"I need to get a Math Vagina"...I want to put that on a t-shirt or bumper sticker...

When I was young, before puberty hit, we had sex ed. I knew I wanted to get married and have kids, but the idea of sex didn't appeal to me at all. I remember thinking to myself, "I guess I'll just force myself to have sex a few times to have kids."

A year or two later, on the first day of high school, I was sitting on the bus when one of my classmates got on the bus. I remember she walked on and I felt a sudden attraction towards her. From that moment on, the idea of sex as some awful trial I'd have to endure was dispelled. (Though I'd need to wait a decade and a half to actually experience it.)

lol I thought the exact same thing.

I didn't think there was ANY motion. I thought the man just "put" his penis in (I guess I didn't know what an erection was) and somehow consciously "released" his sperm. To make a baby, of course. That's what I thought sex was for only. Raised Catholic.

For years, I thought every couple who didn't have kids was "barren" because that's how my mother referred to herself. She had a miscarriage when I was a baby, and then never got pregnant again, despite NEVER using birth control, or talking about it. It never occurred to me that people wouldn't want kids. It makes a hell of a lot more sense now, but when I was a kid, I thought you got married to HAVE children.

The Catholic Church. WHEW

Haha, yeah, I know what it's like. I was raised Baptist, and my parents pretty much strayed from teaching me anything sex-related. I never even had "the talk". That's why I was rather innocent when it came to that stuff. Everything I learned about sex I got from movies and porn. lol

It never occurred to me either that people wouldn't want kids, especially since I was a kid myself. I thought the whole point of marriage was to have a family. I didn't get why some married people didn't have children. Now that I'm older and I've babysat a bunch of kids, I totally get it.

Ok...that is just...truly bizarre. It either makes almost everyone I know psychologically abnormal because of who they married, or means they married 'incorrectly' because they were already psychologically abnormal (probably the more likely option, considering my friends). That still just seems bizarre...and wouldn't it imply the choice of the 'correct' mate would be solely determined by the woman? The theory also pretty much ignores any non-heterosexual relationships.

Do you remember how long ago you read this article? It's definitely piqued my curiosity. Was it a special 'Psychology Today: Oddball Feminist Thinking" edition?

Yep, same thing--sex-ed, Catholic Church-style. They tell you what's needed and where it comes from, but kind of skip the 'how exactly it gets there' part. At least they DID teach us about menstruation, so we didn't think we were dying when it happened. I think Catholic education in general is much less overtly religious than most people believe. Even in grade school, we were taught evolution and the Big Bang theory, that the Bible was symbolic and not literal, that Christ wasn't actually born on December 25th but the Church purposely timed most of its holidays to coincidence with traditional Pagan festivals to prevent unnecessary social unrest. Now the Vatican has officially given the thumbs up on extraterrestrial life. I'm from a predominantly Catholic area of Pennsylvania, so we always stood out as the 'strick' religion to our non-Catholic neighbors. Then I moved to the South, and encountered dogmas that made my supposedly brainwashed Catholic-trained brain go "Huh? Are you serious?" I mean no offense to anyone's beliefs, and I haven't been a practicing Catholic for about 25 years; I just think public perception of Catholic teaching is off in many ways.

But, back to the sex-ed, Catholic-style--I guess for a religion that teaches abstinence outside of marriage probably wouldn't feel the need to explain the "how" to 5th graders, since it wouldn't be an issue for a long time (Catholicism does fall short in terms of real-time world practicality). Now that I think about it, we were actually taught homosexuality wasn't a sin, but since pre-marital sex WAS, acting on homosexual sexual urges was a sin because homosexual marriage wasn't recognized. That's actually pretty warped, in retrospect.

I believe Vatican II made it permissible to have sex for pleasure instead of just procreation, as long as you didn't try to hinder any procreation that might occur. And procreation was, and I believe still is, the purpose of marriage in the Church. I think the Church will not recognize a marriage if the couple decides not to have children. I think a special dispensation from the Vatican MAY be granted to couples who are infertile. I guess the procreation thing would be the Church's main argument against gay marriage, too.

Regardless, I think allowing school or churches or the religious-education hybrid to be your child's only source of sexual education is bound to end in confusion, and drive them to hang around here.

I found out the 'hiw' by finding a porn video in my Parents' closet; considering how much of a snoop I was, and that it's the ONLY porn I ever found in our house, I often wonder if they planted it so they could avoid 'the Talk.' I should ask them, now I'm 38.

But I just thought contact was all that was necessary, as well (re: my previous 'sex-by-accident' post). The movie explained a lot, but I still didn't know exactly what it all meant. It dispelled the 'Claymation' idea, at least. I was the first of my friends to be privy to this information, and I still remember the confusion and gasps of horror when I told them "it GREW, got hard, he put it in her, and some white stuff shot out."

So here I am today!

Funny thing with the clitoris: that's actually what happens during fetal development. Fetuses all start out female, but if a Y chromosome is present at a certain stage of development, then the ovaries become testes and the clitoris merges with the urethra to become a penis. It is, in a way, a mini-penis. The more you know!

SAME HERE! I was such an odd child. I never really thought that I was 'confused' at all. I can remember looking at a book detailing pregnancy (the trimesters, pictures of the fetus, etc) and thought I knew all about 'where babies came from'. However, I never realized I didn't know how they got there...ahemsexcoughco ugh. When I was in 5th grade I insisted to one of my classmates whose parents weren't married (his mom got pregnant as a teenager) that he MUST have been adopted because people can't have children without being married. Poor kid. Even, when another classmate who had divorced parents told me that I was wrong because she wasn't adopted and her parents weren't married. I just said that they once were married, so they could have a child. I remember asking my dad this. And he told me that people could have babies without being married. I was confused and let it go. The funny thing was that I never even thought about how the baby got inside the woman in the first place...there was a hole in my married then baby theory (married _____ Baby) but I never realized...I can't even remember how I first found out about sex, I think it was in a book.