Journal 98 Failed Sex Education
Hey girls!
Today I want to talk about a few different things. I want to catch you up on everything that has been going on with me. These are things I’ve wanted to write about for a long time but I could never find the words, so I’m just going to blurt everything out.
First off... semen!!! Where to begin? Why was I never educated on the effects of semen on the female body? When seventy years earlier, in the 1940s, the effects of semen were well-researched and before that, since time immemorial, understood by everyone.
Yet a few generations in, and in the Western world there became complete amnesia on the subject. And if not total amnesia, the information reduced to a trickle between generations.
My mother and I didn’t exactly have the kind of close emotional conversations I saw on American TV. But one of the most poignant things she said to me one time when I was around seventeen was, “Save all your love for one person.”
By the time she said this, I had already formed the same idea: One day I happened to privately catch a Christian radio program on my headphones during a road trip when I was thirteen. It talked about waiting for marriage to have sex.
Up until then, I had assumed from TV and movies and culture that everyone had sex while they dated. Then they broke up, and met a new person, and had sex with them. Then broke up, and had sex with the next person, and so on. I kid you not: As a child born in 1993, until the age of thirteen, listening to a radio program in the middle of nowhere, I never heard that you did not have to have sex before marriage.
How sad is that? Why didn’t any sex education class tell me about the effect of semen on a female’s body? About telegony? And why didn’t the radio program talk about the scientific effects of semen? Why didn’t my mother tell me explicitly what semen does to a female?
In my class biology textbooks, you could find information on all forms of contraceptives, learn about every sexually transmitted disease, but I distinctly remember only one small paragraph talking about things in semen other than sperm. It was a complete misdirection and misrepresentation of the many things inside semen and their permanent effects on the female body.
Nothing hinted at the vast effects of semen. No teacher ever mentioned it. No media I watched ever mentioned it. No online article ever talked about it. Only once I saw telegony mentioned in an online forum, but it was derided as a myth.
Yet nowadays, Time magazine is writing about it! Apparently animal breeders have known all along! But why the cultural dead silence?
Yet hearing it on the radio program, and picking up a few hints here and there, stirred a natural intuition in me. Despite not being from a super religious household, and despite the cultural brainwashing, I felt like the traditional route was best.
I have much more to share, but it seems this is all I have for today.
Thank you so much for reading.
Asya