Once a week I pick up the paper and the column "Savage Love". Some of you may be familiar with it, some of you not, but it's a pretty funny sex advice column. Anyway the past couple of weeks he's printed letters from people describing their early age misconceptions about sex and most of them are quite funny. I've cut and pasted the columns for you all to read at your leisure. And feel free to add some of your own stories if you want.
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Dear Readers: A few weeks back, Laughing at Myself Now suggested that I ask my readers to send in letters detailing their childhood misconceptions about sex. It sounded like a good way to lighten my workload, allowing me to get out of the office and enjoy some of this global warming stuff I've been hearing so much about, so I invited readers to send in stories.
Well! Far from lightening my late-summer workload, LAMN's idea crashed my server and ruined my appetite. The server crashed because so many people wrote in. What's worse, once the server was back up, reading and sorting all the misconceptions turned out to be more work than busting out a regular ol' column. And the misconceptions mail ruined my appetite because, gee whiz, about 400,000 of the e-mails were from adults who, as children, thought a man had to pee in a woman's vagina, mouth, anus, hair, pillowcase, or nose (!) to get her pregnant. One out of every two e-mails concerned the Daddy-pees-on-Mommy pissconception. So before we get to the mail, a quick thought for all the parents out there: For the love of God, moms and dads, when you have your "where do babies come from" talks, make it clear to your young'uns that piss plays absolutely no role in reproduction, okay? Unless, of course, you want your kids to make early, perhaps fetish-forming associations between sex and piss.
Okay, on to the mail....
When I was 7, one of my friends tenaciously held to the theory that babies were made when a man urinated into the woman's mouth. The humping part, my friend explained, which we all vaguely knew was part of the baby-making process, helped the man build up enough pee. I was grossed out and alienated from all adults after learning this. I couldn't understand why anyone would ever make a baby under such circumstances. Did grown women like the taste of pee? Troubled, I asked my dad how I was born.
"Well, your mother and I decided to have you and then...." He stopped.
"I'll tell you when you're 14."
Fourteen?! Unwilling to wait that long, I found a book in the children's section of the library about human reproduction and got my answer. The penis-in-vagina model was still disturbing to me at 7, but it was better than the my-mom-guzzles-pee model. So I was able to feel okay about being kissed by my mother again... until I learned about oral sex.
Momentarily Relieved
I was one of those brainy kids that read too much and understood even less. So it made "perfect" sense to me that if my penis got bigger, wider, and harder when I wanted sex, then it logically followed that a girl's vagina gets softer and opens up like the doors on Star Trek to accommodate me. Then, when I found out that gay men have sex by inserting their penises into each other's asses, it logically followed that, if you're gay, you must have an orgasm EVERY time you take a shit. At the time I thought it must be great to be gay!
Foster S.
I was about 12 when I started figuring out that I was gay. The popular theories at the time (as I understood them) all revolved around dramatic Freudian psychoanalytic revelations. My revelation was that I liked other boys because I still had my foreskin. I was apparently the only boy in the U.S. who was uncircumcised (it was the '70s). So I postulated that the psychological trauma of my embarrassing wiener had made me go fag. It was pretty humiliating to ask my mom to get me the chop job "for health reasons." Worse than that was the actual bloody mess that is a 12-year-old freshly circumcised penis. And still worse was the agonizing wait for the desire to hump girls to arrive.
It turns out that telling your mom you need a circumcision when you're 12 is actually more traumatizing than telling her you're gay at 19.
Cut Homo Over Phobia
My older sister kept a box of tampons sitting on the floor next to the toilet. I was probably 8 years old when I became interested in these strange little plastic tubes. I had no idea what they were for. The box had helpful visual diagrams that made it look like the tampons were meant to be inserted in your butt. I had no idea what a vagina was at the time. Wanting to be cool and grown-up like my sister, I began inserting tampons in my butthole. Only later did I discover that tampons were not for 8-year-old boys' rectums.
Really a Goof
I had my first orgasm in the bathtub. For months, the new hobby was indulged in the tub, under water, in a bubble bath. I'm the cleanest kid in town. But the itch gets the better of me in bed one night. All's going well, door's locked, the ever-more-familiar feeling of warmth is on its way, and... WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT WHITE STUFF?!! I concluded I must have cancer and this vile, pus-like discharge was my body's attempt to keep the disease from eating me alive. My terror over the copious amounts of cancerous goo flowing from my dick didn't stop me from playing with it. I'm extremely courageous that way.
