My dad sat me down and explained the mechanics of sex to me when I was two, on account of I had a baby brother on the way and he wanted me to know how this had come to pass. I'm generally pretty gullible, and my dad enjoys taking advantage of this. For example, when I was eleven I said to him,
"Dad, is it okay to mix root beer and dr. pepper?"
"Oh, no, it's not," he said. "If you mix them it'll cause a chemical reaction, there'll be a huge explosion. It'll blow up half the house, probably kill the whole family."
"Oh," I said, "Okay."
Nonetheless, when he told me the tab-A-in-slot-B truth about where babies came from, my reaction was like, "Dad, that's ridiculous. Quit messing with me. Where do they really come from?"
So I knew the mechanics, but I had some social misconceptions about how sex worked. I didn't know that it felt good, I thought it was purely a procreative act, and so I couldn't understand why people would have casual sex or use condoms. I also had no idea what its social context was, for a while. I knew I wanted to have a baby eventually, and I imagined that the scene would go down like this: My future husband and I would be sitting around the kitchen table, having some breakfast. I would tap my fingers nervously, and say,
"Hey, sweety? I was thinking... do you want to... um... have a baby?" Then his face would light up, and he would say,
"Oh, yes Alternate, I do! I want to have several babies!"
"Well, that's great, so do I."
"Okay then!"
"So..." I would say, tapping my fingers again, "You, uh... you do know what we have to do... right?"
"We... we have to do something?" he'd say, his smile fading. "My parents didn't tell me about this!"
In high school I still had a bunch of weird misunderstandings about sex, such as "girls are obligated to do what boys want," and "girls must dress sexy or no one will like us," and "girls can repeatedly hook up with other girls and it doesn't mean we're not straight, it just means we're really good friends."
As for virginity losses: When I was twenty I had done things with ladies that some might consider sex, but I've never really counted that. So by my definition I was a twenty year old virgin when I decided to move from the east coast to california with a dude I'd been dating for three days. So we drove three thousand miles, to a place where I knew no one, me and this older guy I barely knew, this guy who really turned out to be kind of a jerk. When we'd been there for about two weeks my mother called me one morning after the guy had left for work. "We're at war," she said, "The world trade center's been attacked. We're at war, and we don't even know with who." I thought that the world was going to end, or at least that american society was going to collapse, the infrastructure was going to be destroyed, and that if I ever wanted to see my mother again I'd have to go by wagon train and that the wagon train would probably get stuck in the utah winter and the people in my party would have to eat each other in order to survive.
A week later I lost my virginity.
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Topic: Childhood misunderstandings? (Read 15027 times)