Sex Education, Part One: The Talk

If their aim had been to convince us all never to have sex in our lives, they had done their jobs well.  Which would be a very strange aim indeed, considering this was a Marriage Preparation Weekend Camp, attended exclusively by engaged couples and designed by our church to prepare us all for a lifetime of blessed Christian matrimony.  Which included, presumably, the procreation of little church-attending children.

But there we were, thirteen nervous young engaged women, sparsely scattered at desks arranged in a loose circle around two pastors’ wives, who were there to impart their sexual knowledge to us.  Along with our fiancés, we had already spent the last couple of days going through sessions designed to help us communicate with one another, understand each other’s needs, get to know each other’s temperaments, and budget finances together.  All this had transpired in a large, one-room cabin at a desolate campground – it was winter – an hour or so from our home church.  For night, we separated into male and female cabins filled with bunk beds.  Now the men and women had been separated for the grand finale: The Sex Talk.  The women had been able to stay in the main building while the men had silently slunk off together to the male cabin to have their little chat.  Before, we had shared little tables with our partners, arranged in a large circle; now, we females nervously dragged them in a little closer as the intimacy of the subject seemed to demand.  But we were still all strangers, and maintained a distance of a couple of feet between our respective tables; and as a consequence we still felt isolated, distant and cold in that silent expansive room with its twenty-foot-high ceiling.

To my knowledge, we were all virgins, waiting for our wedding nights to offer up our virginity to our partners.  I for one was still horribly uncomfortable with the whole topic of sex.  Ben and I had maintained a very strict and limited sexual regime throughout our dating years: holding hands, hugging, kissing in an upright position.  That was all.  We all looked uneasily at the two women who were to lead us in this embarrassing discussion.

We began by sitting in complete silence for an alarming amount of time.  I had been expecting the pastors’ wives to have had some kind of talk planned, or at least to have written out a list of topics to address; I began to realize that I had been mistaken.  We all just looked at each other uneasily for several minutes.  One of the pastor’s wives was about my mother’s age, but looked much older – her hair was cut short like an elderly woman’s, and dyed an unnatural peachy-brown colour.  She smiled slightly like she had a secret to impart; she sat with her arms crossed and her lips together, apparently deciding whether or not to share her secret.  The other woman looked a lot younger – probably in her late thirties – but her hair was cut short and spiky in a style that hadn’t been in fashion for at least fifteen years, she wore baggy masculine clothes and her blue eyes were always open extraordinarily wide as if perpetually surprised.  She looked around the room wide-eyed and nodded, as if she were reading out thoughts and agreeing that we all had very good reason to be anxious, but need not fear, because we were about to hear some very comforting news from the older one.  Neither was exactly what I’d consider sex-talk-leader material. We remained like this, as I said, for an uncomfortably long time, listening to the sounds of our feet shuffling on the hardwood floor or our tables occasionally screeching forward in that large noiseless room.

Finally, the older woman broke the silence.  “So,” she asked, “have you bought your negligée?”  She stressed the final word dreadfully, emphasizing the first glottal “g” in a way that made my stomach turn.  Since she wasn’t asking anyone in particular, no one answered; she read our silence as lack of understanding and decided to clarify: “For the honeymoon.”

Someone coughed half-heartedly.   Another turned over her notebook listlessly.  Silence.

“It’s very important to have negligée along for the honeymoon,” she finally added.

Now, this pastor’s wife (surprisingly) wasn’t the first I’d heard to expound on the virtues of titillating nighttime apparel for a new wife; but something about that scandalous foreign term from those grandmother lips, spoken in the restless vastness of the cabin, made my throat tighten.  Negligée sounded like something made out of stiff, faded teal or apricot-coloured lace you might pull out of a black garbage bag from the back of your mother’s closet.  It made me think of the one time in high school when I had volunteered at the local Salvation Army store, organizing boxes of donated clothes with the spunky lady who worked there.  I had heard her give a short laugh; as I turned to look at her, I saw her pull out a faded red polyester nightgown.  She howled as she put it up to herself, placing one of the cups over her own breast to reveal a gaping nipple-window.  “Look at that!  A nipple-hole!” she hooted.  That was negligée.  If I could have done so discreetly, I would have written in my marriage-preparation notebook, “Note to self: no negligée.”

