Coming Out
One of these days, I’m going to have to hanker down and do something that’s likely to be very uncomfortable: talk to Sean about sex. Now, I know what I should say in that case, the only question is what I’m going to say. For future reference, then, here’s the speech I ought to give.
The first thing you should know about sex is that none of your friends know anything. This includes those friends of yours who may have actually had sex. Hopefully by now you’ve started to catch on to the fact that sounding certain about something and being correct about it are two completely unrelated things, but just in case I’ll spell it out for you. Teenagers are notoriously bad at sex, but because they haven’t had much sex yet they don’t have any way to judge just how incompetent they really are. If your friend tells you a secret method for making girls super-excited, it’s got about a 70% chance of having the opposite effect, and a 5% chance of resulting in an embarrassing visit to the emergency room.
This brings me to the second point. Your parents know a lot about sex, but we’re not going to tell you. My main point in telling you this isn’t to squick you out; I just want you to know that whatever questions or issues you have, you can come to us. We won’t be shocked, or if we are shocked it’ll just be because it’s you asking the question, and that means we’re getting old. We’ve been there, done that. You see the proof in the mirror every morning.
Speaking of you, let’s talk about birth control. Remember rule one: your friends know nothing. Amateur birth control is always doomed to failure. Pull it out? Doesn’t work. Only have sex at certain times of the month? I wouldn’t trust horny teenagers to use a spoon, let alone a complex device like a calendar. Take hot baths to kill off sperm? Rinse with cola afterwards? Eat plenty of bay leaves? You might as well swing a dead cat over your head at midnight… I hope that by now you’ve gotten the hang of sarcasm as well.
Always use a condom. Always know where to find a condom should the need arise. If you can’t find a condom, ask your partner why she didn’t bring one herself. Then go watch a movie or something. Condoms are important for more than just birth control- they protect you from disease, and they also protect the furniture from the kind of mistakes teenage boys are likely to make. Don’t think that you can tell if somebody had VD just from looking at them: you can’t, and they might not even know about it themselves. If you think that wearing a condom is embarrassing then you clearly have never needed to ask a doctor about the strange lumps on your privates.
Some kinds of sex are safer than others. Oral sex is good. Mutual masturbation is quite nice. Solo masturbation is the safest of all, unless you do it wrong. Having sex on the sofa in the living room when your parents are coming home soon is extremely dangerous and not recommended under any circumstances.
There you go. Did I leave out anything important?
December 18th, 2008 at 6:40 am
All the information seems to be there, but I’d wager you’ll have a distracted teenager looking to make a quick escape by the second paragraph
Also, I wouldn’t discount a teenager’s ability to collect accurate information about sex. Honestly speaking, I never heard any of those myths from my friends growing up, but I suppose living in a liberal state like Massachusetts where they start sex ed at around 11-12 years old will do that.
December 18th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Ah! Yeah, the myths were relatively few in my experience, but there were certainly some misunderstandings that needed dealt with. More important, I didn’t really talk with my classmates about sex because, well, I was pretty sure they didn’t know much and even those who might were merely boastful.
I wonder. What will his first definition of “clit” be? That one took me a while to get right.