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 recommend he use condoms for now (or at least some form of birth control). He needs to learn more before he has a baby. This man is not ready to be a father.
I thought this kind of thing was common knowledge.
Does referring to sperm as “dudes” sound odd to anyone else?
Yeah, given that he says that they want babies, I was wondering what his reaction to the burp cloth was going to be.
Yes. Personifying sperm sounds a bit like discomfort at the function sperm actually has.
So, I don’t comment all that often and I should reiterate that I’m a trans* woman. Sadly, this wasn’t always the case. In my mid-twenties I was dating a wonderful woman in her early forties and though I had sexual experience beforehand I never had the anxiety associated with maybe possibly having a child as I did with this girlfriend. I was in the middle of understanding who I was as a person and the sheer possibility that I could unintentionally have a child and be locked into a male role as a father shook me to my core. Even using condoms was not enough to ease my mind about spending quality physical time with her and not to mention all of the emotional turmoil I was experiencing behind the veil of pretending to be a gender I was not.
I won’t say I was as naive as the OP. But, I can empathize with the anxiety, at least for completely different reasons.
@NautaliaC
Which could connect back to the anxiety interpretation. He may fear that his sperm are little homunculi with minds of their own, and that could be why he calls them dudes.
For me, it just sounds odd because I think of sperm as little cells, not people. Also because too many people use kind of gross euphemisms for sperm. I’ve got no problem with the sperm itself, but I find it gross when people call it weird names like “baby yogurt” or “dudes.”
I couldn’t agree more. The imagery alone makes me nauseated.
Peak male hubris: Rather than admit there might be some gaps in your knowledge, you diagnose your GF with stage IV sex towels.
Cool; I now have a name for my 1980’s Salford Polytechnic arthouse band! Someone get the ghost of John Peel on the phone.
The fact that this chap could at least ask about his worries, and get some sensible feedback, reminds me of a line from Sense8, where Kala’s auntie offers to tell her all about “things that happen on a girl’s wedding night.”
Kala responds with “Auntie, we have the internet for that” and her auntie says “I knew that thing was good for something.”
I honestly started watching Sense8 out of spite, because I saw a bunch of manbabies whining about its “sjw gay trans agenda” and I have to say thank you, manbabies. It’s such a great show 🙂
Thanks, David. Now I feel like my coochie is being renovated into a rad frat house for little dudes.
@Mish
It really is amazing. Cancelled long before it ever should have been :,(
@Bakunin, I’m still only on season 1 but I’m already sad that it was cancelled. I just absolutely love all of the characters, and that’s incredibly rare for me!
This guy is a bit of an idiot, but I don’t see any evidence of explicit misogyny on his part.
I feel for his part where he talks about having trouble reading people, I too have a lot of trouble with sarcasm or when someone is telling a joke. I feel like both are not very good forms of communications. I also don’t like it when people talk in metaphors. That being said, I appreciate his concern. His naïve and inexperience about relationships shows he’s got a lot to learn before taking the huge step of having a child. If anything he should have just trusted his partner that she knew what was right about her body and took a chill pill.
I feel like refusing to believe his gf knows her own body well enough to know if something is wrong plus talking about her bodily functions behind her back to friends (and then internet strangers) because he refused to believe her is pretty darn misogynistic.
@Naglfar:
Yeah, I’m squicked out by many of these malphemisms but I admit that one is grandfathered in for me: “baby batter”.
When I first came out, my queer women friends used “baby batter” to refer specifically to ejaculate that was stored in a sperm bank and then used by queer women to make babies with no physical contact with any cis guys. By about 5 years later, my best friends and I were using it (not often, since we didn’t talk about semen often) to refer to male ejaculate even if it didn’t come from a sperm bank.
So… “baby batter” is okay to me. It’s something that was used in queer women’s communities (including my own) for our own purposes, and became humorous over time without ever having its meaning defined by men.
BUT… I totally get how anyone who didn’t experience that would perceive “baby batter” as just as gross as “baby yogurt” and almost as gross as “dudes”.
I can’t really explain what it is, but when guys make up these names there’s a weird dynamic (or maybe it’s hard to define because there’s more than one weird dynamic and not all the nicknames use all those dynamics, so each one is its own mix) that adds up to something sexist or toxic or just gross.
I feel like the sperm should be visible to the naked eye if they’re going to be referred to with a countable noun. That’s gotta be someone’s fetish 🙂
She should have said that his load was so huge that she couldn’t hold all of it.
Major confidence booster and *mostly* true.
😛
@Crip Dyke
I think I know what you mean. It feels like there’s some element of toxic masculinity in men using a lot of those terms. The term “dudes” especially shows this, because it’s conceptualizing the sperm as little men and uses a specifically masculine term because God forbid the sperm be something other than manly.
@Meerkat
Sperm are among the smallest human cells, so they aren’t visible to the naked eye. Eggs can be (depending on how good your eyes are), though.
I’d agree that he’s not ready to have kids, but then, everyone I know who has kids tells me they weren’t really prepared to have children either. My wife and I are working on having children ourselves- we’re both physicians in our thirties, and as prepared as we’re going to be, and I’m pretty sure most of being a parent will be surprising to me.
I’m a bit squicked out that this guy took his concerns to Reddit rather than trusting his SO. Maybe his autism makes him less comfortable with in-person confrontations?
Can we just address that this guy needs better friends? Surely they know he’s autistic and has trouble reading subtext; it feels mean that they (plural?) pranked him on something that feels so serious to him and didn’t clear the issue up before saying goodnight.
@kupo:
Exactly. Even though he comes across as sweet and well-meaning, it illustrates how often men are socialized to think women’s normal body functions are gross or pathological, and how poor sex education (at least in the U.S.) is at teaching teens about what’s “normal”, or at least not a cause for concern. I don’t know what he expected to happen with his sperm, but instead of communicating with his partner for reassurance, he went to his friends for confirmation. And they told him what he wanted to hear, instead of counseling him to chill out and listen to his girlfriend.
If he’s not mature enough to talk to his partner and believe what she says about her own body, he’s not mature enough to be having sex, let alone trying for a baby. Babies are constantly doing unexpected things that make you wonder “wow, is that normal or should we go see a doctor?” Every little spitup or rash is going to send him to the ER in a panic.
I wonder if the sex towels bother him because they’re a reminder that she has more experience than him. It’s telling that he assumed she had some terrible disease that made her “semen incontinent”. We hear hot dog-in-a-hallway rants all the time from guys who think women are supposed to hold onto it. Vaginas aren’t paper towels.
@Buttercup
It’s true that in much of America sex ed is pitifully inadequate. In the district I grew up in, it was optional so almost nobody took it (I didn’t), and those who did reported that it had an abstinence only curriculum and didn’t discuss consent.
I’m just wondering what he thought was going to happen. Does he not know how basic physics works?
Creepy dude, if you’re reading this, I will literally pay for you to go get sterilized. You should never have children ever.
There is no grosser euphemism to me than when dudes call a vagina an axe wound.
It’s doubly gross because one, it implies that vaginas are inherently damaged and hideous and two it sexualizes violence against women.
No man who calls my vagina an axe wound is ever getting near it.
@ Cindy
That was super on call for. Not a fan of that whole you said something I don’t like autistic person so now you need to be sterilized considering that this is a group of people who still have to fight for the right not to have forced sterilization and abortion forces into them that statement was way more gross then that guy calling his sperm little dudes.