The subject of negligée being exhausted, the younger woman decided to throw something in.  “Also, don’t forget to pack some KY Jelly in your suitcase before you leave for your honeymoon.”  (Apparently, the honeymoon was the only concern for these two pious women).  The other lady nodded slowly in agreement, her arms still crossed.  I was struck with horror.  What was this?  What did I have to buy?  I was not familiar with this KY Jelly.  I had not been aware that I would have to purchase such a product.  I had never even bought my own menstrual pads – I had never even used a tampon before – and now I was supposed to saunter into some store (I didn’t know which one) and buy a – what?  Jar? Bottle?  Tube?  Pot? – of some mysterious sex-related substance  . . . and pay for it to some cashier?  Without a wedding ring on, even?  No, no, no, no!  If I would have been able to keep my trembling fingers steady enough, and if I could have been absolutely certain of its private safe-keeping, I would have jotted down, “Note to self: find out more about this (ugh!!) jelly.”

We were sitting in silence again, though my mind was reeling, fiddling with our pens and glasses and shirt buttons.  One of the girls finally worked up the courage to squeak out some lame question about birth control – asking how the Pill worked, or something like that.  This was not an area of expertise for these women, especially considering they hadn’t done any research for this lesson, but they both recommended it as a dependable form of birth control.  Unfortunately, the older woman decided to advise us to try different kinds, as she and her husband had.  It took all my strength to keep from clapping my hands over my ears at the word “condom” in her list of methods they had tried, as I had heard her husband preach at our church before.

The subject of birth control reminded the younger woman that they ought to bring up doctors’ examinations.  “Be sure to have an exam before the wedding,” she advised. “You want to be sure that you’ll actually be able to have sex on your honeymoon.  When I got married, and we left for our honeymoon, we found out on the first night that my vagina was too small.  We couldn’t do it.  He couldn’t fit inside.” My eyes were probably about as wide as hers at this point. “We couldn’t do it the whole time we were on our honeymoon. When we got back I had to get my opening surgically enlarged.”

At this shocking new information, my heart flittered madly inside me like a wasp caught in a jar.  I felt lightheaded; I dropped my pen.  I couldn’t decide whether I was more horrified at knowing so much about the pastor’s wife’s genitalia or at knowing that something like that could happen to me.  I had not gotten an examination, and was not planning to, for . . . well, forever, really, if I could get away with it.  I was already anxious enough about exposing my body to my beloved fiancé, under the veiling darkness of night; there was no question of the scrutinizing gaze of a doctor under the harsh lights of an examination room.  I found myself conjuring up all kinds of nightmarish images in my mind: of not being able to perform on the wedding night due to malfunctioning hardware; of lying on my back, legs outspread, with my face towards some fluorescent-tube-lit ceiling before a white-clad doctor.  Never! I could never do any of this!  I could never wear red, nipple-exposing negligée!  I could never buy KY Jelly, whatever the hell that was!   I could never make a doctor’s appointment to see if my groom’s parts could fit inside.  Never, never, never!  No sex for me!

But the older woman tried to comfort us.  “There are stretches you can do before the wedding to help reduce the pain,” she said.  She recommended a book that could instruct us on these stretches.  My mind perked up.  A book?  I could do books.  I was a literature student.  That was better than a doctor – maybe with the book I could avoid that whole doctor thing.  I considered writing down the book title, but paused.  I would give it a couple of minutes, and then write it down.  I didn’t want anybody to know that I was going to seek out this book.  I repeated the title in my brain so I wouldn’t forget it as we sat again in silence.  I looked around at the girls around me, who were glancing around the room languidly.  I felt certain that everyone in the room felt the same way I did.  As the older woman began to speak again I quickly jotted down the book title and then swiftly turned the page in my notebook.

