Sex ed as taught to me
By an upbringing in the religious south:

1. my 6th grade gym teacher:

“never touch your penis,
especially if it feels good,
because Jesus is watching you.

You’re going to start growing hair down there
and in some other places too.
The important part is:
sex is like double stick tape
Or a paper heart your partner cut pieces out of,
or a pizza…
The point is,
Having sex with more than one person
makes you broken and worthless and no one will want to eat you.”

2. a particularly ill-informed classmate:
“You just put your wiener into the hole she pees out of
and then you pee in there,
and you fall asleep like that
and then the next day,
she either poops the baby out
or vomits it by dislocating her jaw, like a snake.

But the best sex is anal;
that’s when you pee in her nose!”

3. From a book my parents gave me
entitled “gods plan for your body”:

When two people love each other very much,
they get married
and that makes a baby.
just don’t touch your penis, especially if it feels good
Jesus is watching.

4. my middle school chapel assembly:

“This
is a twenty foot tall
high definition
erect penis
coated in rotting, syphilitic flesh.
This
is a twenty foot tall
high definition vagina
sprouting HPV flesh tower flowers
and oozing puss.
This
is what will happen to you if you even think about sex
Unless you protect yourself
By only making love inside a church-ordained marriage
with the christian partner god intended for you.
Also, condoms are satan’s little finger puppets,
STDs are so tiny they can travel through them
and anyone who tells you differently is in league with lucifer.”

5. my first glimpses of porn:

Sometimes a woman gets on top of a man,
And sort of bounces up and down on him
And she has fun,
but if he starts making too much noise,
She put his penis in her mouth…
I think she’s threatening to bite it off
if he doesn’t shut up and make her happy more

6, my first partner:
Despite me wearing three condoms simultaneously
And her using so much spermicidal lubricant
it felt like fucking a jar of jelly
It was still AWESOME

7. my mother,
after discovering the reciept for those condoms in my car:

You are a disappointment to me
and to Jesus,
and if you’re going to live in sin
and fornicate for any purpose but to procreate,
then you deserve all the AIDs he can give you!

8.

I reached 16 and lost my virginity
without knowing what a period was,
how girls pee,
how a condom works,
or that the clitoris even exists
Because I grew up in Tennessee,
where it’s a crime to teach anything
that could be considered “a gateway to sexual activity”,
where parents have the legal right
to keep their children out of any sex ed classes,
and where those classes
are not required to be medically or factually accurate.

So thank you republican voters and lawmakers
for ensuring abstinence-only education
is a staple of conservative states;
thank you for the high teen birthrates
and STD occurrence in those same states;
thanks for ensuring an entire generation
feels shame about their bodies;
and thanks for making sure that I think about Jesus
every time I masturbate.