By the time I entered my junior year of school, I was convinced that Binghamton University had only three types of guys. There have been players. There were the boys who were saving themselves for marriage. There were the ones who learned about sex from my mother.
A biological anthropologist, my mother taught Intro to Sex and Evolution, which centered on from mating systems in the Animal Kingdom to why women go through menopause. Pretty much every student within the life sciences took it. Those who didn’t heard stories of the professor using the sign in her office that read: My biggest fear is the fact that there is no PMS and this is my personality.
Thus, in the age of 19, I could flawlessly explain the mechanics of seahorse sex, but had only a vague notion of the way it might work between two humans. I feared engaging in a romantic situation only to have word from it get back to her, or worse, hearing her clinical scientific explanation of it in my head. And if a guy ever mentioned sex and my mother in the same sentence, be done with it.
The very first time I came home having a hickey, it prompted her to launch a clinical study about the psychology behind casual hookups.
I would be a freshman having a crush, and also the guy in question was a senior looking for nothing serious. We made out several times before he decided that I was too clingy, which in hindsight, I probably was. His rejection sent me right into a deep funk that lasted for weeks and hang my mother’s cognitive gears turning.
As the resident “sex professor,” she’d heard more and more students talking about “hooking up.” Neither she nor I have a problem with anything that happens between consenting adults, but as a scientist, she wondered why so many girls seemed to be giving that consent for casual flings when nearly all women in their generation had lived through the adage, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” The most obvious method of getting answers was to launch a study of her own.
Every student taking an introductory-level psychology class had to log a particular quantity of hours taking part in psychological studies – it was the department’s method of introducing us to research while making certain they’d a stable supply of human guinea pigs. My mom launched an easy survey that asked students questions about their sexual experiences, expectations, and what they thought was “normal.” It had been among the easier studies to sign up in, because you could take it from any computer instead of trekking across campus to possess diodes hooked up to your face.
At the time I was majoring in psychology, and felt odd understanding that my mom’s graduate students, many of whom had adopted me like a younger sister, would be sifting through a description of my sexual experience (or relative lack thereof) albeit anonymous. Plus, who wants to consider their mother writing questions like “How comfortable are you with the idea of anal sex?”
If using the survey changed my perspective on my small mother, though, it was nothing when compared with how the results changed my perspective on sex. I already knew that many of my peers were more knowledgeable than I had been. Things i didn’t know, though, was just how uncomfortable most of them really were with linking, or which i was not even close to the only girl who secretly wished that a hookup would turn into a relationship. The actual kicker was that, on top of being uncomfortable with linking, almost every participant believed that their peers were at ease with it compared to what they were.
Like some biology-driven option to Judith Butler, my mother was proving to girls the new social norm of being sexually “free” included the freedom to hold towards the “old-fashioned” values that her study proved a lot of us preferred. She never attempted to make us into prudes. What she did was far more effective – she armed us using the facts to overlook the peer pressure and make our own choices. (And when those facts sometimes included vividly accurate biological descriptions of all types of potential pregnancy mishaps and STIs, well, she was still a mom.)
It took until my junior year to find a guy who I had been in a comfortable relationship with, was willing to wait, and most importantly, didn’t know my mother. He didn’t grow to be “the one,” however i was ready by the time we took that next thing.
Lots of girls might be able to state that they waited to possess sex as their mother pressured all of them with expectations or religion, but I’m alone I know who waited to have sex because her mother empowered her with science. Despite the fact that often it made for an uncomfortable college experience, when I think back now, I think that’s pretty cool.
[Rabbit photo from Shutterstock]