“The important thing,” she was saying, “is not to have too high of expectations.”  She paused as if she wanted to explain more; but her words failed her.  Well, that wasn’t going to be a problem for me, I thought despairingly.  She looked around at us silently, uncomfortably, thinking; but eventually the appearance of any intention to continue faded from her face.  She was done.  She looked imploringly at her accomplice, asking with her looks whether there was anything left to add; the other shrugged her shoulders and gazed back at her wide-eyed, as if to say, “Is there anything more that can possibly be said about sex?”

There was the click of a turning doorknob behind us, followed by the sound of treading feet.  The guys were back.  The session was over.

I sat stone-cold at my little table as the men shuffled quietly back inside and sat next to their partners.  My fiancé and I exchanged tentative glances before turning back to face the front again, frozen in terror.  How was I going to break it to this guy that we could never, never, never have sex?  But maybe the book could help me.  Maybe things wouldn’t be so horrible.  Maybe I could do it.

On our way home that afternoon Ben asked me how the sex talk had gone.  “Um, it was fine,” I lied.  I wasn’t quite ready to express to my future husband that I was swearing off sex for life.  “How about yours?”

“It wasn’t very useful,” he sighed.  “The pastor totally didn’t answer my question.”  He looked tiredly at the road before him as he drove.  It had been a long weekend for both of us. I was intrigued: I wondered what kinds of questions my fiancé had about sex.  “What did he say?” I asked cautiously.

“Well,” he began.  “See, I asked about what you can do if a woman, you know, throws herself at you.  Like what if an attractive girl just comes at you, forces herself on you . . . how do you respond?  What can you do? I don’t know if I’d be able to handle it . . . I don’t know if I’d be able to resist the temptation.  You know?”  I did not know.  “And the pastor just avoided the question . . . he just said it was very unlikely to happen.”

I suppressed a smile.  On the one hand, I agreed that this was a very poor answer to an earnest question.  Ben hadn’t asked how likely the event was to happen, he had asked what to do in the event of it happening.  But on the other hand . . . the pastor had a point.  If you knew my husband you would have found his question funny.  Sure, he’s tall, handsome, and very masculine.  But he’s also about as charming as Elmer Fudd.  And unless he was planning to spend a significant amount of time in strip clubs and red-light districts, the odds were very slim that he would run into this problem.  There wasn’t exactly a lot of this kind of activity going on in Canadian Tire and the label-making factory where he worked.  I smiled sympathetically.  “Yeah, well, our sex talk wasn’t that helpful either.”

In fact, I think that this had been the least productive sex talk I could have possibly imagined.  Instead of genuinely preparing us for what was ahead, and giving us information, comfort and advice, these women had simply filled my head with terrifying images of awkward bedroom encounters and hideous surgical procedures.

Honestly, I think that what most young female virgins need to hear is that everything is going to be OK.  Contrary to our instincts, sex is not scary or dirty, but with the right person is actually fun, pleasant, weird, sweet, funny, and very full of love.  I have rarely heard from a young unmarried woman who actually looked forward to her wedding night with unequivocal excitement and delight.  The pastors’ wives didn’t need to worry too much about high expectations.  Most young women are utterly terrified.  Once, at a sleepover with a bunch of my teenaged friends, we had been taking turns naming our greatest fears; one girl had piped up, “My wedding night.”  It had been followed with reverent silence.  We all understood.  By the time I was engaged, I still had not a single iota of desire to be penetrated in the most delicate, private and mysterious realms of my body; I only knew I had to let it happen to me if I were to share my life with this man whom I loved.  I knew I had to somehow make the best of it.

Obviously, I knew nothing about sex; but this sex talk did nothing to cure me of my ignorance.

(The terror continues in Part Two: The Book)

Tagged as: sex education