Sex is stupid
“Why do grownups wrestle naked?” I wondered out loud, after watching a sex scene in a movie, but decided not to judge too harshly because adults are strange; they would abruptly stop talking whenever I crawled out from under the dining table and were almost always startled by my uninvited, unannounced presence in their closets.
“But who referees the match? They should at least keep the lights on to make there is no foul play,” I protested, as my nine-year-old sister rubbed her brow and wrinkled her forehead, clearly regretting our kinship.
“And why did that woman giggle when the man pinned her down? She lost! What’s she so excited for? Sex is stupid.”
Banning breastfeeding
“Don’t mothers know how weird it will be for the babies when they grow up to know what they did?” This question haunted me from the ages of four to six, as I was convinced that mothers ought to squirt milk into the mouths of their don’t-know-any-better newborns from an appropriate distance. Babies should be blindfolded to avoid awkward eye contact.
God is really Aladdin’s genie
As a child, I was told that I must love God, but having never been formally introduced; I couldn’t foster affection for something I didn’t quite fathom. Genie, on the other hand, was both fathomable and available. Plus, he demonstrated godly abilities. First, he was blue (a color I presumed to be godly… mostly because genie was blue). Second, he could do anything he wanted with the snap of a finger, and third, he never understood Aladdin’s wishes and never really came through for him, and since God had never literally answered my prayers or granted my wishes, I took that semblance as proof. The main reason, however, was that he was cute and funny, which is just the kind of God I would like.
A few boring episodes later, I lost my faith in genie.
Kittens are so sexy
In another attempt to decode adults for me, my almost-equally-ignorant sister said that the word sexy means cute. Being the pretentious child I was, I felt compelled to integrate the “adult word” whenever the context seemed appropriate.
The next day, I begged my mother for a sexy kitten and promised to look after it. Later, I confessed to my third grade science teacher about how sexy I found him, and swelled with pride at his shocked face, thinking it meant he was impressed with my new vocabulary.
All babies are mistakes
Five-year-old me hated not having the slightest clue as to how exactly a man’s seed could end up inside a woman’s womb. So she resorted to conjuring up scenarios in which such an unlikely event would take place. Examples:
Scenario A: If a woman falls with hers legs spread open onto a man on the beach, because that’s the only place where people aren’t fully dressed.
Scenario B: If a man and a woman swim together. To leave no room for error, the pool ought to be small and men should outnumber the women to increase the odds.
Scenario C: If a woman slips and lands on semen.
The bleeding
An ominous name for an ominous thing, I felt, as an old man on TV explained the menstrual cycle. At first, I thought it was a cruel joke inflicted upon women kind, but that was before my sister informed me that it was monthly. Then I thought that it was a periodically cruel joke.
At the age of eight, I was puzzled by women’s passiveness towards this oddity, and wondered why doctors never attempted to break the cycle. When I later learned that the only way to break it was to grow old or bear children, I quickly made peace with pads and tampons.
The mustache
“If I am the girl, and Khaled [my fourth grade enemy] the boy, how came I have a mustache and he doesn’t?” I asked derisively, pointing at him in math class.
Dad
“Is he really that fat or is he smuggling watermelons under his shirt?” I asked my mother over lunch, as I probed my father’s belly with a curious finger.
Besides women, what do men do with their penis?
“That’s it?” I sighed slamming by biology book shut and pushed it off my bed. “You would think if an organ goes through the trouble of dangling outside your body, it would do more than pass fluids.”
If I were Tarzan, I’d make myself shoes, not underwear.
“He walks on his feet not his butt cheeks. Tarzan is stupid.”