Still Peeved About Not Knowing
When I was about 7, my 8-year-old older brother had the pleasure (or painful discomfort... I still don't really know) of seeing his first porno flick at our teenaged cousins' house. It was called Oriental Orgasms, and I'll never forget his exact words about it: "There were all of these Chinese guys getting their penises sucked by this one Chinese girl. Their penises all got real big, and then after awhile, CHAMPAGNE SPRAYED OUT OF IT!" After my initial "EEEWWWW!!" all I could think was, "So... is that where champagne comes from?"
Classic Underage Misconception
When I was coming of age, I lived alone with my mom. I was younger than my classmates, and too intimidated to ask about puberty. As a child with a vivid imagination, observing my horny dog led me to conclude that one day my erections would emerge from the outer layer of skin, like the dog's did. For a time, I was terrified of getting an erection, convinced that if not suppressed, my penis would "peel back" to reveal the true, slimy boner lurking inside.
Finally Learned a Canine Cock Is Different
One of the kids at my Catholic school was proud to teach the rest of us guys all about sex. He had peeked in on his mother and her boyfriend and explained it as follows: The man puts a balloon on his dick then uses his dick to insert the balloon into the woman's pee hole. Then he puts his lips to the woman's pee hole and inflates the balloon until it pops. He knew it popped because his mother screamed when it did. We believed him because his story was just too bizarre to have been made up.
Canadian Balloon Inflator
That's all the misconceptions we've got room for--but if you want more misconceptions, you can enjoy the overflow at www.thestranger.com/specials/fuckedinthehead. And before folks start writing in to complain that all the misconceptions in this week's column and on the Web are from boys, that's only because next week's column is entirely dedicated to girls' misconceptions.
and here's part 2. . . .
Dear Readers: Last week we were treated to the childhood sexual misconceptions of my male readers--a shocking number of which involved piss. This week it's the girls' turn....
My grandma on my dad's side liked to come in while I was sitting on the toilet, doing number two, and tell me, "That's how your mommy had you! One day--poop! Francie came out!" I guess she thought it was cute or something. When I was done, I would stare at my own poop while it swirled around the green ceramic toilet bowl of my grandma's toilet, feeling vaguely disconcerted.
Francie Fuckin' Freaked
When I was about 7, my older friend Annie told me that the way a man and a woman had sex was that the man put his middle finger inside the woman's bellybutton and twisted from side to side. That's why they called it screwing. This really screwed me up because when I would sit on my dad's lap he would sometimes rest his hand on my belly and absentmindedly put his finger in my bellybutton. When another friend told me the truth about sex, I was totally grossed out. I told her that she was lying and proceeded to tell her about bellybutton sex.
Bellybutton Creeps
Growing up I heard the term "screwing" to describe fucking. As I had only ever seen a penis when it was soft and it had looked quite large to me, compared to the small place between my legs where it was to go, I thought it was called screwing because you had to somehow "screw" the penis around and around to get it in there. I spent many hours puzzling over how this would actually be done. Did she rotate on top of him? Did he somehow manage to turn it around and around while staying in one place? Just how did a man manage to screw that big soft thing into such a small tight hole?
Strange Tales of Really Interesting Embarrassing Situations
I discovered masturbation when I was in the fourth grade; home from school with nothing better to do. It soon became a regular afterschool habit. I didn't have a clue what I was doing, I just knew it felt damn good. What really scared me, though, was my aroused, engorged, and very tender protruding clit. Not knowing what it was, but fearing I was harming myself, I went to my mother's biology textbook (she was a teacher) and looked through the parts on the human body. Of course no sexual or genital organs were included in this high school text. What was pictured was the large and small intestine. Ohmygod! I thought I was mutilating myself, and my intestines were coming out of my body. Each time I came, I tried to push my "intestine" back into my body. It scared the shit out of me, but didn't stop me from masturbating.
Child's Play
When I was around 8 years old I asked my mother what a homosexual was (she had called our neighbor one). She told me that "homo" meant "same" and "sexual" meant "sex." So I thought, "Oh my God! I am a homosexual because I touch myself! This is awful! I am going to hell!" A year later I asked my mother how homosexuals had sex with each other. She said, "Through their rectum." But she must have scratched her nose while she said it, because I thought she was saying that her nostril was the rectum. Since I had NO CLUE what a rectum really was, I was horrified once again. "Oh my God!" I thought. "That must hurt like hell!" So for years I thought that gay men were weird and disgusting because they fucked each other's noses. I was so relieved when I realized they were Buttfuckers and not Nosefuckers. I was also relieved to know that I was a homosexual not because I touch myself but because I like to touch other women.
