18

I went to college feeling confident, worldly, and eager, in short, prepared for my life on my own. To boost my self-assurance, I knew I’d exempted freshman year thanks to high school AP courses, I’d been accepted early decision, and having traveled a lot to France and Europe as a child, I’d “been around.”

The only freshman class the college required of me was Sex Education, a one-week crash course held at the beginning of the school year, attendance mandatory. That alone should have raised my suspicions. But I was a cocky freshman: I had health class and biology in high school. I had a brother and a father. I had liberal parents who talked about subjects like rape and incest. I had learned from the animals we raised as 4-H projects. I had my shit together.

Until, in the dark amphitheater, a slide showed a man with an erection. I was shocked. My cheeks glowed red in the black room. Embarrassed not by the erection, but by my ignorance. This fundamental step in the reproductive process, I’d never heard of, seen, or read about. Never in my life — before or since — had my flat world suddenly inflated and rounded out into a different shape, an orb.

There have been other points of awakening, of revelation, of having the blinders rudely yanked off my eyes, but this one was the most devastating. I sat in the dark, literally and figuratively, wondering what else had no one bothered to mention?

I scurried to the bookstore and bought the text book. Also Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but Were Afraid to Ask) by David Reuben and read it cover to cover that day. I went back the next day, bought a second copy, wrapped it in brown paper, addressed it to my oldest sibling — two years younger — and mailed it. She was instructed to share it with our brother — four years younger — and two sisters — six and seven years younger. No one mentioned it at the time, but in the years since, I have been thanked.

I then set to the task of learning about sex. I could claim I learned entirely on my own, but that would be overlooking an obvious collaboration. Nonetheless, the trips to Planned Parenthood, the discussions with the gynecologist, the expenses of the pharmacy, the frightening side effects of the pill, the nights of nausea, the bloating, the roller-coaster mood swings, all of those were done alone, and I mean really alone.

Thank god I didn’t get pregnant! Too many of my family and friends had to navigate that nightmare all alone. Thank god for Planned Parenthood, the best teacher and mentor I had.

Do I lay blame at the feet of my parents? No. They did the best they could. In the fifties and sixties, we were a culture that screamed Space Age but acted Victorian Age. Cultural limbic lag is at least three generations long. I am now in my late sixties reading Adrienne Rich (my mother’s generation) and Natalie Angiers (younger than I am) and realizing that we — as a culture — are astoundingly ignorant. Embarrassingly ignorant. Dangerously ignorant. It wasn’t just me.