, mainly because I didn't have boobs and was therefore not a "real" girl. Boys are very open with their bodies and would run around naked, or even grosser, try to pee on each other whenever they're peeing outside rather than going inside. (Happens a lot more than parents want to admit.)
Anyway, I saw wieners a lot growing up, but I remember being 11 and (through an honest accident) seeing the wiener of the 17 year old in the group. (To this day he doesn't know I saw his wiener.) It was at that point that I thought, "Huh. I've never been interested in naked boys before now, but there is something about that wiener that intrigues me."
And that is the story of how I knew I started puberty.
@RosemaryF "There is something about that wiener that intrigues me" is the beginning to basically every song / poem / story I ever wrote, I just didn't know it. :)
That was fantastic!
And I feel this might be the place to share that my own "sexual awakening" (in terms of learning about things, not my having sex) occurred at a big group sleepover where the some of the older girls sat around in a circle and told their rape fantasies (I was 12, they were about 13, ugh). Then we watched Interview With A Vampire and I was not only such a naif that I hadn't heard of the movie, I also had never heard of Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise. And one of other girls, realising how gullible and scared I already was, told me it was a documentary. And I believed her.
@Decca I was always very gullible as a child/teenager as well so I feel your pain. You could tell me anything and I'd be like WIDE EYED WONDER. So embarassing!
Notwithstanding, this comment made me laugh a lot.
@Decca When I was 15 or 16, I watched "Sixteen Candles" for the first time with my friend and she had me convinced for the entire movie that everyone died at the end. I was way too old (and familiar with your typical John Hughes plot) to believe this. I am SO GULLIBLE.
@redheadedandcrazy People still get me ALL THE TIME. I'm seeing this guy and I asked him if he'd read a particular David Sedaris book and he dryly responded, "I don't read books written by gay men." I totally believed him for an entire minute. He accomplishes this all the time and I think that's why I like him.
@rocknrollunicorn Intending only to make a mediocre joke, I accidentally convinced a buddy of mine that I didn't know what Batman was. He embarked on a very serious explanation of how he was like a rich ninja, and I led him on a merry dance down Revenge of the Ninja and whatnot, before I got too annoyed by the fact that he might think so little of me as to believe I might not know what Batman is. Smdh.
@miwome I've basically had to stop telling outrageous lies because people (who should know better) believe me too often. And not even like "I don't know who Batman is" type lies. Like, "Mexico was founded by molemen fleeing the crab-people's blitzkrieg assault on the western seaboard" type lies.
@wharrgarbl O.0
I...don't understand these people? Who are you hanging out with?
@rocknrollunicorn This happened to me with Jurassic Park!
@miwome I don't know. They seem really normal otherwise? But then I'm sitting there, gently walking back "Pants were first invented by Buddhist monks to give them something to wipe their hands on" or "The dog was first domesticated by Pat Roberston in 1953" and quietly thinking that there's a social contract being broken somewhere, because you shouldn't be able to graduate high school and tie your own shoes and also believe that there's a Pacific island where gravity doesn't work.
@wharrgarbl This is like that time my ex convinced a girl that "they" had "discovered" a new number between 6 and 7 and it was called Derp, or something equally appropriate.
I must say, though, the quality of your fabrications is stunningly high. I commend you.
@wharrgarbl You are my hero.
@wharrgarbl I have a feeling that a) you are a really good liar and b) are telling these stories to people who, like me, avoid conflict, so even when I manage to NOT believe everything everyone says (which is very hard for me), I will just kind of pretend like I believe certain things.
Which maybe isn't the best way to conduct oneself? But I honestly wouldn't know how to begin arguing against your statements about pants and gravity-free zones.
@rocknrollunicorn It's not an argument, though. If that helps? I mean, there are times when it is, but those are always between close friends who are doing the same thing and it's basically a satiric re-enactment of a GOP primary debate. The problem times, it's ridiculous assertion -> expression of belief -> explanation that it was a joke -> awkwardness.
People actually believing me (or credibly pretending to) didn't used to be a problem, though. I'm not sure what happened--maybe I aged into being A Credible Person? Or I unwittingly tripped over a meteorite and got a shitty superpower, and now I'm Unusually Persuasive Woman and should go into politics? But I still can't talk my mom out of believing stupid things about CFLs and the president and Mexicans? I don't know.
But you pretty much can't go wrong with an excessively chipper declaration of "That sounds like absolute bullshit!" if someone's seriously badgering you to get on board with something that's prima facia ridiculous. If someone's actually trying to persuade you to accept an extraordinary claim, the burden's on them to prove it, not you to argue it down.
