My first ongoing encounter with sex via the media was with HBO's Real Sex series.
As a curious 12-year-old with insomnia and a rising libido, I was glued to the late-night "informational" show, alternating my jaw-dropping gapes with paranoid sideways glances down the hall where my parents slept silently (in separate beds).
I ooh-ed and awed at the raw depiction of naked breasts and buttocks. I grimaced at the close-up shots of the vagina (or "bagina" as I had known it until only a few years prior), and I huddled underneath my blanky every time the dreaded "baloney pony" flashed on the screen.
I peered up to look only out of sheer terror, much like a horrible car accident. I couldn't take my eyes away, though I knew the image of foreskin and hardening erectile tissue would combine with every other fear I had to create the most frightening nightmare a child could have -- a giant penis dressed as a clown that hides under the bed, perhaps.
I knew very little of sex, after all, though I craved the information. While my parents were never neglectful, they never exactly banged down my door at night to explain my erotic dream or lead me through my every tingly feeling "down below."
They tried, I suppose.
I recall coming home from elementary school one day to find the book "How I Was Born" nestled perfectly between my pillow and "Lamby," my stuffed lamb (hey, no one said I was creative at this point).
I flipped through the book incessantly from then on, trying to decipher the blank expressions on the cartoon faces of the supposedly loving couple that was preparing to copulate. The lovers became closer on each page, until they lay next to each other in bed by mid-book (with bluebirds and musical notes hovering above their heads, of course), and they returned home with a happy, healthy baby by the end.
I was never quite intrigued with the baby part as I was by the perfect couple sandwiched perfectly on top of each other, softly whispering "I love you" into each other's perfect ears. This was what sex was, I thought. You lay on top of each other, say the three little words, and wah la! A baby is born. Seemed simple enough.
But then things got complicated. My parents removed my favorite reading material, which I hid under my bed and sneaked out only at night and during "time-outs" (I was a very bad child for a period of time), and they replaced it with a video.
Where Did I Come From? was new and confusing, with images I hadn't even imagined with my book. Sure, the people were still cartoons, but now they spoke and moved and made me think even more.
In one section of the film, little Timmy comes home quite upset. Apparently the children on the playground were teasing him about his less-than-adequate penis size (how they knew this I was never quite sure). Little Timmy's father, after visibly regretting adding the word "little" to his son's name, explains that every penis is different and that each is used for the exact same thing. This then began a long and vividly illustrated discussion on puberty and intercourse.
None of this quite appealed to me as much as the cartoon swim race between a giant egg (a pink Betty-Boop-like character with a bow in her ... plasma) and a large, blue wiggling sperm. It was so entertaining, in fact, that my brothers and I would make my parents rent the movie every week. Sure, we had no idea what the scene meant, but my parents must have thought they had such bright, sexually-educated children, and all without ever having to say a word to us.
The following years were filled with an endless array of teenybopper shows, PG-13 movies and Cosmo mags wrought with sexual innuendoes. I was exposed to more gratuitous sex scenes after my parents finally gave up on covering my eyes every time I changed the channel, and my imagination ran wild with every Christian Slater poster I could pull out of YM.
I was definitely on the road to becoming sexually active. (READ: If you are my mom, dad or brothers, this day has yet to come. I am a nun. I am asexual!)
But even with this blanketing sense that everyone in the world was having sex, at least on TV, I still wasn't led any closer to the edge of the bed.
In fact, as I got older, the images I saw on TV actually made me want to slap on a titanium, nuclear war-withstanding chastity belt. The screaming 13-year-old mothers that appear on Maury Povich with exposed g-strings and gruesome attitudes turned me off so much I couldn't look at another bulging pectoral muscle or perfectly quaffed Jason Priestly-esque hairdo for years.
With an even keener sense of reality, I began to detect the falsehoods that came with television sex scenes.
The guys never fumbled with bra hooks, the girls woke up the next morning free of eye-goop and tangled hair and nobody EVER had to fidget with the meat rod to place it on target. (READ: Dear family, I have no idea what this so-called "meat rod" is or where it's supposed to go.)
Overall, sex in the media was never and probably never will be anything close to the real thing, so how could it influence us? Do we not have brains (or at least think with the one on top of our bodies more than often?)
Virgin or hussy, the media is much less powerful than we give them credit for. Whoever says that sex sells in the media must be the same guy who buys oceanfront property in Phoenix, because I have never been able to buy one bit of it.
Reach Ashlea Deahl at ashlea.deahl@asu.edu