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Goofy Girls

September 2, 2004

By Dan Savage

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 here.

Next week in Savage Love: Back to the ol' Q&A.

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1
These stories are hilarious! Thank you for the laughs!

Posted by Elle on February 23, 2009 at 7:59 PM · Report
2
I had sexual dreams from a very young age(about 7) but large gaps in my knowledge, thus for a persiod of time I thought that when I grew up I would pee in a guys mouth.
Then, when I was about 9 or 10 my barbies started having sex (with designated "male" barbies as my mother refused to buy a Ken doll). By this point I knew a little more about sex but I was under the misconception that there was a "correct" position (sometimes it was "man" on top sometimes not) for it to be "real" sex. Sometimes the "boy" had to have sex with a girl he didn't love and so he would trick her by not having "real" sex.
Posted by MyStory on October 26, 2009 at 11:03 PM · Report
3
I didn't realize penetration was part of the deal until i was 15. before that, i though dry-humping could lead to pregnancy if your clothes were off. you know, the liquids would slide down and collide to make the appropriate baby bits. then a friend told me about having sex in great detail... and suddenly, shockingly, it all became quite clear. I was horrified (having only just gotten used to the size of a tampon!)
Posted by Extuno on August 6, 2010 at 11:30 PM · Report
4
@3 - The Calvinist Christian girl who lived next door to me when I was a kid thought her female hamster could get pregnant if it and the male hamster she was taking care of for a friend looked at each other across the room. I couldn't convince her that wasn't true, partly because the truth is so much more bizarre to anyone who knows nothing about sex, and even then I knew better than to try and open that can of worms. (I also sort-of thought there might have been an exception I didn't know about to the usual requirements for physical contact for mammalian reproduction. Like maybe rodents could have babies with *or* without mating, and that was why they were so famous for reproducing so well.)

And I was just so completely astounded that someone that age, around 8 or 9, could know absolutely NOTHING about sex. I'd try to explain, "They have to, you know... [in a scandalized whisper] *mate*." And all I got was a blank look. I think she had gotten the "When a mommy and daddy love each other very much, they pray to God, and he brings them a baby" explanation, and that's all she had to go on.

My parents gave me the kid-version of sex ed when I was 4 and my mom was pregnant with my younger sister, so I had the right information (just not all the more adult details) pretty early. They used the book "How Babies Are Made," which describes reproduction in flowers, chickens, dogs, and then humans. Looking back, I realize it put human sex in a great context by relating it to how other living things reproduced. It also explained things simply and without a lot of extra information that a 4 year old would have found weird, scary, or completely confusing. It spared me a LOT of the confusion expressed by people here, and I'm grateful to my parents and the authors of "How Babies Are Made" for that. It's still in print, and I'd recommend it for any parent of a young kid.

And BTW, my Christian next door neighbor had a baby when she was around 16.
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Posted by Just the facts ma'am on August 11, 2010 at 9:42 AM · Report

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