Three Letter Word

I was raised in a conservative Baptist home. But, as Mark Twain would say, I repeat myself.

My father was a Baptist minister and my mother was a homemaker and they had a special language for talking about sex. To hear it from them, babies were gifts from God dropped from heaven into the arms of happily married couples who had a special way of loving each other.

I never heard my parents say the word “sex” until I was almost finished with high school. The reality of sex was shrouded in euphemism and hyper religious lingo.

Thanks to my curious and scientifically-oriented mind, I figured out sex for myself when I was thirteen years old. I had been babysitting two children for the summer, and I noted the difference in female and male anatomy when I changed their diapers.

In the tradition of being vague and euphemistic, I’ll just say that the boy had a round peg and the girl had a round hole, and it seemed to me that if all men had pegs and all women had holes, these were most likely puzzle pieces that were meant to fit together. And then I thought I must be crazy because how could you ever, ever, ever let a boy’s peg anywhere near your hole.

That was ridiculous. Wasn’t it?

My curiosity finally overcame my embarrassment, and I decided to research my theory. One evening while my parents were out and my younger siblings were asleep, I took the “R” encyclopedia off the bookcase in the living room and retreated to my room. I sat on the floor, knees tucked to my chest, serving as a makeshift table top for the encyclopedia that lay open before me. Looking back, I realize I should have taken the “S” encyclopedia to look up “Sex,” but at the time I didn’t even know what it was called. The only word I knew that pertained to the topic was “Reproduction,” which I must have picked up in biology class at some point.

So I looked up the “Reproduction” entry in the encyclopedia and began to read. I was at once gratified and horrified to find out that my theory was true. Male and female anatomy were puzzle pieces that fit together in an act that the encyclopedia called “intercourse.”

I was right! I thought triumphantly.

And then, Oh my gosh, my parents don’t do that. Do they?

And after the gratification and horror came a deep sense of betrayal. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me this? I wondered.

By the time my mother got around to giving me the sex talk, I had gleaned all the information I needed from our encyclopedia set.

One night she sat down on my bed and said, “Do you know what sex is?”

I nodded.

“Do you have any questions?” she asked me.

I shook my head. I thought, I’ve done so much reading, I probably know more than you do, but I didn’t say that out loud.

I let her kiss my forehead, turn out the lights, and retreat down the stairs. And that was the end of the sex talk.

About a year later, I celebrated my sixteenth birthday. My parents gave me a purity ring to mark the occasion. We had a little ceremony at the dining room table where I put the ring on my left ring finger and promised my parents I was going to “save myself for marriage.” But even then, there was no mention of the word “sex.” There was purity, abstinence, waiting, saving yourself, the special relationship between a husband and a wife, all these terms and more. But there was no “sex.”

Because my parents seemed hesitant to discuss the details of sex, I decided not to bring it up. Instead of thinking about boys, I immersed myself in science class and research projects. Instead of dating, I got involved in church and choir and drama.

I almost forgot about sex. Until I got to anatomy class in college. Thankfully, by this time Al Gore had invented the Internet, which came in handy for looking up answers to questions I was too embarrassed to ask out loud.

There were some questions to which I found no answers. Like who first referred to sex as “the birds and the bees.” All I could imagine when I heard this phrase was a canary trying to mount a bumblebee. Wasn’t that the equivalent of a man trying to hump a horse? Wasn’t sex between different species considered bestiality?

And why did people always use the verb “have” when referring to sex. Everybody “has” sex, but how is it possible to have something you can’t keep? Why didn’t anyone refer to “doing sex” or “practicing sex”?

Other questions that arose had more concrete answers.

In a lecture on human sexuality, I learned about different sex acts, including something called a blow job. For a few weeks, I mulled this phrase over in my mind. A blow job? What exactly was that? How did blowing on a man’s penis get him aroused?

I couldn’t figure it out, and I didn’t know who to ask, so I turned to Google, where I found a graphic description of fellatio. Again, I felt betrayed. Not because no one had told me about this before, but because the act had been so misnamed.
There was no blowing involved as far as I could tell.

*

It turns out, my younger sister was as naïve as I was. Except she wasn’t as curious as I was, so she never turned to the encyclopedia set or the Internet to figure out the mystery of sex.

She lived in blissful ignorance until, at age 15, my mother hauled her to the ob/gyn’s office because she was having irregular periods.