Sex and Love 100

Musings on the most basic life skill . . .

Sunday, December 18, 2011

How did you learn about sex? A 1960's Sex Education Lecture

     When I was about 11 years old, I rode my bike to my friend Linda Scalotta's house to play with our ‘Barbie dolls’.  She was a whole two years older.  She said to me,  “Come in my brother Nicky’s room and look what I found under his bed."  I knew my bother kept his GI Joe's there, then again, Nicky was 23 and my bother was 9.  She pulled a pile of magazines from under the bed and placed them on the chenille bedspread.  She opened one up.   I saw something so strange.  It was a grown man and he was wearing a mask on his private parts, it had a horrible long pink nose, and hair all around it!  To this day I can't get myself to look at those Marx brother phony noses that hood up to the eye glasses.  I was confused, actually I may have been in shock.
     Of course, Linda explained.  I was horrified and imagine my contorted face;  Linda began to tell me what I was really looking at.  "That’s not true," I yelled furiously yelled  "That’s not true." Now, I insisted.  " I have seen my bother every night in the tub and he doesn’t have one of those things!"
        She replied that “that’s what your parents do!”  I attacked her like a vicious dog.  “My parents don’t do anything like this,”  I screamed.  I remember peddling my bike furiously home, running in screaming to my mother, who then told me "it was all true."
      “Don’t you remember the book I gave you called The Gift of Life?"  She asked.  I searched my memory.  Cartoon pictures.  First page, a girl with hair under her arms, a boy shaving.  Page two; they meet.  By page five they were standing at the altar.  By page 6 they kissed at the altar.  Page seven; I recalled a magnifying, the kind you got in the science kit.  In the lens was a tadpole-like thing, it was being met by something else.  Oh yes, it was a seed.  Of course I knew it.  You grow hair under your arms and meet a boy who shaves.  You get married.  As you kiss him at the altar a tadpole swims out of his mouth and you swallow it.  It would look for the seed to eat. Hence, page nine told it all; she had a baby growing in her tummy and the baby came out.  I assumed of the belly button.  The book never said.  But I had caught enough tadpoles in the yard to know exactly where they came from.  I thought of all the neighborhood boys who had jars of swimming tadpoles on in the bedrooms.  It all made perfect sense to me.   Then it was all ruined.
     My mother continued with the rest of the story. I recall hearing only the words penis, erection and pain.  Her warning came in the form of a secret;  if you had sex a man's penis could get stuck in your vagina, just like what happened with the neighbors dogs.  My mind raced back to the event between FiFi and King; the Smith's poodle and the Herbacks German Shepard.  My mother told me they had to hose the animals down to pull them apart.
      She peered into my face, eyes bulging,  “Don’t ever do this until you are married  --no no matter what!”  The "what" part hissed out then snapped, so  I knew she was serious.  Of course I would never do this terrible thing.  I immediately knew my mother and I were on the same page.  If the hideousness of the act itself didn't repulse me, the consequences did.  My mind took me to the scene: First I conjured up the scene, yelling for help,  someone would have to pull the fire alarm on the corner.  I'd hear sirens, lots of them.  Just like when my mother caught the kitchen on fire making french fries, the entire fire department would come.  They had hoses.  If that didn't work, I  imagined myself on a stretcher,  some boy stuck inside me,  being taken to the hospital, and then being detached.  I had no problem making the promise. 
     “Never, never even when I am married, will I ever do this terrible thing!”   Then, she made me make a second promise; “whatever you do never tell anyone about this, because if their parents find out you will never be able to play with them again.”
     I violated promise number one 9 years later.  It took only 3 hours to tell my best friend Joyce the secret I had just learned about!

Have any funny tales?  Did you think you grew in a cabbage patch, the stork brought you, or were you bought at the Walmart?

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Looking for Men in Love- Are you There?

No, I am not crazy.  Men love more than women think.   I am looking for men who would write their love stories.  Yes, men!  So if you know a  man who has a love story, ending good or bad, long or short, pleasure or pain,   I’d like to hear from him!   Length is unimportant.  Love, livid, lurid, longing, life-changing, lachrymose, lascivious, lustful, lasting, laudable, lubricous, low-bred, luminous, lush, or lucid  -  I want them!  Lesson learned, hearts tormented, love that sustains It is all good.  Email the longest to dawnmhopper@gmail.com   -  I am collecting them.  Yesterday an 87-year-old man wrote me a 6 page single spaced story… WOW!  It was great.  I might publish it in a series, so wait….Thanks!

