What a pity you don’t understand.

I went to Disney World when I was 9.
I didn't get it.
The lines were long, it was hot, some of the rides weren't worth the wait, my father's curse of the cable cars got us stranded over Cinderella's Castle for half an hour (I have not been on a cable car since, for fear that the curse is now mine), and we weren't able to go swimming.
I don't mean I hated it. But neither me nor my brother ever asked to go back.
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I had never read the lyrics to this song before. It always seemed such a peppy song about a hot guy in school or something. It's a little more sinister than that.

“You think you’ve got the right, but I think you’ve got it wrong?”
“‘cause when you say you will/ it always means you won’t./ You’re givin’ me the chills.”
“Anyway you want to do it/ I’ll take it like a man/ But please baby, please, don’t leave me in this jam.”

Mickey was definitely one of the guys your parents warned you about.

But here’s my question – why do parents warn their daughters about boys but never tell their sons how to treat a girl or warn them?

Growing up a girl in the 1980s and ‘90s meant a lot of mixed messages. The sexual revolution of the 1960s was long over and yet still resonates throughout pop culture – girls are supposed to want “it” and be boldly sexual. But the 1950s morality – girls are supposed to be “good” and they are the ones who must stop boys from acting on their baser animal instincts – is also still in force. And then there were the ‘80s shoulder pads and power suits – business women on the rise, eating men for breakfast (and not the way men wished they would). The ‘90s, with their grunge, supposedly made us all equal in our baggy plaid flannel. Add in some Catholic celibate morality, and you have a morass that would keep down the most willful of women.

Most high school kids have sex. I forget what the figure is, but more than half of them “do it” before they graduate. Sex in high school is a sticky wicket if ever there were one. No one knows what they’re doing, but I personally think guys have an easier time of it, at least in the physical sense. Hear me out. Guy equipment is pretty straightforward; hell, it stands up and pretty much tells you what to do with it. Girl equipment is a little less forward. So coming into the supposedly defining moment of The First Time? At least guys know what gives them pleasure and how to attain it. Beyond that, they aren’t told, in the Big Brother voice of society, to feel guilt over sex (unless they’re Catholic). Guys who have sex are lauded for it. Girls are called sluts.

I spent my later 1990s primarily In the Company of Women, and watched us bandy these mixed messages about internally. We confuse ourselves as much as anyone. The general consensus among us is that yes, we are to enjoy sex and be “liberated.” Liberated should mean that we do what pleases ourselves and, if we are with someone, our partners. The focus often seems to be on the partner, though. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t occasionally done something he or she didn’t want to because a loved one requested it. But when that happens more often than not, when the focus is on keep a partner satisfied at the expense of self, a power imbalance is created.

Whose fault is that, though? From infomal polls I’ve done (and the even less-formal ones Susan is always conducting), people don’t talk about sex – TALK about it, not joke or make stories out of it – nearly enough. As a country, we’re obsessed with sex, but we don’t know how to talk about it.

Does that mean that when it's my month, I can choose "let's talk about sex" as a title???