I hear a lot of misconceptions about sex. Often they come from parents, saying that they don’t want their kids to be as poorly misinformed as they were as teenagers and young adults. More often than not, teenagers and young adults don’t want to say what they do or don’t know about sex, because more than anything else, they don’t want to sound mis-informed. Recently, though, a young adult asked me this:
Isn’t it true that the reason women have so many eggs is because every time we jump up and down or sit down roughly or anything else, one of the eggs dies?
Wow, there’s a rumor to keep the girls looking demure and well-mannered if I ever heard one! “Little Susan, every time you jump, one of your unborn children dies!” And it’s a bizarre construct just on it’s own anyway, because by what mechanism could women’s bodies possibly ensure that one and only one egg self-destructs at every jump or jostle?
Anyway, I recently was pointed to a fabulous site where people have been listing their childhood/adolescent/current misconceptions about sex. (Thanks, Eolake!) It’s a real gem. One of the reasons I like it so much, though, is because it appears to be a British site. So along with lots of blokes, pubs, etc, there’s lots of sex ed. These are often stories of children and teenagers who came to their parents with real misconceptions or questions, and them answered honestly and frankly. I love it!
So what was your childhood/adolescent misconception(s) about sex? Rather than relying on the Brits, let’s talk about what misconceptions we have on this side of the pond – and how we manage to over come them.
One night in fourth grade, my best friend and I were in my kitchen concocting some kind of drink out of a combination of apple juice, Kool-Aid, and lemonade, or something equally horrible. I pulled out a container to mix our concoction that, to me, was cool because it looked like a giant test tube.
“That looks like a giant rubber!” my friend said.
I asked what a rubber was.
She said, “A man and a woman take off all their clothes, then the man puts something called a rubber on his butt, and then they have a baby.”
Also, for a long long time, I thought that God might or might not give a woman a baby if she was married, or divorced, or widowed, but that it was physically impossible for a never-married woman to have a baby.
October 2, 2008 @ 7:16 pm