Sex 101: An Illegitimate Sex Education
About the Series: Sex 101
With cuffing season just around the corner and Scorpio season in full swing, romance is in the air. Along with that, though, come rigid sexual norms, too many atrocious Tinder dates, and having to deal with our exes (and exes of exes, and so on). Are these just the things that we, as young people still understanding our own sexualities, have to go through?
Here at Camp Thirlby, we don’t think anyone should be denied the education and experiences that encompass their sexual and romantic lives across (and outside of) the gender spectrum. However, that usually isn’t the case for many of us, whether that means having to seek out alternative forms of sex and dating information for queer folks or using our own lived experiences in a religious upbringing to process our knowledge and feelings towards sexuality years later. That’s where “Sex 101” comes in — a series that highlights the educations and experiences — no matter how unconventional — of our Camp Counselors that have something to say about how they navigated, learned, and unlearned certain sex and dating norms.
While Michael Stipe of R.E.M. lost his religion standing in the corner, I lost mine standing in the bathroom stall of my Catholic high school.
But before Catholic high school, there was Catholic middle school, and Catholic elementary school, and Catholic preschool. I attended Catholic school for 16 years. In sixth grade, I had a panic attack when I realized my mother would be going to hell for having me and not repenting. My kind, strong mother, who sacrificed everything for me; my kind, strong mother who stayed.
My early understanding of sex and love was clouded by the archaic term “bastard.” More specifically, bastard child. The Bible, a text I became intimately familiar with during my childhood and adolescence, uses the term to describe those who are “polluted,” foreign, “those who do not share the privileges of God's children,” and, as we know it today, illegitimate children. I never actively considered myself illegitimate. After all, I was flesh and blood, so how could my mother’s marital status when she had me impact my own agency? And yet, it has. There is fear where desire should be — the constant remembrance of abandonment coming back to me in moments that should be intimate. I think the most intimate I have ever been is when I am naked with my own trauma.
When my father found out my mother was pregnant, he left. I could offer a multitude of reasons as to why, but I think the root of it was shame. I know because my mother was shamed. I know because I was shamed.
As a child, Father’s Day came and went, always with cards written to my grandfather and questions from my classmates as to why I was not cutting and gluing one for my dad. It would be easier if the reason for his absence was one society allowed for. But with every answer I could not give these kids and their prying questions, I was continually marked as the other — the girl with no dad, the girl who didn’t know her dad. I can’t be mad at their questions, but I can be mad at the culture of wrongness tied with being fatherless, at the invisible erasure of those who were not entitled to the nuclear family. Consistently, I was reminded that being a bastard was shameful — that I should not be here. The priest who baptized me asked my mother why she would not want to perform the ceremony in private, so as not to embarrass my grandmother.
Frequently, I have had friends of mine insist they are accidents as well — that their parents did not want to have another baby, and yet there they were. But your surprise conception does not warrant you illegitimate, and your experiences do not equate to my earliest memories of loss and trauma. My sex education was as illegitimate as my birth — I was never taught about sex, but about shame, and the way our bodies carry it.
I carried this sexual shame for years before I received any sort of formal sexual education. While my class had been told in fifth grade we would be watching a video on human reproduction, that video was never screened, and the chapters in reference to it in our textbooks were overlooked. Anything I knew about sex up until high school I had learned from my upbringing and from 80s movies that have not aged well. It wasn’t until I was 14 that I could utter the phrase “make out.”
Then came the tape.
I was absent the day we learned about abstinence in high school, but the memory is seared in my brain as if I had been present because I am so intimately familiar with the shame my classmates discussed after it. It was the same shame I have been navigating my entire life.
The story was painted for me in an anxious retelling around my lunch table, my friends wringing their hands and avoiding each other’s eyes. It went like this. A group of pretty, modest women asked for a volunteer from the awkward, insecure girls rounded up from my co-ed school. My friend obliged. These women held up a piece of tape, emblematic of women’s sexual purity, and stuck it to her arm, and ripped it off. Again, and again, and again, until the tape would not stick. The idea was that having sex before marriage means that our chosen husbands would not be able to stick to us because we had dirtied ourselves.
