I was in my early twenties when I found her vibrator.
Home for some holiday or family function, we were in her bathroom, getting ready for whatever it was I’d come home for. I rarely came home, I was busy living a life no one in the family would have approved of if they knew, shaking my ass, and anything else that would shake in a half dozen Times Square strip joints. We never talked about where I worked. Don’t ask, don’t tell, 1977-style.
I reached my hand into the closet for a clean towel and came out holding a Hitachi Magic Wand , the Howitzer of personal massagers. It had been hidden behind all the folded towels.
I held it up and looked at her. I didn’t say a word, but my eyes clearly said, “Um, hello? What the fuck?”
“Put it back, just put it back. Some people don’t have as easy a time as you do.” That was thirty years ago.
Assumptions were made. She assumed that because I was promiscuous, that I was getting pleasure out of all that sex I was having. She assumed that because she’d wanted me to grow up free & easy, that wishing it was enough. I assumed that cheap & sleazy was the same as free & easy.
They gave me all the technical words. By first grade I could use the word vagina in a sentence, which would have been terrific in an anatomy themed spelling bee. But, saying vagina, out loud, in class, when you’re 6 years old is not paving the road to popularity with teachers. Or with the neighborhood mothers when your classmates go home and repeat what you’ve said. During dinner. Over mashed potatoes and gravy. In that nice suburban kitchen you will never, ever be invited into again to have milk and cookies after school. I learned that nice girls not only don’t say “vagina” in public, they don’t even think about vaginas in private.
Public school sex education consisted of two films shown in the gymnasium. The girls learned how to attach a menstrual napkin to a sanitary belt , and how to dispose of it discreetly, the implication being, nice girls don’t bleed. I can’t imagine what boys learned.
I was raised in the 60′s by left-wing liberal Long Island Jews (a flagrant use of an ultra-uber-redundant phrase) and so I knew all about the logistics and technicalities of sex, homosexuals and hermaphrodites. The “talk” consisted of two running jokes my father would tell.
How do you stop a Jewish woman from fucking?
Marry her!
(…from which I learned I was expected to be promiscuous.)What’s a Jewish woman’s favorite sexual position?
Doggy style, because she can’t stand to see anyone else have pleasure.
(…from which I learned that sex was solely about my pleasure.)
But we never discussed birth control, pleasure or boundaries.
Which meant we didn’t talk about it when their friend touched me.
And there was no one to tell when the gym teacher cornered me in the locker room.
Or to ask when I had sex the first time and it wasn’t really any fun at all.
Or when I had sex with the next boy and that wasn’t any fun either.
I kept the rape a secret for twenty years.
We didn’t talk about it when I had my first orgasm.
Or my first squirt, where I thought I’d peed myself.
Or my first g-spot orgasm.
We certainly never talked about my first woman, not that there’s anything wrong with that she’d have said.
Or my first anal.
Or any of that.
What would my life look like today, if I’d been able to ask question then? If there’d been answers available? I’d like to think I’d be just as open, just as evolved, but without quite as many wrong turns, missteps, nights of quiet desperation, unwanted pregnancies, panicked confusion.
No child has ever been harmed by having too much access to education.
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This entry was written by , posted on November 10, 2010 at 2:02 am, filed under the naked truth and tagged rape, Scarleteen, sex education. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
