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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@Cindy, the fuck is wrong with you? This guy sounds teachable, unlike a lot of the malignant fuckers we usually talk about here.
Referring to sperm as “my dudes” is probably just a jokey turn of phrase, but it still bothers me a bit to see someone assign personhood to cells, since it’s that kind of thinking which leads to clumps of fetal cells being given rights.
@Moggie
Thank you, I’m glad someone else saw the problem with what this person said
Tbh the guy in the post kind of reminded me just a bit of my husband in some parts when we first started dating. Which really just showed how bad the sex education in the untied states is. I had to explain to him what a vulva was, and without being to much tmi I was the only woman he’s had sex with while menstruating. He got super concerned when he saw the blood because he thought he hurt me because he didn’t think people bled that much during menstruation. Told me he thought it was a couple drops ever hour or something. (yes this man has two sisters)
Wtaf, Cindy?
@Cindy
WTF? You are literally calling for someone to be sterilized because they didn’t know something. Sure, they were a bit ignorant and made some errors, but I don’t think that warrants sterilization.
Maybe it’s because I’m autistic myself, but to me these statements aren’t so harmless. Sterilization of neurodivergent individuals has a nasty history, like Lainy said. And it continues to this day. Please be more sensitive.
@Nalfar
Sorry that made you have to look up a citation for it. I didn’t want to go into that horribleness so early in the morning.
Human bodies, how do they work? How is babby formed?
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/4f016964-c56c-48f9-960f-27d355381675/gif
This is what happens when sex ed gets left to the internet. Looking your way, Douglas Ford.
@Naglfar
Yeah, it’s off-puttingly juvenile, as if they’re afraid to just call it what it is. Having written my fair share of graphically explicit sex scenes, you have to grapple with synonyms that range from clinical to poetic. “Semen”, “ejaculate”, “fluids,” and if the moment calls for vernacular “cream” or “jizz.” Most of the time, I’m describing the moment of orgasm anyway, which spares me the need to describe the end-product. It’s all ropes and strings and spurts as far as the eye can see!
@WWTH
…wait, that’s a thing…?! Ughhh…
@Katamount
In my very limited experience with writing erotic material I leaned towards the latter. It sounded too medical and unsexy to talk about ejaculation.
@ katamount
It very much is a thing. It’s right up there with calling a vagina a gash
@Lainy, Katamount
I’ve heard the wound thing a lot from TERFs about trans* women who have had GCS. For example, item C in David’s TERFs vs Nazis post.
Lainy wrote:
As a teen, I was reasonably well educated on what menstruation is biologically, but not so much what it is practically. I long assumed that the amount of actual blood involved (as opposed to uterine fluid and mucus) would be very small. Why? Well, obviously natural selection wouldn’t favor a system that wastes substantial amounts of blood … yeah.
As a teen and young adult, I kept occasionally hearing the notion that women (generally) don’t like (PIV) sex during their period. Only more recently I’ve heard (from feminist women online) that period sex is a thing, and something men might have trouble dealing with, rather than without.
As for having sisters – I only ever asked my sister (when we were teens) if it’s true that you can’t go swimming while on period. Her answer was kind of indecisive. (Supposedly, girls often skipped mandatory swimming lessons at school, not that I begrudged them on that.)
@naglfar
I wish I could say I’m surprised but I’m really not
@lumipuna
Yeah knowing what menstruation is and then actually seeing the blood, especially on you is a whole different thing. That being said I have a relatively heavy flow.
@Katamount
It depends on how its deployed. Blunt descriptions are never sexy, but if it fits the sentence’s flow, I’ll use it.
@Lainy
That one is familiar and very obnoxious.
This post is so different from what I expect here. It’s just a tale of a naive, ignorant kid with good intentions. I isn’t cruel, or hateful. Just kind of a dope who needed some correction. And, it looks like he took that correction when it came. Is this an uplifting WHtM post? Can such a thing exist?
@katamount
I’ve also seen vagina compared to bleeding bullet wounds as well
Jeez, the shit I miss out on being a penis-haver.
…[/s] just in case it wasn’t clear.
In the spirit of reciprocity, perhaps we should start referring to dicks as “genital hernias”….
David, if you’re reading: I hope you’ll write a post about that horrifying AITA thread you rt’d. I think that’s far more deserving of attention than naive sex towel guy.
@Gaebolga
I’ve heard it jokingly called a “frontal skin tag.”
One of the inherent sexist bits of English (there is no shortage) is that there is no male equivalent to the word “c**t.” Although there are certainly many slang terms for penises, some more offensive than others, there aren’t any (that I’m aware of, anyway) that come anywhere near as offensive as the aforementioned term.
@Moggie
That thread was definitely more deserving of attention. The OP in this post didn’t seem to have bad intentions even if what he did was less than ideal. The AITA thread is downright horrifying.
I don’t think it’s the majority, but for me it causes pain, I assume because of all the inflammation that’s part of the whole process. TMI warning: I can’t even go solo without some amount of pain. Plus my menstrual backaches can get pretty bad.
@Lumipuna
You (and others) might enjoy a Rachel Bloom’s song “Period Sex,” done for her TV series but the network wouldn’t let it air:
https://youtu.be/Uab2BlDpPxQ
Includes the line: “If you’re grossed out, let’s pretend it’s cherry lube!“
I laughed at “I don’t want her to have a cancer or anything up in there.” I mean, cancer isn’t funny, but the situation! and the phrase UP IN THERE! Anyway.
For me, the blood flow mostly stops when I’m in the water, but when I was a teenager I wouldn’t swim during the first two days of my period, because in swimming lessons there were times you had to get out of the water and wait – and I didn’t use tampons, just pads, so I couldn’t wear those with a swimsuit.
Also, physical discomfort might be an issue? I’m lucky not to have that much PMS/period pain (for me it’s just a bloated, slightly uncomfortable feeling with occasional back pain) but other people with worse symptoms might not want to go swimming because of that.
Reminds me of that Onion article: Renowned Hoo-Ha Doctor Wins Nobel Prize For Medical Advancements Down There.
I’m a virgin, so this is hypothetical so far, but I can’t see myself ever enjoying period sex because I just don’t feel sexy when I’m on my period. Nothing against those who do enjoy it-it’s just not my thing.
As someone else on the spectrum, what they gynecologist friend did is rather mean. People like us don’t recognize jokes that easily, and we tend to get worried over stupid things like that quite often. And who here is in a position to say whether or not the guy should be a father, given that the whole process of parenthood is something that can’t just be taught in a classroom?
Dave, I really expected better from you than this. Save the mockery for people who truly deserve it, not for people whose only crime was being born with the “wrong” brain wiring.
@Anonymous
Being born with the “wrong” brain type, refusing to believe his girlfriend about her own body, and talking about it behind her back with internet randos