Your UnSlut Project

Submitted by @Nia_Maesolie

Most stories on here are about their peers teasing them or spreading rumors about them. My story is a little different.

I was always the prude girl in my friend circle. No one called me it, but it was pretty obvious that I was focused on school and not the high school relationship drama that most people care about. When I got my first boyfriend, it was junior year of high school, and we dated for almost a year and a half. Still, this wasn’t when the slut shaming started.

After about a year of dating, my boyfriend and I started talking seriously about having sex. These were the typical discussions, though they didn’t really end in us making out furiously and having sex. We took our time and went a lot slower.

One day, we decided that we wanted to go a bit further (and by “we”, I mostly mean “me” as I was the one who wasn’t ready previously). We discussed lots of things. I wanted to go on birth control or something, as condoms aren’t always effective, and we both wanted to use two methods as neither one of us were ready to have kids at 17 and 18 years old.

Birth control, however, requires parental guidance. Any person can walk into a drugstore and buy condoms, albeit a bit embarrassingly for the first time or two. Birth control requires a medical prescription, and to teenagers, this meant talking to the parents.

My parents had never given me the sex talk. I didn’t even get the puberty talk: just an “all about girls” puberty-type book. So you can imagine their shock when they realized what I wanted.

My mom acted as if there was something wrong with me. Although I hadn’t had the sex talk, it was clear that my parents didn’t want me to go that far with my boyfriend, and they didn’t believe in premarital sex (and no, we’re not religious). I clearly remember my mom tearing up and asking me, “Did we do something wrong in raising you?”

That’s the kind of thing that sticks with you forever.

My dad was a bit better, as he acknowledged that I was at least talking to them about it and trying to be safe, and not just getting knocked up or something. However, after a long lecturing about how “sex = bad” (and them making it seem like desires for sex were wrong), I went away unsuccessful. No birth control, and then my boyfriend and I didn’t have sex.

But this was, in its own way, slut-shaming. It was done by my mother by acting as if my desires for sex were unnatural. I wasn’t acting on lust or anything; I loved my boyfriend and wanted to go a step further. We both knew each other extremely well, having been dating for over a year, but this still was not okay in my parents’ eyes.

It took me months to reconcile from it. My boyfriend didn’t really act all that gracefully, as he criticized my parents’ actions out of frustration of life, when I just wanted a hug. Six months later I was able to actually tell a close friend about what happened. I’ve started realizing since that my mother was wrong.

It is okay to have sex. It is okay to have desires for sex. It is not immoral; it is natural. (On the opposing position, it is also perfectly natural to not have sex.)

However, I still have that voice inside me that says, “No, sex is bad! Suppress that side of yourself!” That is a horrible voice to have.

Fast forward about nine months. My boyfriend and I did break up, for college and because it just wasn’t working out, and my sister (now approaching about a year and a half with her boyfriend) texts me while I’m at college asking about birth control. I’m proud to say that I didn’t act like my mother. I joked around with her a bit, made sure she knew it was okay to have sex, but that she shouldn’t even bother talking to the parents as they wouldn’t be receptive at all.

I told her about what happened to me, and I hope she’ll pass it forward to the next sibling in line so they don’t have to go through that conversation.

I hope all of you know that sex is okay. It is okay to want sex, no matter your gender, race, orientation, whatnot. It is perfectly acceptable to not want sex. Your private life is your private life, and you shouldn’t let others judge you on it.

That is a lesson I still am learning.