Everything You Ever
Wanted to Know About Sex

Nin Andrews

“Nice girls don’t touch their own genitals.”

When I was in sixth grade, I thought I knew it all. About sex, that is. After all, I lived on a farm. Every spring mating season began, and the farm burst into a frenzy. Cows tried humping other cows, stallions and geldings kicked their stall and whinnied wildly, cats kept us awake, howling all night, and dogs ran away. My mother talked about bull semen at the lunch table. My father worried about stud fees. That
year my brother began hiding Playboys in his room. I read them all, studying the slick surfaces of silky women. No one said much about the subject. “If the cows can figure it out,” my mother said, “I think you people can too.”

I had one best best friend then, called Annie B. Annie B was Catholic. She didn’t know about sex. I didn’t know about God. We had sleep-overs and stayed up late talking. One night, when she was staying over, we snuck into my brother’s room, looking for Playboys, but instead we found the book, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. Annie B and I read that book, cover to cover. We read aloud the surprising parts, all those details, tastes, smells, positions.

After that I couldn’t sleep for a week. When I saw people I knew, I imagined them nude, in strange upside-down positions, like acrobats arching this way and that. No one was safe. Teachers, gas station attendants, waitresses . . . I wanted to ask them if it was true. I wanted someone to tell me it wasn’t. To say, No, not me. Not ever.

That week Annie B phoned me after confession. The priest, she said, had asked her questions. He knew she had done bad things. He always knew. He told her God saw what she had read. He would know if she ever touched herself or had sex. God was watching her every move. Why? I asked. Why you? Because we’re all being watched. All the time. Annie B said, as if it were obvious. After that I closed my shades at night. That was the first time it occurred to me that God could be such a creep.