My first exposure to sex

Back in the early 90s, when I was not much more than a boy of 10, I learned what ‘sex’ meant. A class mate told me that it involved the man putting his lan into the woman’s pepet. I was mildly fascinated by such an elegant phenomenon, where the protrusion of one fits into the recession of the other.

I did not give the matter much more notice than that cursory spark of interest. Yes, I was among those that actively made silly jokes about penises and breasts, but they were more out of fascination than sexual awareness. Notice the absence of the vagina- it was completely foreign thing to us. In similar vein, you would not expect a German farmer to make jokes about asam laksa. No, neither do I know of any good asam laksa jokes.

The ‘sex’ matter was forgotten until one day at my grandparent’s house. It was a slow weekend afternoon, and a movie of sorts was on the television. My uncle and a cousin or two were half-heartedly watching the moving images. As I passed through the living room with my cousin David, we paused to look at the television. At that moment, the scene was of a man and a woman kissing. For no explainable reason, I blurted out something to the effect of “maybe they are doing sex,” before moving on.

Once out of the living room, David stopped me and sternly told me that “my father knows what sex is.” “Oh.”



*In hindsight, it is perhaps surprising that my uncle managed to conceal his (presumed) surprise instead of abruptly sitting up and gasping for air.