By David Futrelle
A couple of days ago, a young man turned to the Relationships subreddit for advice on what he saw as a troubling health issue with his somewhat older girlfriend. And then things got weird.
“We have been dating for almost a year,” he began
I am 22 (almost 23) and she just turned 30. The first time my lady and I “got busy”, she put a “sex towel” on the bed. I thought it was funny and cute, but she did it the second time too, and the third, etc.
No one likes a wet spot!
Every time we do it, she puts down one or more towels. It isn’t very sexy and so finally one time after I asked her why she was doing it, and she looked at me like I was nuts.
That should be a clue.
“It’s for when your stuff spills out of me, so I don’t mess up my bed.” (We don’t use condoms) She showed me the towel, and sure enough, there were a bunch of my dudes in a puddle.
His dudes.
I don’t have a lot of experience, and I ended up asking some friends of mine, confidentially, if they use a sex towel with their partners, and they said no, they don’t, and that it shouldn’t be spilling out of there like that. One of them is going to school to be a gynecologist and she said there might be something seriously wrong that needs to get looked at.
Maybe your friends are fucking with you, because the vagina isn’t some weird semen Hoover. Your dudes aren’t going there to live.
Obviously I didn’t want to tell my gf that I talked about our sex life – I feel really crummy about that, but I really didn’t have a frame of reference really? But I did tell her that I did some research and that what’s going on there isn’t normal, and she should make an appointment with her gynecologist.
Oh my sweet summer child.
And she just started laughing about it. I’ve brought it up two more times since then, and every time she dismisses it or she gets kinda irritated with me. I try to show her how serious and concerned I am but that just seems to make it worse. I’m not a very good communicator, I stutter a lot and when I get nervous or embarrassed I smile compulsively, and I think maybe she thinks I’m kidding?
But I am not kidding. I love her and I am worried about her. I don’t want her to have a cancer or anything up in there. We would like to have some babies (that’s why no condoms), but I worry that the problems she’s having in her area might cause complications that could endanger her life.
The only alarming thing here is that they’re trying to have kids and he seems way too young and naive to handle a baby.
How can I get her to take this part of her health seriously?
TL;DR: My girlfriend has something wrong medically in her gynecological region and refuses to see a doctor about it or take it seriously
The assembled crowd informed him that no, she didn’t have a problem. What goes up in there must come out of there.
Hell, there’s even an entire genre of porn devoted to this process. All he needs to do is to go to his favorite porn site and type “creampie” in the search box to see an assortment of short featurettes highlighting this biological reality. (Or he could just check out Urban Dictionary, which helpfully defines “creampied” in somewhat mangled English as “The woman which vagina is fulfilled of cum during the orgasm.”)
The most heartening thing about the post is the young man’s update.
UPDATE: So yeah, turns out I’m a dummy. 🙂 I just got off the phone with my friend that I mentioned who is going to school to become a gynecologist … she said she was kidding around, and she thought I knew she was kidding. (I’m autistic so sometimes I don’t read people very well.) Thanks to everyone who weighed in.
Given how many people double down on their original bad opinions when they’ve been proven incorrect because they can’t stand to ever admit they’re wrong, it’s good to see someone actually willing to frankly admit a mistake and learn from it. He seems like a sweet kid.
But a sweet kid is still a kid, and that may be the real problem here: He seems way too young and inexperienced to have a kid himself. Maybe they should wait a few years? His sperm isn’t going to dry up, and despite what fearmongers like Stefan Molyneux would like everyone to believe, his girlfriend isn’t going to run out of eggs in the immediate future either.
At the very least, he needs to do some research (that doesn’t just involve asking a few friends their opinions) on pregnancy, so he won’t be shocked if his girlfriend starts vomiting all the time, and on fatherhood, so he won’t be shocked when his new baby starts spitting up all the time. Being responsible for an unpredictable and often unreasonable tiny person is crazy hard and demanding and full of surprises a lot more dramatic than a girlfriend setting out a “sex towel” every time you fuck.
If he’s a little squicked out by bodily fluids now, wait until he’s trying to deal with a peeing, pooping terror of a baby at 4 AM.
It may well be that his over-the-top anxiety about the wet spot on the towel is a sort of redirected anxiety about having a kid in the first place. He needs to figure that out before one of his dudes actually gets his girlfriend pregnant.
H/T — Twitter’s @redditships for highlighting this post
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I’m generally a supporter of the blog, but this post seems patronizing to me, and the majority of the comments run that way (or worse) as well, which is quite disappointing to me as an autistic woman myself.
Oh, for fuck’s sake!
I’m autistic as well. And while what his friends did wasn’t very nice, what he did to his girlfriend was a total asshole move.
His autism does NOT excuse that.
Fucking hell, if people tell you there’s no problem with their bodily functions, believe them.
Especially if you fucking admit that you have no clue in the first place.
Jesus, you can be disabled AND an asshole at the same time.
And being an asshole deserves to be called out every time, no matter your disability status.
Honestly…
@Knitting Cat Lady
Fellow autistic person here. I am in agreement with your take. It’s really annoying to me whenever anyone tries to use autism (or similar) as an excuse for being an asshole. Somehow I and many other autistic people manage to pull off not being assholes. People who use it as an excuse make us all look bad.
All the same…
This is very definitely unintentional assholery, and a reeeeally good amount of it is the fault of his closest ‘expert’ joking with him and, judging from the story, not correcting herself for days, let alone immediately after. 22-yo folks that are AFAB don’t know what to do with their bodies most of the time; why would it be any better for a 22yo bloke, autistic or not, first girlfriend or not?