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Who do we pick: Attractiveness

      Why is attractiveness important?
     Love can be sometimes, logical.  Science has been able to give us some trends that may predict who we pick. Of course all our behavior is influenced by our lens of culture, family values, religion and social backdrop but the following truths have emerged. 
     Both men and women pick attractiveness as the number one criteria.  Numerous studies point to a social perception we might have when looking at attractive face.  It’s most likely built into us, honed by thousands of years of evolution.  Think about it this way, when you meet someone you have no clue about them.  Our ancestors relied on physical cues.  If he had a face full of sores and was emaciated you might think that this person was sick, unhealthy.  Do you want to sit next to the guy sneezing and coughing on the train?  No.  We avoid people who do not look fit or healthy. The sale of acne medications relies on this very assumption...

Friday, December 9, 2011

Jealousy

Jealousy
     While love can bring us rapture, it can make our lives crazy.  Nothing feels as worse as that demon, jealousy.  It is an emotion that results when we detect a relationship is being threatened but a third party.  It is the fear of being totally abandoned.  If the threat is very high the message is sent immediately to the amygdala, a center in our primal brain that we have little control over. Your autonomic nervous system is now on and you center on all the facts to determine just how you will respond. Intense and consuming; few people can truthfully say “ I was a little jealous” because it is not the kind of emotion that we experience lightly.  So negative is this feeling that we need to at once deal with it.  The feeling is so harsh that we will make any kind of bargain to take it away. Fear or anger is often unconscious, fast, impossible to control and direct.  
     So what do you do when you find this jealousy pit bull in your face?  You may cry, plead, threaten, be reduced to hostile reactions that in your normal state you may not had ever considered.  Aside from obsessing the jealous person becomes vigilant and will focus on the behavior of the other person.  Here is when we can get into all sorts of trouble because our brain might over process the situation. Guess what? You were wired to do that. 
     Jealousy is not only the worst possible feeling it also motivates us to act to preserve our bonds and to rescue our relationships.  Nature intended it to work exactly this way.  Jealousy is the detection system that insures the bond between lovers is preserved so we could stay together to raise our young. Because when we feel it we may do what we need to do to keep that person from leaving.  
There is a strange flip side most people don’t notice with regard to jealousy. So terrible is that feeling that sometimes we don’t want to believe that we are being jilted.  Girlfriend tells me that and tells me that loverboy told her he’d like to take some time off the relationship- get a little space.  A breather. “what do you think he means?” She asks me.  I immediately knew.  So does girlfriend # 2 who is part of the conversation.  My friend is in denial, her brain not wanting to face that devil.  Of course she eventually did when he showed up at her house to pick up some of his things with his new lover on his arm.  My rational GF went crazy.  For the next few months we entertained her visions of retaliating.    She was going to slash her tires,  put dog poop on her car handles,  but the best one was asking one of her other GF’s (who knew her) to put hair remover in her hair conditioner.  We just listened and eventually she was able to get back to her normal self. 
     As bad as the J word is it can serve us.  Strange but we deliberately use that little devil in our relationships.  We might mention an old flame we ran into…flirt with someone in the presence of our love or in the worst case leave our love and let them know we’ve found another interest.  Jealousy is often the first sign they care about you!  How many movies have that theme- they break up and then she finds someone new and then he goes crazy…Well evidently loverboy was reading that script.   GF began dating loverboy’s neighbor.  About a month later he sent her an email….”I really miss you…” It began.
This brings me to a final point and another blog I must write. Men are far more jealous than women….

Any comments? Dr. Dawn Marlena Hopper

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Sex Education

     What do you know and from whom do you know it?  Most new adults do not want to hear about sex from parents, religious figures or even experts, like me.  You prefer, at your own rate to discover the area, using the information that comes your way.  That, I might add is hardly reliable.  Do you know that about 90% of you learned about sex from someone other than your parent?  A sister, brother or friend told you the facts of life.  One of the most important areas of your life may have been learned from your Cousin Vinny.   If your parents did manage to reach you in time did you bolster that knowledge through scientific reading or inquiry.  Of course you didn’t. 

Is Virginity a Dirty Word?

