The first time I used a tampon, I was over the age of 18. I had an article from Playtex open on my phone called “How to Use a Tampon”. I was approaching the time when I would need a pap smear, and, up until that day, I had never had something inside my vagina before. After several read-throughs and a phone call with my mom, I propped one foot up on the toilet seat, my knees quivering as I pressed on the end of the wand. Three attempts failed before I finally succeeded. Nonetheless, the tampon shifted with each step I took, even though the article said I shouldn’t even feel its presence. I tried to nap off the discomfort, but when I awoke to the same irritation, I panicked and yanked it out. I promised myself to try again one day in the future, but that day has yet to come.
There is nothing in this world that demands I use tampons over pads. People use a variety of menstrual products; in a study measuring preferences for menstrual products, the percentages of people who prefer pads compared to tampons isn’t too low — 46% and 51% percent, respectively. Personally, my reason for trying a tampon wasn’t related to ease or comfort. I just wanted to prepare myself — gain a little experience so that I’d be less nervous when I had other things in my vagina, like an ultrasound wand or a penis.
Before college, nothing in my educational career taught me that using the word “penis,” even in a clinical manner, was okay. The word “tampon” wasn’t used either. My sexual education, in both private and public schooling, always took a conservative approach. My private Catholic elementary school describes health education in their handbook as “an integral component of the physical education” in which, deductively, “values and morals are those of the Catholic Church.” During fifth-grade sex education, girls were seated in the lunchroom and boys in the multipurpose room. Sex was hastily explained. The teacher got the basic anatomy out of the way before shifting to the importance of marriage and childbirth.
I remember imagining how much intercourse must hurt and wondering why the elementary school even felt the need to discourage us so much — I required no convincing. It seemed to me that a woman would only put herself through something so terrible if she really wanted a baby. I was afraid and also confused: Why would the school bother explaining sex to us if it’s not something we should do until marriage?
After fifth-grade health, I concluded that being female meant being in pain. Sex, childbirth and periods promised nothing but pain. I was dissuaded from having sex, as well as from engaging in health education, entirely for fear of exposure to sex. Such fear wasn’t rooted simply in childhood naivety, but a deep sense of religious anxiety. I wanted to be “good” in the simplest, purest sense, and I felt exposure to sex was a threat to that dogma.
I carried this guilt and discomfort with me into middle school, where health education took place over one week in February during students’ English periods. Similar to the values of my elementary school, my public middle school explicitly refers to sixth-grade health education as abstinence-based, and, from my memory, seventh and eighth grade followed the same trend. In the sixth grade, I convinced my parents to write me a note exempting me from the lessons. I told them that I didn’t need to learn about “this stuff” yet, and I could use the time to do work. In reality, it wasn’t that I didn’t need to learn it, but, rather, I was too nervous to engage. For each of those five days, I spent an hour in the library, while my classmates attended health lessons. Maybe this is when they explained how sex didn’t have to hurt, how to manage menstruation pain or how sexual harassment is wrong. The rhetoric in the handbook leaves me doubtful.
In seventh grade, I attended the health classes in February but made a conscious effort to sneakily do homework and drown out the teacher’s voice. I faintly remember a video about saying no to drugs, but that’s about it. I still felt that I was protecting my innocence and my Christianity by avoiding conversations about sex. Though I began to swear that year and wear makeup, activities I also feared would taint my innocence, sexual purity was the bedrock of my conscious.
Eighth grade solidified my anxiety surrounding health education. When I made it to the English-turned-health classroom with little time to spare, I was thrown off by the sight of my classmates in new seats, split by gender down the middle of the room. Amid the busyness of school and extracurriculars, the annual health week had slipped my mind. There were no seats left on the girl’s side of the room. A boy mockingly announced that I could sit on his lap instead. I quickly seated myself as far away from him as I could.
As the health teacher introduced herself, the boy caught my attention again. He turned to me and made a circle with one hand and, with the other, began thrusting his pointer finger into the hole. I quickly turned away and stared at my lap until the lesson was over.
That English class, by the virtue of the male students enrolled in it, had already been a hotbed for suggestive teasing, but sex education seemed to have inspired a whole new shift in behavior. More sexual jokes followed in the coming months, whispered between desks as we read “Flowers for Algernon” and snippets of Anne Frank’s diary.
But while sex education fueled the harassment I faced in my English class, it wasn’t the sole instigator. In a completely unrelated circumstance, one of my friends approached my locker. He had something to tell me, something he didn’t want to say but couldn’t keep hidden anymore. In his computer class, a boy had spoken about me:
“I want to f*** her and cum all over her face.”
I barely knew the boy who had said it. We never had a class together or even spoke. The innocence I tried so desperately to protect felt ripped away. Instead of continuing to direct all of my anger and guilt toward sex education, I shifted some of that blame onto myself. Did I secretly like the attention? Was I dressing inappropriately? Did tall boots and shorter skirts dictate this treatment?
High school was the reprieve of formal sex education. I was on the school paper and, by the school’s logic, was therefore excused from the health class requirement. At the time, I thought it was a blessing. But as I aged into young adulthood, the deficits in my education shined through. As detailed, I had no idea how to insert a tampon. I went on birth control not knowing the potential side effects and ended up in the emergency room twice for panic attacks immediately after starting the pill. I thought the vagina was the entire “thing,” when really, I was referencing the vulva. I didn’t even know what a clitoris was.
As a freshman in college, my sister recommended I take WGS 220: Perspectives in Women’s Health. She also took it as a first year, and she said it wouldn’t be a difficult class to begin college with. With the separation from my hometown, I was coming to a point where I could reflect on the difficult experiences I’d had, and I wanted to heal from my strained relationship with sex and my body. This particular course was online and mainly asynchronous, and I felt like I had a space where I didn’t need to fear harassment or judgment over my ignorance. Sitting on Zoom listening to our prerecorded lectures, I experienced an education I desperately wish I had been exposed to in my prior sex education: explicit conversations on comfortability, walk-throughs of menstrual products, awareness of and action plans for sexual harassment.
My comfort is still fighting to catch up to my knowledge. I’ve grown with age and time, but my childhood fears remain adult anxieties. I can make jokes about sex with my friends and feel assured that they don’t think less of me, but like other University of Michigan students noted in The Michigan Daily Sex Survey results, I’m still working toward accepting my capacity for intimacy and bodily autonomy. When asked to “detail how religion has or has not impacted your sexuality and/or sexual experiences,” students wrote answers with which I resonated:
“…I feel stinted and as though I am behind my peers.”
“I internalized a lot of the shame around sexuality from growing up in a religious community.”
“I internalized that sexuality was an immoral feeling that I should mostly repress…”
I struggle to blame my religious experience; the fact I still call myself a Catholic makes this article almost feel like a betrayal. But I cannot lie to myself and pretend like my religion didn’t contribute to years of ignorance and self-shaming. I say this hoping it will help me heal and find comfort in my own being, beyond what any technical sex education may help me achieve.
Statement Columnist Elizabeth Wolfe can be reached at eliwolfe@umich.edu.