No Objects Shall Enter
I have two funny stories about sexual misconceptions. The first one is not exactly about sex, but close enough: When my brother was about 15 years old, he was well aware that girls had periods. However, I think he watched a little bit too much TV, complete with maxi pad commercials with demonstrations. He thought that women's periods were blue, like the liquid they would show being poured into pads to demonstrate their absorbency! He'll never live that one down.
Another one is from when I first became a teenager. My friend and I were trying to figure out exactly what handjobs were, since some of the boys had been tossing around the term. (I had visions of rubbing a guy's penis back and forth furiously between my hands, as if to start a fire.) An older, more experienced girl explained, "Well, it's kind of like getting that last bit of ketchup out of the bottle. It's the same kind of wrist movement." This was back when glass bottles were more popular than those squeeze ones. Even though I'm in my late 20s now, I still can't help but laugh if I see someone giving a handjob to a glass ketchup bottle in a restaurant.
The Mave
My mom, in that super-calm instructive voice she used to sound extra-casual, told me, "A man helps a woman to have a baby." She also said that "a man puts his penis inside a woman's vagina." So I spent a lot of time imagining a man and a woman on the operating table in the hospital, both flat on their backs, their legs scissored around each other. I figured the man's foreskin must form a suction cup that attached to the baby's head and helped to pull it out.
Ann
Dunno how funny this will be to you, but my friends find it hilarious (particularly when they're drunk): My mother was a categorical man-hater and all my life described how evil they were and how they would fuck you blind and leave you pregnant. So the first time I was naked with a guy wasn't until I was 22, and wasted out of my mind in order to deal with the fear my sweet mother instilled. So there we were, making out in the darkness of his room, and eventually he asked me to give him a handjob. I was so afraid to even touch his penis he had to gently guide my hand "down there," and when I touched it for the first time I was completely shocked that it was just oh-so-soft skin. I almost expected it to leap out and attack me. As I began to caress it, I just got so caught up in the moment... I couldn't help but exclaim in my drunken wonder of this thing I had feared: "THAT'S IT!!??" He was none too thrilled at my comment, not quite getting the profundity of the revelation.
Also Laughing at Myself Now
Just can't get enough of this "childhood sexual misconceptions" stuff? There are more girls' sexual misconceptions at www.thestranger.com/specials/fuckedinthehead2.
__________________________________________________
Dear Readers: A few weeks back, Laughing at Myself Now suggested that I ask my readers to send in letters detailing their childhood misconceptions about sex. It sounded like a good way to lighten my workload, allowing me to get out of the office and enjoy some of this global warming stuff I've been hearing so much about, so I invited readers to send in stories.
Well! Far from lightening my late-summer workload, LAMN's idea crashed my server and ruined my appetite. The server crashed because so many people wrote in. What's worse, once the server was back up, reading and sorting all the misconceptions turned out to be more work than busting out a regular ol' column. And the misconceptions mail ruined my appetite because, gee whiz, about 400,000 of the e-mails were from adults who, as children, thought a man had to pee in a woman's vagina, mouth, anus, hair, pillowcase, or nose (!) to get her pregnant. One out of every two e-mails concerned the Daddy-pees-on-Mommy pissconception. So before we get to the mail, a quick thought for all the parents out there: For the love of God, moms and dads, when you have your "where do babies come from" talks, make it clear to your young'uns that piss plays absolutely no role in reproduction, okay? Unless, of course, you want your kids to make early, perhaps fetish-forming associations between sex and piss.
Okay, on to the mail....
When I was 7, one of my friends tenaciously held to the theory that babies were made when a man urinated into the woman's mouth. The humping part, my friend explained, which we all vaguely knew was part of the baby-making process, helped the man build up enough pee. I was grossed out and alienated from all adults after learning this. I couldn't understand why anyone would ever make a baby under such circumstances. Did grown women like the taste of pee? Troubled, I asked my dad how I was born.
"Well, your mother and I decided to have you and then...." He stopped.
"I'll tell you when you're 14."
Fourteen?! Unwilling to wait that long, I found a book in the children's section of the library about human reproduction and got my answer. The penis-in-vagina model was still disturbing to me at 7, but it was better than the my-mom-guzzles-pee model. So I was able to feel okay about being kissed by my mother again... until I learned about oral sex.
