How I Learned About Sex

There seems to be a theme to this week: Over-sharing.
Oh well. I like doing it.
Below is an exercise I wrote for my Sociology of Sexuality class.
I banged it out in 30 minutes... after it was due. haha
I liked it so much I decided to let you guys read it too.
Hopefully it'll make you guys think.
Enjoy.

I can’t recall where I first learned about relationship between males and females, not even where the notion of romance and destiny came from, but I do remember my first time I experimented. I was four years old. It was a summer day camp, and there was one little girl named Jasmine that caught my fancy all summer long. I don’t even think I held a conversation with her, yet alone played a game with her. I was simply stunned by her beauty. (At least that’s what I tell myself.) Eventually, the last week of summer camp was upon me. I didn’t know if I’d ever see her again. So, I decided to be bold. One day during recess, out on the black top playground/parking lot, I saw her standing underneath the basketball hoop by herself. I went up to her, and I kissed her on the cheek. As soon as I lifted my lips, she slapped me so hard I fell to the ground and began to cry. My older sister, one of the counselors at the camp, still teases me about it to this day. It was that day I learned that I couldn’t woo a random woman by action alone.

            My next lesson in sexuality came in first grade. Our teacher would often the room while we worked on an assignment for minutes at a time. For some reason, my classmates nominated me to be their specimen. They told me to show them my penis. I refused at first, but they threatened they would tell the teacher I did if I didn’t. I guessed I believed in numbers over the truth in those days because for two weeks I obliged them. Every time the teacher stepped out, I would present my boyhood as my peers gathered around, girls and boys alike. It took two weeks before the teachers finally caught us. I was given a pink slip. That was one of the two times my father whipped me with a belt. My mother simply sat down and gave me a talk, the details of which I do not remember in the slightest. What did I learn myself? Exposing yourself is bad.

Oddly enough, I still participated in the “I’ll show you mines if you show me yours” game in middle school. I was always tricked into going first. I never saw a woman’s lady parts.

If allowed to back up, although elementary and middle school, I made a new girl my victim. Jasmine had not deterred me. There was one in first and second, another in third and fourth, yet another in sixth and seventh, and one last girl in eighth. I made all of these girls my best female friend in the class before I attempted to woo them. Most of the girls agreed to a kind of fake boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. I kissed a few of them as well. I doubt it was a real attraction, though. It was me playing a role.

Let me explain, Boy Meets World was one of my favorite TV shows as a kid. I wanted to be like Corey Matthews and find my Topanga, a girl I first met on the jungle gym and would eventually marry. I was such a little romantic. Sadly, girls move away; I change schools; and my Topanga is never found.

I finally grasp were babies come from when my other sister, twelve and a half years my senior, has a first child at the age of 20. I hold my little nephew in my skinny arms and think this feels nice, it feels right. My father has always called me his prince, his heir to the throne. His name also Charles, just like his father. When he asks what I’ll name my first son, I respond, “Charles, of course.” Oddly enough, neither of my parents ever gave me the talk. I suppose I was thankful for that awkward conversation. We never really had any in depths conversations as a kid. I got all of my information from TV.

The notion of heterosexuality was pounded constantly into my head at every turn. So it only made sense it would take me an entire year during my junior year at a private Catholic all boy high school to explore my sexuality and come to the conclusion that I was gay (or bi as I told myself, a transition of sorts.) I even had a “big-tittied fling” as my friends called it and a girlfriend the same year I was figuring this out. I guess I realized girls truly did nothing for me.

So when asked who taught me about sex, I would respond my peers first, then television. I didn’t talk about it as much, but it set in my mind the premise of male and female relationships, the different things I could try and say to a person I was attracted to. Where were the parents in all of this? Providing for me, making me laugh on occasion. Conversations didn’t really happen.

Word.