@Decca 13 year olds are already having rape fantasies? *This* intrigues me. My sexual education also came in the form of sleepovers. But actually in the "let's raid Becky's dad's porn stash and stare at every page and maybe watch that naughty movie her parents rented and also read/stare at The Joy of Sex because it is on the bookshelf in the living room." Oh AND "AIM just started getting popular and we can 'cyber' (giggle and decide what "sexy" responses to type to get him to say more stuff about his peen/sex) with rando anonymous creeps on the other end of a chat window."
@Veronica Mars is smarter than me Uggghhh Hairpin, WHY do you make me want to reveal all my embarrassing secrets all the time?
This is AWESOME! Really, I love this. The boys book was SO much more interesting!
@redheadedandcrazy Eh!
I LOVE THIS.
For some reason, I had an old bookcase in my bedroom that was full of books that weren't mine. Just a bunch of my parents books. At some point -- 2nd or 3rd grade maybe? --I started looking at a few of them and stumbled upon a very old copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I WAS OBSESSED WITH IT and obviously showed it to all my friends whenever they came over. To this day I wonder if it's the reason I've got such a fascination with body hair. Anyway, finding out about a lot of sexy things from a 1970s feminist book really isn't so bad.
@Katie Scarlett YES. I learned all about sex as a kid by snooping through my parents' feminist books, namely The Purity Myth and The Second Sex('The Formative Years' parts are really explicit). It was totally weird at the time, but probably a way better way to learn about sex compared to how my friends did.
@Katie Scarlett @fusion Everyone I knew growing up learned about sex either from porn, or in various other tragicomic ways. It was less than ideal. :/
I bought those very books (along with The Feminine Mystique and a few others) for that very purpose - for any future child of mine to stumble upon at a (hopefully) appropriate age. I hope this will help lead to any daughter of mine damn well learning to respect herself and her body, and any son of mine to be taught to damn well respect womens' minds and their bodies.
@Katie Scarlett I ALSO stumbled across my parents' copy of the 70s edition "Our Bodies, Ourselves" probably when I was 8 or thereabouts. I hid it in my room and read it at night (...ahem.) It was so compelling and I loved reading the real women's stories about what sex was like or seeing photos of two women kissing or people having sex.
I never thought that about the body hair but it makes total sense now that you mention it. I'm 24 now and have been rocking hairy pits for the past two years... I love thinking that early exposure to "Our Bodies, Ourselves" had something to do with it.
Incidentally I find it a bit disappointing how sanitized the new edition is.. how will the youngins get their sex ed from scandalous yet feminist sources?
I learned about sex from my mom's copy of American Indian Myths and Legends. I vaguely remember being confused when a coyote was somehow able to extend his penis in order to rape some women who were bathing in a lake while the rest of him was hiding in the bushes.
@Katie Scarlett I found my brothers stash of (100+...!) porno mags and vhs around the age of 12. Also, I snagged a copy of "The Shoemaker: The Anatomy of a Psychotic" from a church rummage sale "Free" box shortly thereafter. It is a true story about a serial rapist/murderer. Totally messed me up for a while but it also caused me to develop a true obsession with reading erotica.
@Katie Scarlett ME TOO, I LOVE the 1970s "Our Bodies, Our Selves..." so much more radical than the current one. I'm so happy other people found and loved this book.
@planforamiracle "...Ahem" is right.
@Caitlin Podiak Oh my GOD, yes! I forgot about that book! (Don't know if it was the same one, but: lots of stories about Coyote, many of them Sexy? Yes?) I was so fascinated by a bunch of those stories.
My dad brought me the book from Santa Fe, having, I believe, only paged through the front bit of it (which was before all the Sexy stories come around), and I remember being eternally terrified that he might someday realize what he'd given me.
@miwome I also read that book! It was big and had a yellow/red/white/black cover, right?
I remember that story about Coyote extending his peen to a maiden bathing, AND I ALSO REMEMBER that one time as they're having teh sex (I don't think it was rape?), A WAGON COMES DOWN THE ROAD between the bush where he's hiding and the lake where she's bathing. Hee! I always liked the sense of humor in that story...
@wee_ramekin Yes, that's exactly the cover I remember: http://www.amazon.com/American-Legends-Pantheon-Folklore-Library/dp/0394740181 I saw it in a bookstore recently and was jolted with memories of sneaking it off the shelf to show my friends, with the solemn pride of having access to forbidden wisdom nobody else had.