Momentarily Relieved
I was one of those brainy kids that read too much and understood even less. So it made "perfect" sense to me that if my penis got bigger, wider, and harder when I wanted sex, then it logically followed that a girl's vagina gets softer and opens up like the doors on Star Trek to accommodate me. Then, when I found out that gay men have sex by inserting their penises into each other's asses, it logically followed that, if you're gay, you must have an orgasm EVERY time you take a shit. At the time I thought it must be great to be gay!
Foster S.
I was about 12 when I started figuring out that I was gay. The popular theories at the time (as I understood them) all revolved around dramatic Freudian psychoanalytic revelations. My revelation was that I liked other boys because I still had my foreskin. I was apparently the only boy in the U.S. who was uncircumcised (it was the '70s). So I postulated that the psychological trauma of my embarrassing wiener had made me go fag. It was pretty humiliating to ask my mom to get me the chop job "for health reasons." Worse than that was the actual bloody mess that is a 12-year-old freshly circumcised penis. And still worse was the agonizing wait for the desire to hump girls to arrive.
It turns out that telling your mom you need a circumcision when you're 12 is actually more traumatizing than telling her you're gay at 19.
Cut Homo Over Phobia
My older sister kept a box of tampons sitting on the floor next to the toilet. I was probably 8 years old when I became interested in these strange little plastic tubes. I had no idea what they were for. The box had helpful visual diagrams that made it look like the tampons were meant to be inserted in your butt. I had no idea what a vagina was at the time. Wanting to be cool and grown-up like my sister, I began inserting tampons in my butthole. Only later did I discover that tampons were not for 8-year-old boys' rectums.
Really a Goof
I had my first orgasm in the bathtub. For months, the new hobby was indulged in the tub, under water, in a bubble bath. I'm the cleanest kid in town. But the itch gets the better of me in bed one night. All's going well, door's locked, the ever-more-familiar feeling of warmth is on its way, and... WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT WHITE STUFF?!! I concluded I must have cancer and this vile, pus-like discharge was my body's attempt to keep the disease from eating me alive. My terror over the copious amounts of cancerous goo flowing from my dick didn't stop me from playing with it. I'm extremely courageous that way.
Still Peeved About Not Knowing
When I was about 7, my 8-year-old older brother had the pleasure (or painful discomfort... I still don't really know) of seeing his first porno flick at our teenaged cousins' house. It was called Oriental Orgasms, and I'll never forget his exact words about it: "There were all of these Chinese guys getting their penises sucked by this one Chinese girl. Their penises all got real big, and then after awhile, CHAMPAGNE SPRAYED OUT OF IT!" After my initial "EEEWWWW!!" all I could think was, "So... is that where champagne comes from?"
Classic Underage Misconception
When I was coming of age, I lived alone with my mom. I was younger than my classmates, and too intimidated to ask about puberty. As a child with a vivid imagination, observing my horny dog led me to conclude that one day my erections would emerge from the outer layer of skin, like the dog's did. For a time, I was terrified of getting an erection, convinced that if not suppressed, my penis would "peel back" to reveal the true, slimy boner lurking inside.
Finally Learned a Canine Cock Is Different
One of the kids at my Catholic school was proud to teach the rest of us guys all about sex. He had peeked in on his mother and her boyfriend and explained it as follows: The man puts a balloon on his dick then uses his dick to insert the balloon into the woman's pee hole. Then he puts his lips to the woman's pee hole and inflates the balloon until it pops. He knew it popped because his mother screamed when it did. We believed him because his story was just too bizarre to have been made up.
Canadian Balloon Inflator
That's all the misconceptions we've got room for--but if you want more misconceptions, you can enjoy the overflow at www.thestranger.com/specials/fuckedinthehead. And before folks start writing in to complain that all the misconceptions in this week's column and on the Web are from boys, that's only because next week's column is entirely dedicated to girls' misconceptions.
and here's part 2. . . .
Dear Readers: Last week we were treated to the childhood sexual misconceptions of my male readers--a shocking number of which involved piss. This week it's the girls' turn....
My grandma on my dad's side liked to come in while I was sitting on the toilet, doing number two, and tell me, "That's how your mommy had you! One day--poop! Francie came out!" I guess she thought it was cute or something. When I was done, I would stare at my own poop while it swirled around the green ceramic toilet bowl of my grandma's toilet, feeling vaguely disconcerted.
Francie Fuckin' Freaked
When I was about 7, my older friend Annie told me that the way a man and a woman had sex was that the man put his middle finger inside the woman's bellybutton and twisted from side to side. That's why they called it screwing. This really screwed me up because when I would sit on my dad's lap he would sometimes rest his hand on my belly and absentmindedly put his finger in my bellybutton. When another friend told me the truth about sex, I was totally grossed out. I told her that she was lying and proceeded to tell her about bellybutton sex.
