Reading Between the Lines: Part II (Sex)

So my last post got me and Husband talking about how kids think about sex. When I was 11, I knew what sex was. In the 4th grade, one of my classmates informed me and a few other girls that she had had sex. That year was the year that I “became a woman” and got the whole woman/sex talk, so I didn’t believe my friend because if she had had sex, why wasn’t she pregnant? It didn’t occur to me that maybe she had not started her period yet.

This actually may be the incident that prompted me asking my mother for more info about how this sex thing really worked, which resulted in an interesting conversation in the car in the parking lot of the grocery store between Mother, Sister, and me. (Remember this Sister, one of the benefits of being the younger child is that you did not have to ask such questions to hear the answers.) But the bottom line is that when I read The Last Resort, I was able to fill in what could have happened in those six pages between kiss and lying on the floor.

Husband said that as a kid, his idea of sex was naked people doing stuff together. I thought it had to do with being under the covers too. When my Barbies had sex (cause you know they did), they didn’t actually do anything. I just shoved two naked dolls under the bed and left them alone for a while. (“When two grownups love each other and want to be alone . . .”) This is why Barbies had to have on clothes when they were put away—-naked Barbies might accidentally have sex with each other and that would be bad.

But I had no interest in sex, so my understanding was limited to the technical aspects. In the 7th grade, I was the girl who asked questions in our co-ed sex ed class (the ONLY person who asked questions I might add, which were prompted by watching soap operas when I was sick. Marty had just been raped on One Life to Live, and I wanted to know why she was told not to take a shower until after she had seen the police. I wonder if that’s what scared off the boys . . .). But even then, it wasn’t something that I would have actually considered doing. Kissing was what I was waiting for. Pretty much anything after kissing fell under the realm of sex. Really, even long kissing was considered sex.

I don’t know if other people had this sort of vague understanding about sex as kids (technically accurate, but no emotional connection to it), but I was trying to figure out why I equated that kiss with almost having sex. It is pretty steamy for a Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys book, and there are the required elements: alone, blankets/covers, longing, lying down . . .

And just so you know, where I grew up, that girl could have easily been telling the truth. She wasn’t in school for 5th grade. I just assumed she was lying then, but now I wish I had told the teacher because she could have been telling the truth.