Maybe it wasn't rape, I was pretty fuzzy on what sex was at that point and the whole extending penis thing didn't help clarify! I also remember at one point the women were lying on the river bank and they farted in Coyote's face to make him think they were stinky dead bodies.
@Caitlin Podiak @wee_ramekin I dunno, I think mine was specifically focused on Coyote, and it seems like it was smaller than that? It definitely had the same kind of Southwestern Native American art style stuff happening on it.
Did y'all's book also have a story about a lady with a toothy vagina?
@miwome Oh yes, definitely read that toothy vagina story.
@Caitlin Podiak Hmm. Different editions, then, maybe. Also, my memory is notoriously terrible.
@LilyMarlene My mother bought us several age-appropriate books along the way, and was always very approachable and easy to talk to. (I have a distinct memory from 4th grade, coming home after school one day, "mom, what's a cherry?" and she didn't bat an eye.) But the best was when I started high school (ish), she bought a COLLEGE textbook for a VERY thorough "human sexuality" course. She said that she got a textbook because wanted us to have accurate, complete information, but that she wanted us to come talk to her if we had questions, because there was some seriously advanced shit in that book (I'm paraphrasing). It was AWESOME.
@Aphrodite That's awesome, and I think approachability/ease of talking to is the key thing. I like textbook thing, too - science-y!
My mother started pestering me about the whole "becoming a woman" thing when I was eight. Eight years old. I hadn't grown boobs, gotten any extraneous hair, no moodiness, anything anytime anywhere. I had merely re-organized the bathroom closet to my exacting standards one boring summer afternoon, and she sat me down and gave me the "I think you're going to get your period soon" speech. I WAS HORRIFIED (none of my friends had it, which is of course how we tend to measure things at that age), and was immediately like "SHUT IT DOWN, DO NOT WANT DNW DNW".
I was so mortified that I refused to talk about anything of that nature with her again, which led to some unfortunate things down the track. It's such a delicate subject, and I want to be the cool mom (not like Amy Poehler Cool Mom, but you know) who does it right and doesn't make everyone run shrieking from the room in horror. So, thanks for sharing your mom's approach - it wins.
Eat the Damn Cake + The Hairpin = I am happy forever now.
I loved this. It reminds me of how I faked starting my period for almost a year before I actually started because I was so excited to become A Woman. Also, getting my ears pierced was the reward for starting my period and I really, really wanted pierced ears.
@heyits "reward?" Not, "consolation prize?"
@hopelessshade my family has an interesting way of viewing life.
@heyits Weird! My "reward" for getting my period ALSO was getting my ears pierced! Got my period at 12 which is super early. Always wondered if my obsession with getting my ears pierced somehow brought it on.
@heyits I never ever understood the girls in my school and stuff who were pumped about starting their periods and ~becoming women~ because oh my god, did they miss the part about BLEEDING FROM THEIR JUNK and CRAMPS and MISERY?! HOW?!
@Gilgongo 12 is super early? I got mine at 11 :-/
@Gilgongo I got it at 11 and I didn't particularly want it. For one thing, I was the only one I knew, for a long time. I remember being convinced that if I could somehow hide it from the world it wouldn't count, and I made a whole Game Plan To-Do List that went something like:
1. Learn how to use washing machine
2. Wash underwear
3. Crumple up toilet paper
etc. I remember when my mom "caught" me I was all, "Nooooo it's ALL REAL" but also relieved, because Mom Knows What To Do.
@Third Wave Housewife I think most people gloss over the cramps and grossness and unfortunate reality of periods when hyping it for girls. I mean, I never heard anyone break it down as a period-thing, as opposed to just saying "God, cramps!", which you understood once you were in it but didn't really connect to it beforehand. (And I guess it would be kind of hard to describe uterine cramps if you've never had your uterus do anything before?) It's all about "Womanhood!" and "Growing up!" and "Important milestone!"
Kind of like boys get so psyched about growing body/facial hair because now they are "Men!" and "Super badass!" and "Whoo!" and nobody mentions the incredibly awkward boners that will plot to embarrass them in front of their whole math class or the nonsense their voice is going to pull or having to quietly hang themselves in the back yard after coming home from school to find their mother in the process of washing the sheets they jizzed all over last night and hid in the attic this morning because there was no time to burn them and oh god she knows, she knows.