Bellybutton Creeps
Growing up I heard the term "screwing" to describe fucking. As I had only ever seen a penis when it was soft and it had looked quite large to me, compared to the small place between my legs where it was to go, I thought it was called screwing because you had to somehow "screw" the penis around and around to get it in there. I spent many hours puzzling over how this would actually be done. Did she rotate on top of him? Did he somehow manage to turn it around and around while staying in one place? Just how did a man manage to screw that big soft thing into such a small tight hole?
Strange Tales of Really Interesting Embarrassing Situations
I discovered masturbation when I was in the fourth grade; home from school with nothing better to do. It soon became a regular afterschool habit. I didn't have a clue what I was doing, I just knew it felt damn good. What really scared me, though, was my aroused, engorged, and very tender protruding clit. Not knowing what it was, but fearing I was harming myself, I went to my mother's biology textbook (she was a teacher) and looked through the parts on the human body. Of course no sexual or genital organs were included in this high school text. What was pictured was the large and small intestine. Ohmygod! I thought I was mutilating myself, and my intestines were coming out of my body. Each time I came, I tried to push my "intestine" back into my body. It scared the shit out of me, but didn't stop me from masturbating.
Child's Play
When I was around 8 years old I asked my mother what a homosexual was (she had called our neighbor one). She told me that "homo" meant "same" and "sexual" meant "sex." So I thought, "Oh my God! I am a homosexual because I touch myself! This is awful! I am going to hell!" A year later I asked my mother how homosexuals had sex with each other. She said, "Through their rectum." But she must have scratched her nose while she said it, because I thought she was saying that her nostril was the rectum. Since I had NO CLUE what a rectum really was, I was horrified once again. "Oh my God!" I thought. "That must hurt like hell!" So for years I thought that gay men were weird and disgusting because they fucked each other's noses. I was so relieved when I realized they were Buttfuckers and not Nosefuckers. I was also relieved to know that I was a homosexual not because I touch myself but because I like to touch other women.
No Objects Shall Enter
I have two funny stories about sexual misconceptions. The first one is not exactly about sex, but close enough: When my brother was about 15 years old, he was well aware that girls had periods. However, I think he watched a little bit too much TV, complete with maxi pad commercials with demonstrations. He thought that women's periods were blue, like the liquid they would show being poured into pads to demonstrate their absorbency! He'll never live that one down.
Another one is from when I first became a teenager. My friend and I were trying to figure out exactly what handjobs were, since some of the boys had been tossing around the term. (I had visions of rubbing a guy's penis back and forth furiously between my hands, as if to start a fire.) An older, more experienced girl explained, "Well, it's kind of like getting that last bit of ketchup out of the bottle. It's the same kind of wrist movement." This was back when glass bottles were more popular than those squeeze ones. Even though I'm in my late 20s now, I still can't help but laugh if I see someone giving a handjob to a glass ketchup bottle in a restaurant.
The Mave
My mom, in that super-calm instructive voice she used to sound extra-casual, told me, "A man helps a woman to have a baby." She also said that "a man puts his penis inside a woman's vagina." So I spent a lot of time imagining a man and a woman on the operating table in the hospital, both flat on their backs, their legs scissored around each other. I figured the man's foreskin must form a suction cup that attached to the baby's head and helped to pull it out.
Ann
Dunno how funny this will be to you, but my friends find it hilarious (particularly when they're drunk): My mother was a categorical man-hater and all my life described how evil they were and how they would fuck you blind and leave you pregnant. So the first time I was naked with a guy wasn't until I was 22, and wasted out of my mind in order to deal with the fear my sweet mother instilled. So there we were, making out in the darkness of his room, and eventually he asked me to give him a handjob. I was so afraid to even touch his penis he had to gently guide my hand "down there," and when I touched it for the first time I was completely shocked that it was just oh-so-soft skin. I almost expected it to leap out and attack me. As I began to caress it, I just got so caught up in the moment... I couldn't help but exclaim in my drunken wonder of this thing I had feared: "THAT'S IT!!??" He was none too thrilled at my comment, not quite getting the profundity of the revelation.
Also Laughing at Myself Now
Just can't get enough of this "childhood sexual misconceptions" stuff? There are more girls' sexual misconceptions at www.thestranger.com/specials/fuckedinthehead2.
