Our Teens and Anal Sex: The More We Know
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At our “Sex, Chocolate & Your Pelvic Floor” event in Chicago a week ago, I was telling the audience about some really exciting work we are doing in an inner city high school here in Chicago with pregnant and parenting Hispanic girls.
I told the group that we were surprised by how open the girls were and how many questions they had about their bodies and various subjects, including quite a few on anal sex. The latter, I will admit, surprised us. But there were so many questions about it that we have created an adolescent fact sheet to focus specifically on anal sex.
We’re doing a fact sheet because so many of these girls had questions and because they had so many misperceptions and were missing key data completely. Here are some misconceptions that arose during our discussion:
You can’t get pregnant
You can’t get HIV
You can’t get STI’s
You don’t need lubrication or a condom
We are concerned, not because we are judging either them or their sexual preferences, but because we want to make sure that if they are engaging in this practice, they are doing so willingly and, most importantly, armed with the knowledge they and their partners need to make good choices.
If you were in the audience and heard my comments, you might have noted my emotion about this topic. After all, we are a women’s health organization and our big concern here is with the health and welfare of these very young girls. Because of their age and “relative” inexperience, we are very interested in helping them learn about their bodies and how to make good, safe decisions about what to do and how to do it. That is all.
Yes, I am shocked by how many questions we get from them about anal sex – call me naïve, but I didn’t really expect to get questions about it at their age. It is a good learning experience for both them and us on how to be open to new information and to how to learn from the people we most want to serve.
To download WHF’s Fact Sheet on Anal Sex, click here.
