MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and
chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.
Ah, another schooltime pleasure, looking up dirty words in the dictionary, curtailed by heartless adults.
When I was a kid in the 70s, our school used to have book sales with new and used books, and one year they pulled The Book of Lists from the sale because it had a section about s-e-x. So we had to go to Walden Books at Cloverleaf Mall to sneak a peek. Most of it I didn't really understand.
I remember looking up "vulva" in the dictionary at school. It felt really naughty and perverted, and, of course, then, I had no idea what a vulva looked like, since it was pre-internet and Playboy was the only magazine that one could look at.
I remember looking up all kinds of "dirty" words as a young kid: tampon, vagina, vulva, fellatio.
When I was 12 and 13 I bought an erotic Anaïs Nin book and was pretty much shocked and delighted.
When I was about 11 I was reading the TV guide and came upon a word in the TV guide that I was not familiar with. I asked my mother what it meant and she said "graphic sex" or something similar. I do not remember what the word was and can't think of what it may have been.
The Sex section of the Book of Lists brought endless snickers from me and my friends in grade school. As I was forming my notion of what exactly sex was, that book probably caused more confusion than anything. But I felt like knowing that sex uses more calories than throwing a frisbee was important for some reason.
As a young kid I thought sexual intercourse was the penis was placed inside the vulva like a hot dog into a bun. I had no idea it entered an orifice. In the fifth grade my friend had to tell me that there were three different orifices: anus, vagina, and urethra. I thought there were only two. I thought the vagina was used for peeing.
I love how the parent claims their child just happened to "run across" the offending entry, as if completely by chance. Reminds me of the excuse my friend and I used when we were caught looking at a Playboy on the school playground: "We found it under the slide, Teacher. And we were just about to take it to the principal's office to turn it in—I swear!"
My mother remembers me lying on the floor around kindergarten age and asking "Mommy what does 's-o-d-o-m-y' spell?" and she remembers asking me what I was reading (The Armed Forces Times) but she does not remember what she told me it spelled. I don't recall any part of the incident.
I used to read dictionaries all the time and the only word I have a specific memory of encountering is "ululate".
I listened to a lot of religious radio when I was 9 or 10, which you'd think would be a wholesome activity for a child, but what happened instead was me asking my mother what venereal disease was, because there were so many public service announcements about it at the time.
I'd much rather my unborn children learn about this stuff from a boring dry book than from their unskilled and germy classmates firsthand. Taking things out of books doesn't mean that people will stop talking about or doing them.
I knew about almost all the weird gross sex things I have heard of now (boytaurs are new) before I kissed my first boy just shy of my 15th birthday. Knowledge doesn't turn people into promiscuous perverts.
I didn't know what a blow job was until 9th grade (1998). I had a clue that there may have been such a thing, but I wasn't certain and I didn't want to ask, lest I look completely dumb. (I had very nice friends who quickly got me up to speed on all that stuff since my folks had kept me out of most of the health classes in middle school. I spent a lot of time in the library with one of my friend's mothers helping me pick out some reading material.)
When I was in 5th or 6th grade, my mom bought my dad a dulcimer for christmas. We were on the way to the post office to pick it up, and she told me "I got your dad a dulcimer for christmas. But you can't tell ANYBODY!"
For whatever reason, because it was a secret, I assumed a 'dulcimer' was something dirty. I was soooo embarrassed and couldn't look at her for a week.
Actually, heh, I have another anecdote. After watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail I had a friend who asked, "Is oral sex where they sit around talking about sex?"
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
