Sophia from Australia
I went to a Catholic school for both primary school and high school so our whole sex education was abstinence is the key. It was very focused on the importance of virginity and that you needed to be in love to lose your virginity. They didn’t say that you should never have sex before marriage, just that it was important to realize the importance and severity of what you were doing.
Generally in Australia, the people are laid back and friendly but I think they have a lot of catching up to do. We are far away from everyone so we have more problems with things like homophobia, racism and sexism. Whenever my mom would hear about a woman being gay, she would always say, “that’s such a waste.” My poppie said no to gay marriage in Australia and his reasoning was “God didn’t want it that way.”
In high school I had this best friend and we would always do everything together. We would speak about sex but we never got any real information from our parents or our school so we were quite misinformed. When I look back at it, it kind of feels immature. We would tell each other who we wanted to date and search for films with sex scenes because it was our only access to information about sex.
Neither of us had boyfriends and the way that it worked in our school, which was our world at that time, was that you would only have sex if you had a boyfriend. We were these two corny teenagers but we saw how things worked. If you did things without having a serious “relationship,” you would be the slutty girl in school.
My best friend and I were curious about what all of these things felt like and how they worked so somehow we decided that we would just try them with each other. I don’t think we sat down and thought ok we are going to do this, it just kind of happened. We wanted to try what it felt like to give a hickey for example, so we did that. Then we wanted to know what it was like to kiss, so we did that. Then it just gradually descended into sex. I didn’t think of it as sex though. I guess I saw it more as just playing around.
We ended up getting caught one time with the hickeys. I did it to her and one of our parents noticed it. We didn’t think about the fact that it’s going to leave a mark and the mark is not going to go away for a while. They were really angry so we blamed it on a boy. We kept having sleepovers all of the time, maybe three times a week.
I never thought that playing with my friend made me gay or could turn me gay because I didn’t think what we were dong was sex. There was always this idea in my head, I don’t actually like girls; I am just playing with them because it’s something to do. I carried that for a long time, not really thinking that I was into girls. It’s only now when I look back that I realize we were having sex and that was my first time.
I wish I had realized what I was actually doing because we had so much love for each other and my experiences with her were so much better than the first time I had sex with a boy.
I wish I knew more about consent too because when I did eventually start to play with guys, I think there were a lot of situations where I did things because I didn’t think I could say no. Once it started I thought, “oh no, I can’t stop now.” I wish someone had told me, no, you don’t have to.
