Journals from the Fourth Wave of Feminism – Part V

Sexuality

The polarized education of sexuality has always intrigued me. I often wondered as an adolescent the reasons why girls were told to abstain, while boys were educated in contraceptive methods. Parents, in our culture, we noted – often allowed free reign with their sons, to date, entertain, impregnate and discard women. Some mothers had an extensive vocabulary of sexualized insults for young girls. In their eyes, girls were the sexual aggressors attempting to steal their sons away from them. It is quite an interesting dynamic. So where does that fit in with our discussion about sexuality? I suppose I could summarize my opinion from the subjective view of myself and my peers, by saying these conversations about sexuality…never really happened. The only places we heard about sex more than we did in health class was church.

Sexual Education

That conversation would include the public confession and de-membership of unmarried girls during the main service (while the fathers of those children sat next to their wives in the congregation). We warned repeatedly about fornication, the story of Esther, Jezebel, the ten virgins – and of course the virginal birth of the Saviour. Other methods of sexual education came from the preachers – all sorts from all different walks of life; former hustlers and pimps, models of chastity, sons of generations of preachers and so on. These ones, the ones who wanted so much to save the ‘whores and bitches’ of our congregation, would frequently call out the women in the audience who did not wear slips under their skirts or whose lipstick was such a bright red that it was a constant distraction from the word of God. These attempts, in my humble opinion, were to distract the audience from the fact that they were poorly prepared, inarticulate preachers. In fact, I, unbaptized, (which made me not a child of God and therefore a child of Satan) figured I was going to hell anyway – so the only thing standing between me and discovering my sexuality was the law.

Desire

The concept of desire in our culture is split amongst groups. Age, ethnicity, religion and physical makeup all contribute to how we are perceived as desirable and who we choose as our objects of desire. Many of us receive our sexual scripts from our peers and due to the silence of women’s bodies and lack of ability to articulate our emotions, it can be a confusing experience that carries on into our adult years. I remember a school mate, a female, blonde, blue-eyed sport fanatic who the boys just loved. We didn’t know she was a hermaphrodite – and later on had a sex change to become a male. I’m certain there was nothing in health class to address that issue! I don’t suppose it ever came up. Masturbation was never discussed at home, and the idea that I may have been gay – well that just didn’t seem to ever occur to my mother. Factors influencing adolescent sexuality are quite different I think from child to child. In retrospect, hormones and boredom are a sure recipe to experimentation. Unfortunately if you have a parent who tends to yell at you rather than speak to you – or constantly reminds you that she doesn’t like raising girls once they start to ‘develop’…one is more reluctant to ask about where to get birth control. Adolescents fall short in the cognitive area of problem solving. Where sexuality is concerned, they need a confidant – someone who is older and more experienced in the world to whom they can turn to for counsel, advice or simply a sounding board.