She's a good girl, loves her mama
Loves Jesus and America too
She's a good girl, crazy 'bout Elton
Loves daydreams and her boyfriend too.
(Tom Petty, Freefallin'; lyrics shamelessly adapted without permission)
When I was in middle school, pious little good-deed-doer that I was, I would periodically volunteer to go to the state or county home for the mentally retarded. We'd all load up in the school bus and spend a couple of hours playing with mostly Down-Syndrome and other mildly retarded children. I had a comfort level with the kids because I'd met some special-needs children at church.
On one of the last trips to the home, someone messed up. Instead of scheduling us with the little ones, they accidentally put us in with the teenage boys/young adult men group. In a very short time the school bus was filled up with freaked out 7th and 8th graders. I remember one of the mentally challenged boys hugged me; I wasn't scared but he hugged with the tenacity of a toddler and the strength of a man and didn't want to let go. We were no match. So the chaperones made an announcement that we should all get back in the bus and the attendants began to corral all the patients out of the room. I must have been sitting down because when one of the young men decided to drop his pants, I got an eye level shot at his half-erect penis.
Please remember, I grew up in a prudish, predominantly female household. I had only seen the non-erect penises of male infants whose diapers I changed while babysitting. This was a horse of a different...size. What I know now and didn't know then, was that this person had an unusually large cock. I had no frame of reference. So I could only conclude...wait for it...that his oversized schlong was a part of his deformity.
The next time I saw a penis in real life was on my wedding night.
I am not making any snide remarks about my ex-husband's endowment–not at all. I was relieved as hell that he was not in possession of such a sea monster. However, can you see how a little sex education would have gone a long way? Do you think I ever talked to anyone about the incident at the home? Do you think I ever hunted down pictures of male genitalia to see what I should expect? No, of course not.
What saved me from some of my naiveté and profound lack of experience was curiosity and education. An education initiated and conducted by myself. I read everything I could get my hands on (not illustrated, unfortunately) about (mostly conventional) sex before I married. My commitment to learning, formal and informal, is based on a love of exploration and the very practical need to know what the fuck I should expect from life.
Side note: I had to go in for a pre-marital vaginal exam (my first). I was 2,200 miles away from home and my mom (who is wonderful and might not have been much informational help to me but sure would have been a comfort). Anyway, the gynecologist was your average late middle-aged white man and he asked me if I wanted him to break my hymen so I wouldn't be in pain on my wedding night. Hmmm. Not a question Sunday school prepared me for. For sure, I didn't want to be in pain, so I said yes. Shit, that hurt. He went on to describe exercises I should do to keep my vagina flexible before the wedding.
I have thought about this incident many times since. I was grateful (?) that my wedding night was not painful. Yet I wondered if the doctor got off on this cultural power trip of deflowering the naive or if he'd just seen too many freaked out young brides after their wedding nights. I do not know. All I know was that I was an 18-yr old virgin with no mom or sister to talk through this and I was bleeding and sick to my stomach. I didn't even understand the traditional implications of not having my husband "take" my virginity. Which concept enrages me just thinking about it.
Sex education. I was desperate for it.
A year or so after getting married, my husband started bringing home Penthouse Forum. It was kind of a pre-Reddit information dump about sex and variations on the same. The other side of the looking glass. My education went into high gear.
So what did I learn? First of all, that there were possibilities for sex that I had never heard of nor imagined. I learned that I was indeed attracted to women. I began to view monogamy in a different way (although I wasn't quite ready for non-monogamy when my husband requested it sometime later). I read descriptions of the female orgasm that convinced me that I'd never had one. It was an enormous amount of taboo information. And I was still a fairly blank slate.
Son of side note: here is the sum total of my previous sexual education (and motherfuckers, explaining menstruation is not sex education). The day before I was to be married my mother handed me a douche bag and my father told me when I got to the hotel room on my wedding night, that I should lock the door and take a bath.
That's it.
Clearly, sex was complicated by my innate uncleanliness. Also, lock the door? What the fuck was that about? Suddenly I wasn't safe because my husband would become a rapist at the first opportunity? Fucking hell. What a message.
Anyhow, my education continued. Dave formally asked me for an open marriage. After crying privately about the accurate suspicion that open marriage was just his way of getting some on the side and keeping his wife at the same time (read: he didn't seem worried at all about losing me and he should have been), I agreed to open our marriage because I'm an idealist and committed to learning. Laugh if you will but that was why. What neither of us expected was that I would get so much more of the action. I was tripping.
Open marriage is a post unto itself. Suffice it to say, the experience changed me. Polyamory, which I still support, is very challenging. If your foundation is not rock solid, extra marital sex will crack it wide open. At some point, for other reasons made more complicated by this, I realized that I was miserable in the marriage, open or closed.
When I left him and decided to date women I was, oh gods forgive my adolescent punning, a fish out of water. Gay women took one look at me and my offspring and saw evidence of my previous congress with men and assumed (correctly) that I'd enjoyed it. They were not only not interested, they treated me like a hetero interloper/pariah. To them, then and now, I say: you should be so lucky.
I finally met a woman who showed interest in me (despite my stint with semen) in a Leisure Learning class on learning to tune up your own car–jesuschrist the clichés just write themselves. She was lovely and awkward. We decided to skip the last class on air conditioning maintenance because she was going camping and her camping partner bailed on her. And I agreed to take their place.
Let's regroup for a minute:
- First of all, if given the opportunity to choose between understanding your car's cooling system or getting intimate with a woman for the first time–I am here to testify that you will never miss learning to fix your own air conditioning. That your life will be much, much richer if you pay the auto guy and spend that precious time learning the mechanics of female anatomy.
- Secondly, you know I was out of my hormonal little mind to agree to go camping--an activity that I am 100% disinterested in. I am also fairly sure I'd have put on plaid flannel and Birkenstocks if that would have gotten me there faster.
- Thirdly, this wasn't just camping. This was the goddamn Michigan Womyn's (sic) Music Festival. The notorious female-only, annual lesbian event in the Michigan woods. I had read the brochure so I had some idea of what I was getting into but even so, it ended up being jaw-dropping. When I say I prefer to jump headfirst into my passion, I am not shitting you.
It was a long drive and we camped one or two nights along the way. I am a very comfortable Alpha and the lack of specialized training did not deter me. At least I got to the festival with that box checked off. (Forgive me, I really can't help myself.)
There were 2,000 women. Which is 4,000 breasts, give or take. The remnants of my modest Mormon past dropped off like a decrepit cocoon and in no time, I was shirtless as a nymph. But still weirded out. I swear I was the only one there with toenail polish on and birth control pills in my bag. I was sure they could sniff out the imposter in me. In spite of my self-consciousness though, I could barely contain my cup-runneth-over glee. It was fucking glorious.
While I hope I never stop learning about pleasure and anatomy and all of that, I'm contented that book learning and field work have made my sex education graduation possible.
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