“But why does it have to be about sex?”
Last January, when I started writing Hump Day, a weekly sex column, my mother begged me to answer the same question at least once a week. She claimed to understand my desire to write, but couldn’t understand why I was compelled to write about sex.
When I got to the UT campus my freshman year, I felt sorely unprepared to be a sexually responsible student. After growing up in a conservative Texas suburb and attending a religious private school for more than a decade, the information I had been taught regarding sexuality and sexual health was brief and confusing to say the least.
I knew birth control existed, but I wasn’t quite sure where I could actually get any. Conflicting reports on the effectiveness of condoms made me reluctant to trust them. Moreover, the perennial inner battle I had over whether I was “weird” for having a fascination with taboo sexual topics made all of the misinformation even less palatable.
TV shows like “Friends” and “Dawson’s Creek” could only teach me so much. By the time I turned 18, “Oprah” and “Dateline” had so thoroughly horrified me that I thought I was going to get pregnant and die if I dared act on any sexual impulse. But despite all of this confusion and fear, sex was still inherently interesting to me.
I ended up applying to be a healthy sexuality peer educator for University Health Services and soon after joined the Campus Coalition for Sexual Literacy. After receiving comprehensive sexual health information and thorough training regarding sexuality, I felt like I should share it.
Looking back now, I can remember sitting in my room, dreaming about sex, but being too afraid to have it with anyone and petrified at the shameful solo option of staying in and masturbating. The thought that maybe other people felt similarly conflicted about sex plagued me. Hump Day was my small answer.
So, Mom — it has to be about sex because no matter how much we want to deny it, sex isn’t going to go away or become magically less complicated if we simply ignore it.
The choice to have or not have sex is completely personal and my intention in writing Hump Day is not to sway people. But maybe if we can shake a bit of the shame and mythical dirtiness off our conceptions about sex, we can begin a dialogue where medical facts can exist peacefully alongside personal moral convictions.
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