So--like apparently quite a few others today--I found myself reading "Savage Love" in the Village Voice. (For the uninitiated and those who might be prone to clicking thoughtlessly on anything underlined and blue--"Savage Love" is a sex-advice column and has been known to cause loud startled gasps and uncontrolled giggling. You've been warned.)
The topic of the latest column is "childhood misconceptions about sex". And goddamn, it's hilarious...but, like everything else, it got me thinking.
I've been--I'll admit it--lost in resentment of my upbringing for a few days. Mostly I'm angry at the narrowness of the world in which I was raised, and of the opportunities which were made available to me. I mean, christ--not to brag or anything, but I was a smart kid--like, scary smart--scores-off-the-chart smart. But somehow, in the name of religion, my parents seemed to systematically thwart every academic opportunity for me from the ages of five to fourteen. But that's another rant for another day (which may come up reallll soon, owing to the fact that I just got my yearly salary letter and my raise was..."insulting" covers it pretty well.)
I have to give credit where credit is due, however. One area in which my parents got my education right--or at least, right-ish--was on the topic of sex.
They HAD to tell me--there was nobody else to do the job for them. I'm an only child, so there were no sibs to tell me. My mom stayed home during my grammar-school years, so--no babysitters to give me the low-down. My nearby cousins were all much the same age as me, and the girls were prudes, being the children of my mom's narrow-mindedest sister; the boys, who were at the older edge of our age bracket, didn't deign to associate with "the babies"--so there were no extended-family opportunities to hear anything about it. So I was left with only one avenue to learn about sex--my parents. And though my mother had (most reluctantly!) told me the bare biological facts about where babies came from, the details--along with the mystique--were things she wouldn't even begin to discuss. A tiny, tiny bit of this might have been embarassment on her part; more, I think, was a theological objection to any notion that sex might actually be -enjoyable-.
My parents were 41 when I was born; they'd married not quite a year before my birth, the first marriage for each of them. (My mom claims she doesn't know whether my dad was a virgin when they married, but she swears she was.) Most importantly, they were both old-school, pre-Vatican-II Roman Catholic. They'd been raised that way, and neither of them ever expressed, in my hearing, the slightest disagreement with Church doctrine. I went to Mass every Sunday--the only excuse was a 3-digit fever or projectile vomiting--and my parents saw the relaxed sexual mores as the worst of all the signs that our society was decaying.
Well...."parents" is not entirely accurate. My father, as he did in many situations, stayed out of the way and deferred to my mother. Mom was the one with the outspoken religious beliefs; Dad believed, but kept it to himself. My mother was the one who constantly bemoaned the sordid sexuality of all the music I listened to; my mother was the one who, when I was seven years old, made me write a letter to the local ABC affiliate demanding that _Soap_ be taken off the air--I had asked her what it meant to "come out of the closet". And I was in awe of my mother, really; scared of her, desperate for her approval; so I learned to see my curiosity as something I should be ashamed of.
But just because she wouldn't tell me anything more than the egg-and-sperm basics of human sexuality, that didn't mean I didn't still want to know. There had to be something more to it than THAT--otherwise, what was the big deal?
Fortunately, the answers were fairly easy to find.
My father was a packrat. He kept -every- piece of paper that came into the house; there were boxes of mail in the basement with postmarks from the year before I was born. He kept his office down there, and between the cast-off furniture, the boxes of mail, and the shelves and shelves of books, it was a maze of tunnels and mountains, full of pathways--perfect for hours of roller-skating and daydreaming. It was my favorite place in the house, and during the summers I'd spend entire days downstairs. It was during one of those days that I found...The Shelves. I don't remember the titles--other than "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask"--but the content was...educational, to say the least.
Years later, JP and I would talk about our sexual beginnings, so to speak. "How old were you," he asked me, "when you had your first orgasm?" He was amazed when I told him: I was nine years old. (I couldn't have named the sensation, nor even described it--but honestly, it didn't take the chapter on "Sex For One" for me to figure it out: after a couple of the more-descriptive passages on other topics, nobody needed to tell me to rub the bits that were tingling. It wasn't exactly rocket science.)
Though I enjoyed my new hobby, it left me with a theological problem. See, according to my old-school pre-Vatican-II Roman-Catholic upbringing, masturbation was a mortal sin. In fact, one of the many Catholic magazines my mom subscribed to went so far as to say that if you masturbated, it resulted in the loss of one's virginity--morally if not biologically. So before I was even old enough to make my first confession, I had a mortal sin on my conscience. Quite a few of them, actually--not just enjoying myself, but thinking about enjoying myself--reading about how to enjoy myself--thinking about reading about how to enjoy myself....oh, it was quite a death spiral I was stuck in, that was certain. I was going to hell in a basket for sure.
Not only that, but there were practical issues involved as well. I was convinced that, although I had told no one, there was one person who could take a single glance at me and know my dark perversion, and that person was: The Doctor. Though I was a healthy child, even a healthy child has that periodic encounter with the medical profession--the yearly checkup. I was absolutely certain that the doctor would know, instantly, that I had this sinful habit--and that she would unquestioningly tell my mother, who would punish me in some way so awful that I couldn't even begin to imagine it. So every time I knew a checkup was coming--generally right before the beginning of the school year--I would make a resolution: no more of THAT for a month before the appointment. Okay--no more for two weeks. Okay, seriously-- if I gave it up ONE week before, she wouldn't be able to tell...would she?
I never did have much willpower.
As it happened, though, I got busted on the books long before I ever got caught on the self-gratification. (Come to think of it, I was NEVER busted on that. And an unexpected benefit of my obsessive secrecy: years later, when my first boyfriend and I finally had sex, we found that we could do it even with parents in the same house--years of practice had enabled me to have an orgasm in absolute silence, if needed.) My mother asked me what I was reading in the basement--I think she must have had some idea, since it wasn't the sort of question she would just idly ask for no reason. I told some preposterous, obvious lie. A few more questions and, cornered, I answered truthfully. I got the hellfire-and-damnation lecture, true enough...but I don't think it even came CLOSE to the one my dad must have gotten for having those books in the first place!!!
(In hindsight, those books told me more than I needed to know...see, my father was ALSO an underliner. So even if, these many years later, I could concoct a feasible excuse for WHY, exactly, my father would have owned two shelves' worth of "how to spice up your marriage" manuals, that excuse would be nullified by the underlinings--which, I realized early in my adult life, laid out my parents' dysfunctions VERY clearly. This is the best thing I can say about what I learned through my father's underlinings: they gave me advance notice of what my family dynamics might lead me into. It's useful information, though I try not to think too much about the details, lest I be moved to nausea.)
I never have gotten quite over that fear of being ratted out by doctors--the fear of hellfire left me long, long ago, however.
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