rissy stories

Hey guys, so this is a very short nonfiction essay-type thing that I wrote for a creative nonfiction course. The prompt was to state our stance on a controversial issue, so I chose sex education because as someone who went to a public middle school and a private Catholic high school… I feel pretty strongly about this topic in particular. It’s a little bit chaotic and jumpy, but I like it the way that it is. It’s pretty snarky too and my college roommate told me to post this “everywhere” after she read it, so I decided, why not?

Oh perfect, another adult woman stepping up on stage to tell her Catholic high school audience about how she gets us because she also needed to have sex with everything that walked when she was our age in order to work through her “daddy issues.” But finding God changed all of that for her, and now she’s celibate because she actually gained self-respect, so the rest of us should too. Who doesn’t love listening to a chastity talk first thing in the morning before classes?

Becoming celibate has all sorts of benefits though, right? I mean, you’re completely avoiding STDs and pregnancy by living a life of celibacy, so that means school systems don’t have to actually teach sex education anymore! Of course we don’t need to defile the minds of the innocent with that garbage anyways because learning about it will only make them want to have sex, right? Therefore, we can just completely avoid the topic altogether and hope to God that they make the right choices! Like, I’m sure that one of the girls sitting close to me, who likes to send nudes of herself to more than half of this high school’s population, is thinking: “I have totally seen the error of my ways. She’s so right.”

-Whoa, okay, just because you’re not getting your point across very well does not mean that you can randomly show us another picture of an aborted fetus to strengthen your abstinence argument! Christ, that’s not something I need to see at 8 in the morning, or ever, thanks. Plus, you’d think that there was another solution to the abortion issue. I wonder what that could be? Birth control, maybe?

OH NO, I said birth control, how dare I! We all know that birth control pills cause breast cancer! But wait, I thought we weren’t supposed to know anything about birth control? How do you know that for a fact? Isn’t that the whole point of chastity talks, to make us completely ignorant of facts that we should probably know? If only someone could teach me these things…

Meanwhile, in this moment, I know someone who got pregnant because she was too afraid to talk to her parents about birth control. I know someone with an STD because she was never taught that you’re supposed to ask your partner to get tested for possible diseases before you decide to have sex. And I also have a mind that causes me to feel guilty and awful for possessing basic human urges that “I shouldn’t have in the first place.”

And I live in a world where some men, for some reason, still feel like they have power over a woman’s body and what she can do with it. So, who needs sex education in schools when God apparently gives us humans free will over everything except when it comes to women who want to have sex… right?