Maybe it's for the best? I mean, if someone really explained the extent to which puberty would involve our genitals going rogue like that, and that everyone else around us knew what was happening, we might all wind up nihilists.
@heyits I think that's kinda cool! I got mine when I was 11 and despite an older sister who had gotten hers, I was so "ahhh sex!" because of how strongly religious my parents were (even though they were good about non-judgmentally answering strictly mechanical questions) that I hid it for like a day before telling my mom because I thought she'd be mad at me. But she gave me a huge hug and was like, "Congratulations, you're a woman now!" In short: the intersection of your parents and sex is not the most confusing thing about being a girl, but it is probably the first confusing thing.
@Gilgongo Ack, I got my period right before my 10th birthday. I still feel weird about that (even though I shouldn't - OUR BODIES, OURSELVES), but my mom got hers when she was nine too, so I guess it's a family thing.
@heyits I feel like getting it early is almost better. I didn't get my period until I was 13, but I was also really young for my grade, so all my friends got it way before me and I spent SO MUCH TIME worrying about how I didn't have it yet. I also don't think I ever told my parents. We had stuff lying around, and by that point of course I knew what to do. A couple months later I taught myself how to use tampons, because I ran out of pads and my older sister used tampons. I don't think I ever even talked about periods with my parents until my sister went to college and I had to sheepishly add tampons to the shopping list. It's not like I didn't feel like I could talk about it, because they were very open to talking about it and they made it clear I could, but I was just a very shy and embarrassed kid.
I had the What's Happening...For Girls book, which my mom bought when I was around eleven. Thank God we didn't have to read it together! I was so embarrassed about it that I couldn't keep it on a bookshelf where someone might see it. Instead, I hid it under the couch cushions. I forgot about it when we moved, until one of the movers approached my mom, holding the book, and said, "Uh, this was under the, ah, couch cushions." Luckily I was not present or I wouldn't be here today, having died of embarrassment.
@EternalFootwoman Yes, this was me too. I had the book, hid it and I memorized every page. Especially the one with all the different nicknames you could possibly think of for penis. I remember thinking, "Johnson? Seriously?"
@EternalFootwoman I had a library copy of something called Girls And Sex which of COURSE had to be HOT F'ING PINK, and one of my elementary school teachers caught me with it and while he was perfectly kind about it I still basically imploded.
One of my friend's first sexual encounters was with a guy from South America. Me and my other friend's only sexual encounters were with American guys from the Northeast. We were talking one day, when we were like 17, about dicks. All of a sudden, we realized that friend #1 had never seen a circumcised dick and Friend #2 and me had never seen uncircumcised dicks! It was like we were speaking separate languages!
Friend #1: You know, you pull the foreskin back-
Friend #2/Me: WHAT? WHAT IS THAT? WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE? Doesn't it look weird?!
Friend #1: You mean, your boyfriends DON'T have it? Doesn't THAT look weird?
And then we googled "circumcised vs. uncircumcised dicks" to see the difference because we had no idea what the other kinds of dicks even looked like. The end.
Also, circumcised is hard to spell.
@bonnbee Yeah, the first guy I slept with was circumcised and the second wasn't. That was a definitely a learning experience.
@bonnbee Apparently my own mother hadn't seen an uncircumsised one, and she and my sister discussed them (which is amusing to imagine), and my mom looked it up online and thought it was a weird concept. Hilarious.
This reminds me of reading the "What's Happening To Me?" and "Where Did I Come From?" books when I was about 11. I had the sex one and my best friend had the puberty one. I strongly suspect that our parents bought them and planted them in an obvious place, knowing that we (my BFF and I) would talk about it together.
There was never any parental discussion about it.. and all I remember reading in the books was learning the word "testicle" which I find hilarious to this day, and seeing an illustration of a guy in swim trunks on a diving board, with a boner-bulge and an embarrassed face, and the caption, "sometimes erections don't know when they're not wanted." Hee hee..
Also I just googled it and those two books are by Peter Mayle, who also wrote "A Year in Provence"—kind of a weird segue?
@planforamiracle Eww really Peter Mayle?! That makes me feel so creepy about Provence!
@planforamiracle: My daughter and I just read "Where Did I Come From?" the other day. You guys, I get that this is a kids' book, but there is SO MUCH THEY LEFT OUT. I need to tell my girl more about her anatomy, no matter how embarrassed either of us get. Does "What's Happening to Me?" get more detailed?
Also, hahaha Peter Mayle! I never made the connection.
