Abstinence education is an absolute waste when youâre Asexual.
In middle school, I really didnât give a crap about the Sex Ed teachers/videos. No one didâWe were middle schoolers learning about sex, after all. But also, even back then, we could tell when we were being lied toâ
âTaking the pill is the exact same as aborting a week old babyâ
(I was just told that one last week.)
So when I watched the videos saying that they knew we all were starting to feel âurgesâ towards other genders (I still didnât know that Gay was even a thing), I thought that was another lie too.Â
They tried so hard to shove abstinence down our throats. It seemed pretty pointless to me. Who would ever want to have sex, outside of making a necessary sacrifice to have a baby? So imagine my surprise when, finally, I realized why they were trying so hard to convince us to stay âpureââ
People actually struggled with abstinence.
It didnât make sense to me, but it was the only answer that seemed to fit the evidence. Even considering that idea made me squirm, though, so I figured that it was just another âAdult thingâ I had yet to understand.
Everything was fine, until it was time to get my HPV vaccine. I HATED shots, would do anything to get out of them. So the idea that I had to get a needle stuck in my arm to prevent diseases from an action that I never wanted to do⌠that didnât sit well with me. And I told my parents so.
I remember fighting, and finally yelling that I never wanted to have sex anyway. What did it matter?
My mom thought that was funny.
âOh, one day youâll be messing around with somebody. I know better than you do.âÂ
So now I had my school telling me that Sex was practically deadly, and my parents telling me that I would have it anyway. Youâd think at this point I would just figure out the truth via Internet, but thatâs not quite what happened.Â
I was confused. I constantly tried to imagine myself in a sexual situation, if only to understand what the big deal  was, but I lacked two very important tools to get it right:
I didnât know what rape was at the time, but when I imagined sex, thatâs what it was. What I pictured was brutal, it was painful, and it was never my choice. Iâd never been told it could be.Â
Because my school was so busy trying to teach me to say ânoâ to sex, that they never told us that saying âyesâ could be just as important. That we actually had a choice in the matter.
Iâve heard a lot of people say that Abstinence-Only Sex Ed is all students need, because weâll find out the rest online. And, sure, I did finally learn about the word âconsentâ through Twitter, but not until I was almost fourteen. Before that, I spent over three years confused and crying and scared out of my mind. I canât help but think that, if someone had just told me once that I had a choice, I could have been spared all those years of fear along the way.