So, here I be, trying out of of my resolutions and applying it to the journal. Don’t need to have huge things to say: just need to show up and say them.
There are some things that get said or asked at Scarleteen sometimes that really freaking break my heart.
• Teen women asking how they can “make their vaginas tighter.”
• The same said group often asking how they can make their labia smaller and remove all the hair from their vulvas without any kind of redness or bumps. (Catch a theme here? IOW, who are all these things for, exactly?)
• Worry that because someone you slept with didn’t orgasm once or twice, you must be tremendously unattractive and unsexy.
• In that same vein, focus on sex as product, not process. Especially when it’s so new and the process should be the stuff of awesome! Ack!
• Getting so caught up in trying to figure out how one identifies orientation-wise that it winds up being a thing of thinking, and stressed-out thinking, at that, rather than a thing of feeling and intuiting. Or just grooving on whatever feelings one has when one has them.
• Winding up with a major birth control or sexual health error or problem because Mom decided to give you her oh-so-great advice that a) was learned 25 years ago and b) wasn’t correct then.
• Mom or Dad refusing to believe that a young person wants a GYN visit well before sex (often just to ask questions about their bodies, get BC info in advance) and refusing them a visit because they’re sure they really are having sex when they’re not. Of course, the truly craptastic part is that if they really think they ARE and think it’s a good idea to have them be sexually active without healthcare.
• This is one of the absolute worst: when we get one of these teens who has more than their fair share of partners, but isn’t safe with any of them, often out of crap self-esteem. You talk up and down about safer sex, they blow you off or tell what you know are fibs about getting tested once a month. Then they start asking about this friend or that one with sores someplace, and it’s like looking into a crystal ball of an STI wave that’s likely about to hit all of this user’s circle, and them, any minute now.
• The rape and abuse survivors who were raped and abused by partners and either a) won’t leave them because denial is easier or b) make endless excuses for them now KNOWING it wasn’t okay to call names/hit/rape because denial is easier.
• The late bloomers who are just so convinced they will never, ever have a sexual life.
• The young women who report really blarghy an unsatisfying sex lives with partners earnestly trying to figure out what will make things better, but who refuse to masturbate or touch their bodies in any way with a partner.
• Okay, so, the young women who don’t masturbate and who are deeply upset about never reaching orgasm, period.
• Young men convinced that it isn’t that intercourse alone doesn’t usually result in orgasm for women, but that their penises are just too small.
• Young men who were SO in love going through breakups. This is one of my top heartbreaks. The girls in that space are painful enough, but they at least feel free to call up friends and sob to their heart’s content. The boys so often just go it alone and tough it out while their very tender hearts are shattered into teeny, tiny pieces. It KILLS me.
• And on that note, the boys who could be great same-age partners to girls their age who are dating these total idiots in their twenties who treat them like absolute garbage, but are “so much more mature.” (Ten bucks says they’d feel very differently if they had ever been treated to listening to the way guys that age talk about teenage girls when they a) think no one is listening or b) think it’s a fun way to try and lord over older women.)
• And the fact that I cannot deliver a kick to the shins of the aforementioned too-old-for-them-idiot-men through my computer screen.
• Reproductive healthcare providers or general physicians who scare young women off of long-term methods they feel strongly would be best for them because those docs either have biases or haven’t updated their education. Do they really feel okay about this after these patients wind up accidentally pregnant because they — as they told these docs — spaced their pills out all the time?
• Young people who don’t talk to us because we have extra information others don’t, or because we’re someone additional to talk to about sexuality, relationships or sexual health, but who talk to us because they simply don’t have anyone else to talk to at all.
• Girls hating on other girls so much that they don’t have a single friendship, and have only sexual relationships with guys which they try to have fit the friendship bill, and which never do.
• People so attached to gender norms and binaries — their own or someone else’s – that they totally reject what would be really great relationships, experiences or self-acceptance.
• Young people who take the stupid shit bitter or unhappy older people tell them to heart.