@Bittersweet Youuu could do what my mom did? (Suddenly open an issue of Playboy she found in the basement, to the centerfold, and explain to my horrified reaction that she was just trying to show me "what a body looks like")
@planforamiracle oh geez! i had those same two books (given to me by mom without comment, followed up by a maxi-pad instruction session and dire warnings about NEVER USING TAMPONS EVER YOU WILL DIE.). but i know exactly exactly the illustration you're talking about. if my sadly photographic memory serves, blue trunks, yellow stripe? please someone prove me wrong.
i did like it's vaguely sex-positive-but-not-for-now attitude, that likened it to jumping rope. great fun, but you can't do it all day cause it's tiring.
Word, dated book. Word.
@Bittersweet My mom read that with me back in the day but never really tried talking with me about everything that was left out. So I learned everything else from friends/classmates/older cousins. None of which are reliable sources!
@phillystout For some reason I just now read this article. And I thought you said "soldiers" instead of "cousins" and I was concerned for you.
This was just so great. You scored, bigtime.
Let's see some hands, who here also learned about sex by stumbling upon a copy of The Joy of Sex that someone left (clearly on purpose) in the children's section of a library? I was on a first grade class trip to the public library, my friends and I were absolutely scandalized and we freaked out about getting caught even on the bus ride home, after I had put it back.
@Danzig! Not quite the children's section, but my parents kept a copy of it in the office in our house that also had a private line, and my BFF at the time would call me with her parents copy and we would look at it together. This was maybe 4th grade? But man, when you're 9/10 and not reading that book but just looking at the pictures, apparently you can come up with weird explanations for them (like my friend deciding that some girl's "down theres" (direct quote) had 6 holes.
I used to read these kinds of books aloud to people in the library during my free period all the time. There were sadly never any hand drawn penises or reader discussions about their penises in it, but it was a very small library and the librarians definitely would have noticed. Also I just realized that this is probably what boys did before the internet.
OMG I totally read these books too! My mom checked out the one for girls, and I found the one for boys on my own. I seem to remember checking it out too, but that can't be possible.
No penises in mine though. Well, no extra penises.
Mysterious Book Boy is like the Half-Blood Prince of puberty!
I want that treasure chest in the picture. I've been looking for one just like it to house all my sex toys and lubricants and other fun sexy things.
@Third Wave Housewife My final project advisor for my semester abroad was this awesome crazy sex lady (like, she had been on national TV before showing how to give a blowjob, in an educational sense... by giving a blowjob to a real life penis attached to a real life dude!)
Anyway I went over to her house to chat about my project ideas and at some point she said, "Do you want to see my treasure chest?" So I responded, "uh, sure!" She directed me to a full-size 5-drawer dresser filled to the brim with sex toys. They actually overflowed into a cardboard box sitting on the floor next to it.
I want her life.
@mustelid I thought "treasure chest" was going to be a much more intimate euphemism and I was sort of scared for you?
Damn, I wish I even remembered how I learned about sex. I have no idea. I'm going to ask my mom if she remembers what she told me and when. I was part of the Our Bodies, Ourselves 70's edition club though. I loved that book, though my most vivid memory from it is unfortunately the graphic photo of the woman who died from an illegal abortion. Still shuddering just thinking about it.
@Killerpants My brother and I learned by my dad telling us. At the same time. When he got to the penis-in-vagina part my brother giggled. That is the one and only time my dad ever slapped him.
I had the girl's version of this book and it was amazing. I remember how nonjudgmental and factual it was about abortion, and it really helped me develop a healthy attitude about puberty and sex. Plus I spent a lot of time staring at the diagrams (I believe there was one of a penis inserted in a vagina and I remember thinking WHAT).
@likethestore I remember a friend and I trying to make our Barbies or whatever have sex, and we couldn't figure out where their legs were supposed to go. I think we eventually ended up having them scissor, basically, but it was supposed to be hetero sex. So clueless.
@miwome My Barbies were horny little bitches.
@likethestore MINE TOO OMG
I never had any book like this, but I remember reading some DK book about the human body that had a brief, clinical description of penises & how they work-- and at the end it was like "...the erect penis can then be inserted into the vagina." And I knew nothing about any of this, so was like GO ON but it just left me hanging there.
Man, I never got to read the good sex books. I don't remember the sex book my mom gave me, but I do remember why she did. It was sometime in elementary school, and Mom babysat a lot of kids until their parents got off work. One of them whispered to me a joke about some kids we knew "having sex." Mom asked me if I knew what that was, and I said, "Like, kissing and shit?" My profanity was much more advanced than my sexual knowledge. That night came the book, and Mom made me swear not to tell anyone else.