What has stuck from that image is the bile that rises in my throat whenever I experience pleasure, the rush of cold sweat that comes after I realized my passing thought about a boy rendered me a heretic. What has stuck, from the tape, is my tongue to the roof of my mouth, silenced, without the language to articulate what makes me feel good, and why this abstinence only education made me feel so dirty as a virgin.
My sexuality became inherently tied to my worth, like an unboxed action figure in mint condition. Yet how could I be worth waiting for when I had been subliminally told for years that my being here in the first place was shameful and wrong? My identity was wrapped in sexual shame before I had my own sexual awakening, and when it came, I was asked to repress it even further. I always wondered about the point of creating or purchasing an action figure, if it was never meant to be used, and to bring pleasure in that use. I never realized I would wonder that about my own body as well.
There were small reclamations; ones of rolled-up khaki skirts and reading 50 Shades of Grey on our school issued iPads.
It is easy, when you are suffering, to ignore your pain and the way others mistreat you. Over time, it becomes a norm, a way of being. This is how trauma forms, and the subsequent negative patterns we consistently seem to repeat. My breaking point was not the consistent dehumanization of my own existence, or sexual autonomy. It wasn’t when a priest at my school, in class, said that Valentine’s Day hearts looked like the shape of a women’s “rear,” bending over. It was when I learned that if you are disabled from the waist down, you cannot get married in the Catholic Church — after all, you could not consumate it. I argued a lot that day in class. I argued again when I learned my mother’s marriage to my step-father was illegitimate because they decided not to have more children. I argued again when the subject of gay rights came up. I argued and fought, and eventually, left for the girl’s restroom to cry in peace. I was tired of fighting against the priest, my family, and the Madonna-Whore complex. Even the two most powerful women in the Bible are identified by their sexual statuses. Virgin and prostitute.
I still cannot name with confidence the parts of my vagina. Before I had ever had sex, I experienced two weeks of straight anxiety, believing I was pregnant after a pantsless makeout with my then boyfriend. Today, using three different forms of birth control and pregnancy prevention measures, I still hold a quiet, cold fear the day before I am supposed to get my period. After all, what if I don't?
When my mom met my father, she believed condoms were 99.9% effective. When she told me this when I was 17, I laughed in disbelief. Today, I can tell you the average effectiveness of each type of birth control, both typical and perfect use. I am pro-choice. I advocate for sexual autonomy, expression, and the right to sex work. I have toys, and I use them alone and with others. But I still frequently have a pit in my stomach when the moment is over. I spend hours at dinner parties recounting the ways I feel guilty for things that most would describe as the human condition. I still carry guilt and shame for who I am, and what I believe — what I feel when someone leans down to whisper in my ear, what I like when I am touched. I think about the people I have crushes on, the unavailable kind, who don’t pay attention to me, and I wonder if I go for them because subconsciously it means I don’t have to be vulnerable. I can be safe in my desire because it never becomes tangible. I am still healing. At least, I am trying.
In a religion rooted in sexual shame, demonization, celibacy, and abstinence, there is no sexual education, except to be educated enough not to have it, not to feel desire, unless you should be so committed to the perpetuation of the nuclear family.
Last winter I came home for the holidays. While I had stopped going to mass during the school year, I always went with my mother when I was home. That day, the priest began a homily by saying that children with only one parent are destined to suffer more than kids with two parents — that their lives would be marred, would be less. He encouraged women to work through their issues with their husbands. He preached the sanctity of family. He again, as if singling me out by name, told me that my upbringing was unnatural and wrong. I left church and tried not to cry.
About the Author
Maura Fallon (she/her) is a recent graduate from the George Washington University with a degree in journalism and film. Currently, she lives in Brooklyn where she works for American Documentary and spends her time reading on roofs and dancing in the streets. Prior to the publication of this piece, Maura got a tattoo of a ghost, which reminds her of the body’s impermanence and the importance of the soul that inhabits it.
