Let's Talk About Sex

Let's talk about sex baby. Let's talk about you and me. Let's talk about all the good things and 

the bad things that may be.

Being in a relatively progressive college sometimes makes me forget about how little sex was talked about before I was in college. The good, the bad, I didn't know much besides that it was evil. As the gym teacher in Mean Girls puts it, "if you have sex you WILL get pregnant and you WILL die." While they were exaggerating a bit for humor that's pretty similar to the sex education I received in High School and that a lot of other people did to. Not only did this damage me in not understanding some very important fundamentals of life but it took away my choice to make good decisions about my sex life. 

What we're taught.

So sex is bad. We got it. But just because that's what we were taught it doesn't mean that we aren't still having sex. We're just having it uninformed about how to do it safely or at the right time. I am understand the firm belief that abstinence only training has not only ignored how to have safe sex but has made it so shameful to actually discuss that no one wants to talk about issues like choosing the right persons to have sex with, when to do it, how to do, etc. 

The argument is always that if you aren't mature enough to discuss it you shouldn't be having it. But sometimes it's not an issue of maturity. I'm a pretty mature person for my age but the words penis and vagina make me cringe (just cringed typing that). It's not something that you should be able to say in public, or so my school system taught me. The discuss of masturbation makes me blush redder than a tomato, and that's discussing it with girls, don't even get me started on talking about it with boys. 

By being taught that our bodies and sexual urges are something we should be ashamed of we never get to the point where we are comfortable enough to discuss it with our sexual partners, maybe ever. But we still have sex with people and then end up confused when things happen that we don't understand. Maybe your partner has trouble getting turned on or get off but there is NO WAY IN HELL you could ever talk with them about it much less someone else to solve the problem. 

Though a lot of these things make me cringe I would still say I'm a pretty liberal person when it comes to talking about sex. I have a tendency to make a lot of people uncomfortable by simply saying what I'm thinking in mixed company (aka with boys and girls). This openness is something I learned on my own. In high school I was literally told that touching boys at all made you a slut. 

Even though I still have a little ways to go in leaving the stigmas about sexuality behind, I think that not being "afraid" of talking about sex has helped me make more responsible choices and have a more gratifying sex life. 

Sex happens. It's how we all go here so why are we so freaked out by it. Teaching people that abstinence is the only way creates many more problems than it fixes. You should be able to have the choice to have sex or wait and do it with whoever you want. We should be telling people how to do it the right way not shaming them for doing it all. 

As always, stay classy

XOXO

Hayley Kiah