Sex--Don't Do It or Ever Talk About It!

“I just really want my period.”

I stared, flabbergasted at my little sister’s last Facebook message, while about 50,000 emotions and scenarios stampeded my conscious. Basic survival instincts, such as the pangs of hunger after a nine-hour shift in the butter-drenched land of a movie theater--flattened. Squelched.

Which mask do I choose? Caring? Strict? Understanding? Light-hearted?

I found myself for once thanking the powers-that-be that when I was fifteen I was an awkward tangle of knees and elbows, and not a drop-dead sexy mama femme fatale like my sister.

Lord help me, I might be an aunt.

As she prattled on, panicked, and told me exactly how it happened, I did the most sensible thing I could at the time—I repeatedly bashed my head into the wall. I pictured her belly slowly getting bigger as my tiny dorm room was engulfed by her belongings and the oncoming baby’s bottles and diapers and clothes and formula--and where the hell would they sleep? She’d have to live with me somehow… Our Mormon-raised mother, and her Catholic-raised father would not be too proud of their little darling. 

The claustrophobia was inducing a panic attack, so I hit my already bruised scalp into the wall one last time, and another for good measure, ensuring that I was thinking straight, and pulled myself together. I was not the one who might have to squeeze out a squirming, screaming mini-human. I had to calm her down:

“You don’t know for sure yet. No matter what happens, it isn’t the end of the world.”

Her typing slowed, and she gradually stopped spitting incomplete spurts of panic at me. I then concluded her heart rate and breathing had fallen to slightly less dangerous levels, and logged off of Facebook. I wondered how exactly this could’ve happened (besides the obvious). We all get the awkward speech—

My mind flashed back to the ultimate age of awkward, junior high, seventh grade, when we all were introduced to the Mesa Arizona Public Schools’ super liberal ideologies, and were taught the truly essential lessons of sexuality. 

For a week, we trudged silently into an auditorium to be traumatized for one seemingly endless hour a day.

The first cringing form of punishment was a slideshow the girls would have to bear alone, without our male classmates. We’d come to learn how our bodies had changed, were changing, or (in my case) would eventually change.

It was horrible.

There was nothing to do but squirm as our instructor, an aged, shriveling woman selected by the district to enlighten us, would blurt out words like “uterus” and “fallopian tubes” and the worst, with disturbing gusto, “thrust” “penis” and “vagina!” I felt exposed as female body parts were unabashedly projected on the screen. She then reassured us that wearing tampons would not make us lose our virginities faster, no matter what people said. I saw the world of feminine hygiene products open, ripe for our picking—we could choose whichever product a young, fit, overly excited woman on TV modeled the best, because our instructor had opened the door for us. We now knew it was our right because we had vaginas.

The next day was equally valuable. It was the day of the videos. We stared at the screen as older, stronger, super sexy Captain of the football team Jack, dated younger, innocent, and irrevocably-in-love Jill. It was a sad story. He had convinced the gullible Jill that he would love her bookwormish ways even more if he could deflower the young lass. At a party she consented, but her anguished expression afterwards showed us in the audience her true torment. It got worse. Jack continued to manipulate poor, sweet, young Jill until she was wrapped around his finger, hanging on his every word (as seen in the way the young actress clung with a stifling grip to his arm, and stared soulfully into his cold, cold eyes). One day, Jill tried to say no to big, burly Jack, and catastrophe struck. In a fit of rage, Jack shoved Jill and she toppled down a flight of 1,500 stairs. In the final scene the bruised maiden was sporting three or four casts and proclaimed it was her fault. She fell down those stairs.

That day we learned a life-changing lesson. If we did not say no, and did not listen to ourselves instead of to our manipulative boyfriends, we would end up in multiple casts. We did not want to be Jill.

Then came the grand finale. The next few days we reunited with our male counterparts. If we had thought that the past two days’ painfulness was insurmountable, we were sorely mistaken.  The topic: STDs.

As she defined each sexually transmitted disease, we avoided all eye contact, with anyone or anything. Even the gum on the floor seemed to stare offensively back at us. She went on and on, painfully and too precisely describing what we’d get, and where we’d get it, if we were promiscuous. Our instructor would heartily project, “It’s important to remember that these diseases are only spread by sexual intercourse.”

One brave girl raised her hand, “Could we like, not have sex, but still get a…disease?”
“Some sexual activity could spread disease, but once again, these diseases are only spread through sex. The only way to ensure 100% that you don’t get a disease or become pregnant is abstinence. If you’re worried, stay abstinent.”

It was then that I remembered what I’d heard whispered in the locker room. The girl who dared to ask questions had so totally gone to third base, and therefore, was a total slut.

Thus, our insightful sexual education experience came to a close, and I snapped back to the present.

I silently thanked that decrepit, disconcertingly enthusiastic woman for teaching my classmates and me everything we needed to know for our debut in high school.

With one of the highest rates of STD infection in the state (at blood drives, the blood would have to be screened twice to ensure diseases were not accidentally spread to helpless recipients), and with enough pregnant girls to start a club to throw each other baby showers (no kidding), and enough of the students’ toddlers to start a daycare on campus, teaching us that abstinence is the most effective form of birth control, clearly worked.

Thank the Heavens they didn’t tell us about condoms. None of those statistic-laden students could have used a $6.00 pack of latex to save the rest of their teenage years from itching, burning discomfort, or from the unprepared upbringing of an accident.

And my sister? She lives in a lovely and chillingly conservative town in Utah I have christened Mormonville, which makes Mesa look almost communistic. There, teen sex and drug use are thought to not exist, so why should sex education?

While we waited for the opportune moment she could buy an incognito pregnancy test that would cast her fate, I told my sister everything she would probably never ever hear, anywhere else, ever. I told her about the unspoken, and forbidden world of Planned Parenthood and how she could get a prescription for birth control pills. I also made her promise her boyfriend would spend that $6.00 and forever and always carry a rubber with him 24/7.

I waited until one day, my phone finally buzzed.

“GUESS WHO’S ON HER PERIOD?!?!”

I wasn’t an aunt.

I exhaled, inhaled, then squealed and slammed my hand as hard as I could into the wall with pure joy. Happily, I accepted that I would be damned to hell, or the Telestial Kingdom (Mormon’s lowest order of heaven), if anyone in that town found out that I had further corrupted my sinning sister by arming her with the weapons of contraception.

Smiling, and icing my hand, I made a mental note to find a new outlet for my emotions.