Of course, I told everyone the next day at school, and boy did I get in trouble.
Also, my mom had an old collection of Mad magazines from the '70s, which was stored at our lake house. In one edition someone had gone through and circled all the breasts and all the crotches. I have no idea why, but I guess this was supposed to be instructive.
ummm i'm pretty sure my first introduction to sex was when i was watching that movie "species" on vhs with my parents and suddenly, oops, graphic sex scene happening! and my mom was like "well, kids, this is sex!". and that was the last time it was ever mentioned out loud.
I learned about sex from medical books in my dad's library. I remember obsessing over page 437 which showed a slice of a penis inside of a vagina. I never understood the mechanics of how it worked because I assumed dicks came straight out of guys at a 90 degree angle.
My mom had this book that was all about pregnancy and there was one page which showed a baby coming out of a vagina in four separate time-lapse photos. The look on the woman's face and seeing her vagina stretched to accommodate a giant head was extremely horrifying. That scarred me for life and I STILL don't want to have children ever.
Oh also, my grandpa once gave me a stack of astronomy magazines and i think he accidentally gave me a copy of a playboy from 1983. I would race home after school just to look at it. That was until my mom found it and took it away (after grilling me about where I got it and I lied about hiding it because I didn't want to get in trouble, when in reality I hid it because I never wanted anyone to take it away from my horny 10 year old self.)
OOH! I never had a Ken doll and my BFF and I used a Barbie that my dog had mangled and gnawed off the arm and then we cut her hair short and she became the boy doll. My mom walked in on us playing house with two naked barbies in a kleenex bed box. She then proceeded to sit me down later to talk about how the "peanut" goes into a vagina. That was 3rd grade and I relayed it to every single girl on the playground the day after.
Damn I have a lot of discovering-sex-as-a-kid stories.
@Lady_Terminator My dad had a stack of Playboys on top of his dresser (the spines faced the wall). He purposely bought one at the news stand in front of my brother and me like it was no big deal specifically to make the point that it was no big deal. Eventually, my brother and I both independently discovered his stack. I looked at them a lot, and showed them to my friends, too. We used to create partially revealing outfits out of parts of our dance costumes and pretend to be Playboy models and one of the girls would be the photographer.
One time, my one friend squatted and spread her legs and labia for a pretend picture! Turns out her dad had Hustlers.
Discovering-sex-as-a-kid stories are the best.
I'm not sure what book it was, but I too had one of these "What's Happening"-type books. To this day, my view of menstruation and women's hygiene and all that jazz has a very 70s tint. I was pubertal long after the demise of menstrual pad hooks, yet I still understood them to be a commonly used thing. In 1998. Yeah.
I don't think I remember a time when I didn't know what sex was, at least in the most clinical sense. My dad did security surveys for Planned Parenthoods across the nation, so I would end up tagging along to the ones that were nearby. You haven't lived until you've spent your Saturday in a Planned Parenthood conference room, eating McDonalds and looking at vagina models. Of course, I also ended up with an endless supply of sex ed books for young people.
On top of that, I had sex ed in sixth and ninth grades in school and eighth grade in religious school (Dad's PP connection again-- that year was half sex, half Holocaust, so imagine that).
Despite all of that knowledge, I am not particularly sexually experienced. Maybe because everyone took all of the mystery out of it?
I was so over-sex-ed'd in middle school (we had sex ed in 5th, 7th, and 9th grades, my parents had me take some extracurricular class all about "Our Bodies") but NOTHING taught me as much as finding my parents' old copies of The Joy of Sex (1 and 2), Our Bodies Ourselves (which had so many orgasm stories, WHOA), and the Kama Sutra. Except the Kama Sutra was less interesting because it had too many things like "rub honey on your vagina to restore virginity".
I was a late bloomer, etc., so my mom never really gave me the talk. Or, she did, but it was too early for me to care I guess? I never had books. The thing I came across that wowed me (ha) was a Rudy Ray Moore record mixed in with my mom's hippie music. Oh man. An astrological trip, indeed.
My mom recently asked me 'Do you remember me teaching you about sex? Using the bathtub faucet?' and I don't remember that at all and it sounds horrible? My poor awkward mother. She would also leave books like 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret' around and encourage me to read them but I understood that if I read them then we would have to Talk About Them and therefore avoided them completely. I don't know where my curiosity was. I really should reassure her that I turned out okay.