Ignorance Ain’t Bliss

Hi Feministing! I’ve only left one or two comments here and there, but this is something I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time now but could never think of a venue that would be open to a topic like this. I’ve wanted to put this out as a facebook note, but then I realise that 105 people could see it, including the lady who used to babysit me, my sister-in-law, and people who really don’t know me all that well.

So, I chose a group of strangers who’ve infuriated me, awed me, humbled me, taught me, and caused me to avoid countless assignments over the past semester.

I’m going to turn 19 in 8 days, I’ve always had feminist sensibilities. My parents encouraged me to think independently, logically, and freely – something you might not expect being raised in a Southern Baptist church, but then Mom is pretty much a secret second-wave agent and Dad was a true-blue hippie who meshes together Christian Science and Buddhism and worships the ground my brother and I walk on.

Not that they don’t have faults – there’s still a lot of turmoil here, which I’ll have to face in this coming summer of being home from my first year of college. But one of their faults is, I now realise, pretty egregious.

My parents cannot talk about sex.

My mom might’ve tried twice. She bought me a book about puberty when I was 11. The discussion of sex in my house went no farther than a timid "Don’t have it!" – the rest I gleaned from public school and church.

The result? Until I was 16, I probably really couldn’t tell you what sex was – and then I would have defined it as penis-in-vagina only. Because I didn’t know there was anything else. I saw no "steps" or "bases" (I know these ideas are problematic) between French kissing and full on intercourse, I did not know they existed.

And, most painfully for me to realise now, I was barely conscious of my vagina (periods, of course, wouldn’t let me ignore it completely) and I didn’t know I had a clitoris until *maybe* a year ago.

I didn’t know my own anatomy. I didn’t know what to call my genitalia (did I know to call them genitalia?). I didn’t masturbate until I was almost 17 and 1/2 (I don’t really like masturbating, even now). I had no ideas about g-spots, labia, or my cervix. Nothing. They were nameless, irrelevant, and silent.

People, even in sex ed at school, never really talk about sex in a way I understand. They show us diagrams of ovaries and the uterus, but not the clit. The vagina is a birth canal. They don’t talk about pleasure, they don’t talk about erections, they don’t talk about fingering or cunnilingus or fellatio.

No one’s talking. I saw a penis for the first time on wikipedia, because I wanted to know what it looked it like. How did I miss out on this? I see our hypersexual culture, but it’s always talked around – there are skimpy clothes and big boobs and long tubular things and six packs, but who’s really talking about sex in the mainstream world?

Why weren’t my parents talking to me? Why didn’t my sex ed class define vulva for me? No one’s talking.

I identified as asexual before I got involved in my first relationship in October of last year. I have met the greatest boy in the world, he has done more than any of the people who were supposed to teach me to show me that I am beautiful. That my body can please and be pleased. He doesn’t pressure me, he fingered me for an hour and half before I had my first orgasm – after probably four months of trying. About two months later, I gave him a blowjob/handjob for the first time.

His love and patience have helped me explore and learn about my body. I don’t think I have "body image issues" per se, but – I didn’t know my body.

No one talked to me. And realising that this part of me – not the most important part, or the most beautiful, but a part nonetheless – was kept from me, by silence. By ignorance. The pain – which I try to dismiss as illogical and indulgent and silly – is very real to me. Have I conveyed it well enough?

I didn’t know myself. I still don’t know all I’d like to – and I don’t want to google it for hours. I want to talk to my Mom, my Dad, my doctor. I want to see a face, I want to giggle and cry and hold hands and talk about my body with a warm, breathing person without shame or fear.

I’m tearing down the walls between me and my temporal home brick by brick. So what I’m asking is: am I the only one?

What I’m begging you to do is talk. If you’re a parent, talk to you’re girls and boys, be open. Please. If you teach sex ed, teach us about our bodies. Please. Ignorance ain’t bliss.