12/7   Sitting with my 85 year old mother in a coffee shop one afternoon and she spies an old classmate from high school.  They chat and conjure memories. The woman wobbles, cane in hand away.  Mom strains her neck towards my face opposite her.  “She wasn’t a virgin”.  
     “What?” I say confused. 
      “You know…She was loose.”
     My mind reeled, after all those years that was all my mother could say!? 
     Let me assure you that the double standard (what men can do vs. what women can do) still exists.  I doubt it will ever disappear.  But the value placed on virginity has shifted dramatically since even I was in college.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Death of a Partner

Death of a Partner

     I am a great believer in love.  Loving is the single most reliable human behavior that exists on earth. Almost everyone fall in love.  Perhaps this is the framework that I see the world through; people happy and bonded to each other in some wonderful intimate way.  So let me tell you about how mistaken I could be.  Sally and Sherman were married and had a total of 10 children.  The length and fertility of their union prompted me to seek out the secrets of their success.  After Sherman died I wondered how Sally would get on without him, after all they were hardly apart for 55 years.  Two weeks after Sherman was buried Sally, at 75, got on a bus to Florida.  There was not a weekend for the next 7 years that she was home.  Rumor had it that she was simply occupying her time without her true love so we excused her behavior.  One day I saw her struggling with her grocery bag into her front door.  I carried it in for her.  She told me she had been on a trip to a casino with a female friend.  Our conversation went on to Sherman and I asked her how well she was doing. 
      “Honey,  I slaved in that house for 60 years.  You don’t think I cooked his eggs in bacon grease just because he liked it that way do you…?”  Sally chuckled and began putting her things away.  I stood there mortified unable to grasp the words I had heard.

Monday, December 5, 2011

Sandusky, Fine and Sexual Coercion: Pedophilia

      Recently the public has been stunned by the alllegations of a coach molesting young men.  No me.  In the Late 1990's I had a student in my class who endured sexual molestation at the hands of his coach. Two hundred people signed a petition defending the teacher and coach.  Why?  Pedophiles are very clever in hiding their behavior.  Pedophilia is insidious and more so when it involves young men. Why?  Young men rarely talk about it. 
    Male on male molestation involves tactics that are designed to confuse, camouflage and deter possible reporting.  Pedophiles can be anyone. They can be your neighbor, clergy member, teacher, coach or relative. Most victims of sexual abuse do not ‘tell’ until they are older but males have a more difficult time revealing because they often feel complicit or responsible for the act. With only a short time to engage your thinking let’s review some signs.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Controlling Relationships...The Noose of Love

12/4
            Girlfriend’s phone is ringing again. 
            “It’s him again.”  She answers.
            I listen to her reply.  “I’m doing the same thing I told you I was doing five minutes ago.”
            It was the tenth phone call in three hours. 
            Yes it’s flattering for about a week or so. Then the cord of attachment becomes a noose. Have you been there? Has lover called several times when they know you are working on a project.  Do they tell you to cut the friendship with someone you’ve known since you were 5?  Do they go through your phone log,  scan your Fb with questions ?  Are you spending much of your time proving to this person that you are not doing anything.  Do you find yourself trying to convince them all the while thinking that once you demonstrate your faithfulness it will end.  Is it a rough spot in the road of love or a huge boulder? 
             There is a dynamic in new passionate relationships.  Lovers want to be with their love object.  You dwell on them.  At the same time the fear of love lost pops up in your mind.  It’s not jealousy per se but a nagging little fear that you could be burned.  In a health union trust builds and we relax.  Real issues of control only get worse because the controller lacks the ability to trust.  What is control?

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Sexual Coercion Romanian Style

11/25
            Today one out of four people have been sexually abused and with the recent media highlighting the two coaches under investigation it’s a topic to be explored.  Did you know that few people tell, that the perpetrator is almost always someone known?  Men tell less often than women.  The average age for ‘telling’ is usually when the victim is in their 30’s- way after the statute of limitations has expired?  It’s very interesting how we think of sexual coercion or rape in the US.  Few young people know that at one time the victim, unless she was a nun, was seen at fault. Neil matha I had forgotten how far we had come in the past few decades but I was going to be reminded  on Thanksgiving Day. 
            “You are up so early.”  Cristiana shoved the coffee cup into her face.  A horde of tired hung over women faced the island with the entire dinner for thirty awaiting assembly.  Cristiana led the charge handing out knives and tasks which we took on.  I did the garlic knowing my Italian sensibility would make sure it was added to everything.  Maria , born in Mexico did the chilies.  Liza, French and Haitian made sure the butter when into everything and Cristiana our Romanian grabbed the birds and massaged the oils and herbs into their cavity.  The rhythm grew  livelier as Franklin, our only male helper poured liquor into the coffee cups. 
            I pierced the beat again when I brought up a crazy dream I had the night before. I had fallen asleep while Cristiana was spinning a tale.  Something about an old woman..rape…a dirty drunkard…