By Guest Blogger Janie O’Halloran
Can you remember a time in your life when you felt so incredibly uncomfortable and awkward? I sure can. I was sitting in my ninth grade health class during the sexual education unit. Our class was taught by Mr. H, the most feared and mysterious man who walked the halls of our high school. He was also the head coach for the varsity football team, and exactly the kind of man I wanted to go to for all of my burning questions about sex−not.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure that Mr. H was a quality guy, just not the guy I felt comfortable asking what it means to ‘pop one’s cherry’? So I didn’t ask, and no one else in my class did, either. I think all of us were scared that our curiosity would suggest we were either having sex or thinking about having sex− two things that none of us, boy or girl, wanted Mr. H to know about us. As you can imagine, a lot of the questions we had about sex remained as questions.
Like many schools in the U.S., our sex education stressed abstinence and the plethora of STDs we were bound to get if we did engage in sexual activity. There was so much missing in our health class conversations. Important stuff, like relationships, sexual pleasure, and desire. Nobody talked about these experiences and feelings so we weren’t sure they were okay. Any hint of desire was about adolescent boys —assumptions that they were innately inflicted with “sex on the brain.” They wanted it. They were naturally horny and they simply couldn’t help it. But what were we? Our desire was missing. We were passive, the cause and objects of boys’ desire. So we learned by our absence that if one of us engaged in sex it was not because we wanted to, but because of a boy’s unrelenting testosterone.
Fortunately for girls out there who are experiencing their own Mr. H, there’s a way to fill in this missing information about ourselves. Scarleteen.com is an online “sex education for the real world” that every girl should know about. This website provides a place where girls and young women can engage in a free and open discussion about sex, filling in all of the topics left out of traditional sex education classes, like girls’ sexual wants and desires. Scarleteen allows girls to ask questions about sex, take polls, and gives us an opportunity to share and read the sex testimonials of other girls.
Reading this amazing site makes me more certain then ever that we need a discourse of girls’ desire in our schools’ sex education classes, not only because there are still so many girls without access to the internet, but because this conversation is fundamental to what makes us human. Perhaps if I had known about Scarleteen when I was in Mr. H’s class, then I wouldn’t have gone through most of my teenage years thinking there was actually a “cherry” that I was terrified to pop.
