I was fourteen years old when the first time I saw a picture of man and woman having sex. My first reaction was "eewwwuuggghh..............its gross..." Three of us huddled in a musty store room at the end of dorm A at my boarding school. It was a tea time. Everybody was at a dining hall. It was a perfect time because most of the students would stopped at a surau to perform late afternoon pray after tea time. Our hearts were in our throats, expecting a matron would walked on us anytime.
One of the junior girls in my dorm Lina from Sungkai, stole her father's Playboy magazine when she was home during the second semester. She kept the magazine under her mattress for two months before she collected enough courage to tell Lamlam, her next bed neighbor that she had a "nasty, sinful" magazine.
"Why did you say it was nasty and sinful. Have you seen it?" My hands froze on my towel turbaned head. I had just had a shower.
"Sshhhh...." Lamlam dumped her wide behind on my bed. The spring creaked making a painful sound.
"We don't want anybody else to know about it." Lamlam was a telephone line in our dorm. She seemed to know every thing occurred within our school and hostels compounds.
"How many we are you talking about? Just you and me?" I let the corner of the towel slid down onto my face as I continued to dry my hair.
Lamlam lifted the towel from my face and inched closer, "Its Lina's father's magazine. She........"
"What? But he is an ustaz!" I was horrified.
"Sssshhhhh...." Lamalam turned around toward the door.
"Stop your sshhhh.., nobody is here except us."
"Lina's father is an ustaz," I said it louder this time as she didn't get it the first time.
"So? Ustaz is a man too. You think ustazs are angels?" Lamlam's wisdom was unbelievable amazing. I was sure it wasn't from the text books. Lamlam claimed she had an unrecognizable disease that made her fall asleep when she had a text book in her hands. "So, do you want to see it or not?" Lamlam's eyes glazed like a donut dipped into a caramelized sugar.
"Okay, lets go." I removed the towel from my head and threw it on my bed.
"It's not now. We have to wait until everybody is out of here."
"Everybody is out except us."
"Sis Zai has it."
"Are you serious? She always say we laugh too loud."
"And when you laugh too loud you're associating with iblis." both of us said it at the same time, and burst out laughing, exaggerated it.
Zainab was one of the senior girls in our dorm. She promoted herself as a dorm moral police. Anything we did that was not met her personal approval was associated with iblis.
Singing too loud in a shower was iblis's pass time.
Putting up your favorite male movie star poster in your locker was iblis's partner.
Iblis,iblis,iblis........
"How does she know so much about iblis?" One of us wondered one day.
"Because she is one of them." Somebody chimed in.
"This is getting interesting. An ustaz read the playboy magazine. And now a moral police is reading it too."
"They don't read it. They look at the pictures. They have lots and lots of colorful naked people pictures" Lamlam looked at me as I was a dork or something. Maybe I was. "You never looked at those dirty magazines before?"
"No." I shook my head.
"You'll see some soon." Lamlam broke into huge grin.
"So this is how they do it? I looked at the glossy pictures of man and woman in different positions. Both of them naked. The woman had a huge breasts, as huge as watermelons. And the man's thing as we used to say it, was an ugly looking kind of worm. We flipped to different pages. More pictures of men and women in different acts. A woman all four on the floor with man kneeled behind her, a man with two women, a woman with two men.
Lamlam hurriedly flipped to a few last pages, and there was a woman lying on her back, knees bent, legs spread opened. A man was on his stomach had his face in a woman's crotch. "What is he doing? Smelling her?"
We turned to the next page, more of naked pictures. Somehow I had lost interest to see more. I didn't know what I was expected. Looking at those pictures, the women and men with vacant look and expressionless had disappointed me a great deal. They had an icy cold look as their feeling cords had been detached from their hearts.
I remember watching all the movies when it came to the romantic part, a hero held a heroin in his arms, they looked into each other's eyes lovingly, and slowy the hero kissed the heroin tenderly. Then the heroin would put her arms around the hero's neck, and they kissed some more. It was an adolescence angst and fantacy. We confused between love, romance and sex, when we had no idea what sex was all about.
After I left the store room, it hit me for the first time about my parents. Was that how my parents did it? Or everybody did it the same way for that matter? A woman was lying on her back bottom and a man was on her? Or the other way around?
Why is it a taboo subject?
Why is it a hush,hush when we are created from the act?
Whys is it considered dirty?
Why doesn't my mother ever told me about it?
Why don't they teach us in the class room?
Those were the questions swimming in my head for a long time. I knew about eggs, ovary and sperms and what happened when an ovulation occurred, but I never knew until that day, that was how it was done.
Until to this day, why do some us think sex education is not appropriate to be taught in schools? Why do some parents still embarassed to teach a fact of life to their children? They know or they pretend not to know their children will find out anyway from the wrong sources. The parents must know it. They were adolescents once. They were curious once.
We tend to do an opposite of our nature when we think we do not have a choice. We cannot eliminate our curiosity. Curiosity comes with us. But when we have the knowledge, when we are taught to think and use our minds instead of following the orders and rules, we will make a choice that is work for us.
Recent Comments