Service Learning Journal 9/20

For my service learning project, I'm going to be leading a sex education Q&A discuss at the Women's Wellbeing and Development Foundation. Although I haven't volunteered there yet, I've talked with two of the women who work there, and I'm planning on starting the group mid-October. I'm very excited to be doing this!

My View on Sex

             Ever since I was a little girl, the topic of society’s view of women and sex has affected me, whether or not I realized it and whether or not my family realized it. This probably applies to many girls in America as well. One of the first toys a little girl receives is a baby doll, and we are taught to take care of it, nurture it, and that eventually, we will all grow up to have a real baby of our very own, but we are only allowed to have our own baby after we get married to a man. Of course, not all women grow up to marry men; some women end up not even getting married at all, and there are many more who choose not to have any children. That was always a weird concept to me. Why wouldn’t a woman want to get married and have children? Wasn’t that what women were supposed to do?

            I didn’t know anything about sex or pregnancy and how the female body worked until I was about eight or nine years old. Out of the blue, my mom came into my room with tons of huge books and began giving me the infamous “sex talk.” She showed me a couple pictures from the books and explained puberty, pregnancy, and sex. I remember her flipping through the pages and explaining the same thing to me over and over because I just did not understand anything. I do not know if it was because of my age, or if my mom did a bad job at explaining the whole thing, or if I just was not paying attention, but I was very confused and disgusted by the whole thing. It just sounded like it would be some sort of horrible chore married couples would have to go through in order to create a child, and that it would just happen really fast with no thoughts or feelings other than, “Let’s just get this over with so we can have a baby.” Because sex sounded so disgusting to me, I’m pretty sure I blocked most of what my mom said out of my head. If you asked me what my mom said or what I was thinking during the talk, I would not be able to tell you. The only thing I do remember from that talk was being taught that I should not have sex until I was married. I had no problem agreeing with my mom’s strict instructions because sex sounded disgusting to me. I did not understand one thing about it or why anyone would ever want to have it.

To be honest, I did not really understand what the point was in having sex, besides producing children, until only a couple years ago, when I finally started to understand my sexual urges and why I was having them. I remember having huge crushes and physical attractions towards males through out my middle school years after I really started to hit puberty. I knew physically I wanted to have sex with them, but I still didn’t get what sex actually was, and I still thought it was wrong for me to have these feelings since I wasn’t married or even dating any of these guys. I always seemed to think that if someone has sex outside of marriage, she is a slut and that there was something wrong with having sexual desires for someone to whom I was not yet married, and I am sure that I am not the only girl who has ever felt that way. However, I started puberty at a very early age and I was very shy about the subject. I had no friends my age I could really talk to about it, and I had no older sisters or cousins. But, at the time, one thing was for sure. I could not talk to my mom about it because I thought I would get in trouble and she’d think something was wrong with me for feeling this way.

It wasn’t until I brought up the subject of sex and birth control about a year ago, a few months after I began dating my first serious boyfriend, when my mom told me that there was nothing wrong with having sex as long as you use protection, as long as it’s with someone who loves you just as much as you love him or her, and as long as you are both sure you’re ready to share that moment together. That really surprised me, but I was relieved that my mom didn’t judge my feelings for my then boyfriend.

Sex has always been an important and sacred thing to me, and I’m glad that I got to share it with someone, who at the time, I really loved and felt loved by. But clearly, not every girl my age feels this way towards sex. I know too many girls who have given themselves to someone just to, as they put it, “get it over with.” I also knew a group of girls who talked about wanting to lose their virginity by the time they turned sixteen, but that didn’t happen. When I began dating my boyfriend, they all bonded together, and according to another classmate, began talking about my virginity status and calling me a “whore” behind my back because I had managed to get a serious boyfriend when they had not gotten any yet. The backstabbing hurt, but I also found it strange that they wanted to lose their virginity at such a young age, but when they suspected that I had lost mine at the age of 18, all of a sudden not being a virgin meant I was a whore.

I’ve learned a lot about sex and society’s view of women and sex within the past few years, and especially within the past year and a half or so. I’ve learned that society is a bit hypocritical when it comes to the subject, especially when women are involved. I’ve also learned that it’s okay to have sex and sexual desire, just as long as you are responsible and don’t let society control when, with whom, or whether or not you have it.