Thanks to all for the period comments. This community is a great environment for learning.
It’s hard to judge him, because we don’t know of the context he heard about this from the gynecologist and his girlfriend. If she doesn’t have much experience either, and the gynecologist told him it was something really dangerous, then I can see why he’d trust the doctor over the girlfriend.
We have all heard stories where what one partner brushes off turns out to be something dangerous. You know, like a weird mole or vague stomach pains or something else. They don’t worry about it, and it turns out to be cancer.
He also didn’t say he’s a virgin. It is possible he did have previous girlfriends, who perhaps cleaned themselves without him seeing. Maybe they didn’t worry about the sheets as much, and so he never noticed. Now his current girlfriend mentions it leaks out, and he has never seen that before, so he might think that this is something he should worry about.
Should he have trusted his girlfriend more? Probably, but I don’t think he’s been that much of an asshole. Certainly not on the level of the people I normally hear using autism as an excuse.
Welp, seems like this guy definitely hasn’t watched as much porn as I had when I was 23… Or at least not the same movies.
Good thing that he’s just naive and ignorant instead of a malicious fuckhead like we’re used to here. He really should learn more about the birds and the bees and their bodily functions before thinking of having a kid.
@Cindy – Hey, by the way, knowing the history of unneeded medical procedures meant to further diminish people considered defective or inferior, I’m pretty sure you have at least one characteristic that back in the day would have been considered grounds for either sterilization or frontal lobotomy. How would you like it if after revealing something of that nature, someone told you they were so disgusted with you they’d pay to subject you to that operation?
(FYI “being an uppity young woman” was in some places considered to be a sufficient mental aberration to get lobotomized with an icepick through the eye socket. Pretty sure you at least fit the 1940’s definition of “uppity woman”, so… you know… I could try and see if I could arrange for a back-alley quack to do it to you. /s)
@WWTH – …I could have lived my whole life without learning about that particularly disturbing euphemism for vagina, and nothing of value would have been lost. Thanks, I hate it.
@Anonymous – Chill out, unknown person of unknown gender, sexual orientation, position on the cis/trans spectrum and other characteristics (except maybe autism and/or related conditions on the spectrum). Yes, the gynecologist friend did a “dick move” (funnily enough despite being a woman and so not having the eponymous body part), but what’s happening here is a lot less acerbic and critical than usual for the site. You’ll note most posters are either a bit baffled, or gently amused, or even mildly supportive of the guy, and worried about him having kids when he’s still so blatantly naive and ignorant. And I say that as someone on the spectrum myself. Not everything is ableist, just as finding a POC or woman funny for doing/saying something we consider silly isn’t always racist/sexist.
(sorry, I’m about a day late with this post; sometimes I have the attention span of a goldfish)
EDIT: Huh, seems other people have a similar take to mine. Nice.
I’m a bit late to the conversation but …
He reminds me of the twenty-something year old lads I hang around with on a Friday afternoon. We’re all autistic, but I’m a 36 year old person they all consider a woman. They’re incredibly naive, except one who grew up with an autistic mum who explained all the things to him. They’d probably ask the same questions and we’ve had discussions on similar topics.
If one of them came to me and asked something like this I’d have told them it was fairly common to use a sex towel, that what goes up must come down, and that he’s too young to have kids just yet. But I know my lads would ask me in private and only if they hadn’t been reassured by their girlfriend’s answer. I’d like to think they’d trust their girlfriend to know their own body but I know what the anxiety is like and the need to ask multiple people to feel certain. I’m not going to criticise someone that innocent because they felt the need for reassurance.
Yes, he should have respected his girlfriend’s answer and accepted it. He could have looked it up online rather than asking his friends, and his trainee-Gyno friend is being an arse for winding him up. But that doesn’t make him a bad person, just a very insecure one.
At least he owned up to being wrong, which many people wouldn’t.
Only now I thought to make a “keep your towel ready” joke.
(Also, so long and thanks, for all the Brits)
@Paireon
Dude, this is not okay.
The comments policy forbids threats of violence. I don’t care if you’re just “joking”, or that Cindy also made a comments-policy violating comment. Don’t do this shit.
Oh wow I have to echo Catalpa above. @Paireon that is a really misogynistic and unfunny joke, and also as a person with autism you should know better – this is shit they did to a lot of neurodiverse folks. And icepick lobotomies don’t happen so much anymore, but there isn’t a day I don’t fear conservatives will bring them back, and meanwhile medical abuse of “crazy women” is still extremely common. That was a really, really gross thing to say to anyone, let alone to a woman as a man.
@Paireon
Pardon my own lateness as well.
You’ll have to pardon me, as I have little patience with that sort of thing and the tone of the post didn’t seem that lighthearted to me. I just feel like questioning whether or not he’s ready to be a parent comes unpleasantly close to the implication that he shouldn’t be a parent solely because of his autism.
And it’s equally upsetting to see that most people who hear of something like this jump to the conclusion of “he’s an asshole” without taking the rest of the story into account.
@Knitting Cat Lady
Being concerned about your partner’s health doesn’t make you an asshole, and if you were in his place knowing no more than he did wouldn’t you trust the person whose whole job is about knowing how the female reproductive system works? I’ve seen autistics who are genuinely assholes, and they are nothing like him.