MY SEX EDUCATION

MY SEX EDUCATION

THE ONLY THING MORE TERRIFYING THAN SEX-ED SCARE TACTICS IS THE WAY I TREATED MY MECHANICAL CHILD

BY SASHEER ZAMATA

I was walking down the street not too long ago, and I overheard a full adult woman say, “I didn’t know you could get pregnant on your first try!” That’s when I realized the world desperately needs better sex education.

I’m including myself in that statement. I had a mortifying moment in college when one of my friends explained how the guy she was sleeping with only wanted to do “doggy style.” I responded, “That’s crazy. He only wants to do anal?” There was silence, and one of my friends slowly asked, “So…do you think when dogs have sex they’re always doing it anally?” And I guess when you say it out loud, it sounds dumb. Of course they’re not always doing it anally—most of them save that for birthdays and bribes. But I wasn’t thinking of the logistics of canine coitus. I honestly wasn’t thinking of sex at all, because I was taught not to.

I was raised in Indiana, and my sex education was pretty much “don’t.” I remember a slide show of STIs in my middle school health class featuring images of cauliflower sprouting out of someone’s ass, or blood and pus oozing from someone’s eyeball, and those were used as evidence for why we should abstain. I went to a public school, so they weren’t telling us to save ourselves for religious reasons—they just weren’t telling us anything.

Our class participated in the Baby Think It Over program, in which students take care of a robot baby to learn how hard it is to care for a human baby. I guess we were supposed to “think over” whether or not it’s worth it to have kids while still in school. I had killed multiple Tamagotchis by this point, so I wasn’t feeling good about my chances of being a good robot mom, but I wanted to at least pass the assignment.

The baby had a computer in it to record how often I fed, held, changed and nurtured it (which is kind of what I currently do in my relationship). It would also cry, and I just had to guess why (which is what my partner does in our relationship). It was so annoying. Sometimes I just let the baby wail because I was busy with other homework. There was one day when I ran to the bus while holding my bundle of joy, and her head was flopping back and forth, so that probably wasn’t good. At the end of the experiment, the teacher pulled together all the counts of neglect and abuse to give me a grade. Apparently I had a lot of counts of neglect and abuse. Someone from Child Protective Services—I’m hoping an intern and not someone who could be helping real children—came to my school to talk to all the bad student-parents. They took me into a room and warned me that if this were a real baby, they would take her from me. And my response was, “Good! I didn’t ask for this baby!” They didn’t care about my protest.

I wish I had said, “You know what would’ve been more useful? Telling me how not to have a baby instead of showing me how hard life is with one. Embarrassing me in class by making me roll a condom over a banana so I’m not too embarrassed to do it with an actual penis in front of me. Giving me language I can use to ask my partners about their sexual history and health so I’m not speechless in the moment. Teaching me that sex can be an enjoyable experience between consenting parties and doesn’t have to be a shameful, detrimental act.”

It can be easy not to have a baby if you don’t want one—you just need access to resources and information, which is getting tougher these days. Let’s keep spreading knowledge so people can have more control of their lives and know how to get rid of the cauliflower in their butt.

Shame, misinformation, indomitable hormones—

Sasheer Zamata and Joel Kim Booster take us back to school

No one had to teach me how to come. Every afternoon, I’d lie on the cold linoleum of my family’s bathroom, turn on the shower for sonic camouflage and get to work on myself. Like a prodigy with no formal training, I was a natural. Maybe I couldn’t read sheet music, and the finger placement was definitely off, but lying there, clutching my instrument, I learned what my body was capable of. My parents, blue-collar conservative Christians, homeschooled me for most of my adolescence in an attempt to protect me from the secular world and its corrupting notions of liberalism and science. For their own edification they purchased a book on talking to your son about sex, which I would secretly take from their shelves and study solemnly in my bed at night. There I discovered that my white pee was actually called “semen” and, in the final and shortest chapter, titled simply “Homosexuality,” that the urges I’d been visualizing while making the white pee (fueled by old Archie comic books) were unnatural and wrong. Turned out all those tiny, messy miracles weren’t miracles at all.

If instinct was my teacher, then shame became my tutor. In the years that followed, I’d spend approximately 15 minutes of each day on that bathroom floor and the rest of my waking hours working out how and when I’d be going to hell for it.

Soon I graduated from the bathroom to a corner of our basement, where my parents had foolishly placed our brand-new computer. The creaky stairwell served as a de facto lookout while I entered such imaginative terms into the pre-Google search bar as gay and gay sex. In the waning days of dial-up it wasn’t unusual for me to wait a full 20 minutes as our Dell PC loaded, line by line, a horrifically photoshopped image of George Clooney receiving a blow job from Brad Pitt. I learned about anal sex from erotic gay fan fiction, which always made it seem so simple and spontaneous. Obi-Wan never once shat on Qui-Gon’s dick. Maybe it was the Force.

When I turned 16, my parents reluctantly sent me off to public school. My entry into the real world would coincide with our school district’s mandatory sex-ed class, years too late to be anything but an exercise in not making eye contact with the teacher. By this point all of us had enrolled in a rigorous course of our own design, consisting of facts and fictions cobbled together from internet porn and various misremembered half-truths some older brother brought home from college. It was like a game of telephone played by hundreds of teenage boys with wild ideas about the viability of their sperm in a hot tub.

After little more than a month at public school, I tearfully came out to a friend during lunch period. A short lifetime of shame and mortal fear—I set it all aside in that moment because the smell of Axe body spray got me hard. Sadly, it still does.

The sex-ed class came to an end, but my education did not. (That same year I met my first boyfriend, who was also the first man I heard whisper “teeth” with erotic caution as I gave head for the first time, a VHS tape of his eighth-grade production of The Music Man playing in the background.) Every new experience, even the many, many humiliating ones, felt like a revelation.

“That was sex!” I would say to myself. I eventually realized that it wasn’t, but I would go on to learn things they forgot to teach us: about consent, about the different ways we experience desire, about the ways our bodies betray us. But I still go back to those teenage moments—fucking in the backseat of a Pontiac Sunfire parked inconspicuously in an empty Target lot—when it all felt miraculous again.