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I did something wrong a couple of weeks ago and I feel bad about it, so I'm going to confess everything now. I had sex with Jimmy, the cute guy from Red Lobster who I mentioned in my last column. I don't feel bad about doing it with Jimmy, though. In fact, I feel good about it. What I did wrong, and what I feel bad about, is having sex with Jimmy but leaving it out of my last column.
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Tyler Valdez
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I wasn't ashamed to have done what I did, but when I sat down to write about the events of that night, I just couldn't figure out how to talk about it without making myself sound like an idiot, like a stupid teenage girl who got taken advantage of by a predatory older guy. I mean, when you lay the facts out, it does sound bad. Jimmy is 18, I think, and I'm 16. He gave me a drug that night, and I took it. I had also been drinking, and I was more susceptible than usual to the pernicious influence of my best friend, Maude Hughes, who — to be perfectly honest — does stuff like this all the time, or at least claims she does.
It's a writer's job to not only be honest about herself, but to provide a voice for her peers who never get a chance to tell their side of the story. If you believed everything in the newspaper, and especially in all those magazines aimed at teenage girls which seem like they're written by 28-year-olds with a slang dictionary, and those gross movies like Kids and I Know What You Did Last Summer, you'd probably think that no 16-year-old in her right mind would willingly give it up. Guess what, folks, teenagers do it every day, and I mean every day. Not a minute passes in this country that there's not some teenager somewhere doing it with another one. I understand that the point of all these scary articles and movies, in which horrible things start happening to you the minute a guy gets a glimpse of your Calvin Klein jockies, is that some of us do get victimized. That's not the whole story, though. Just because you're on drugs doesn't mean you don't have a condom in your pocket.
Look, I'm 16 years old. I'm not obsessed with sex or anything. I don't think about it all the time. But I do think about it often. And I decided, "What am I waiting for? I'm responsible enough to do this, I'm enjoying myself, and I like this person!" Am I supposed to wait all my life, or at least until I get to college? Why is it OK to have sex in a college dorm room, but not OK to do it on a public golf course?
Of course, I would never, ever say what I've just written to my parents. They would pretty much never let me out of the house again. I don't want to be in a position where I have to lie to them, either. You know what, though? It seems like they must not want to know anything about my private life. They never ask me what I'm doing at night any more. I think they must subconsciously realize that if they knew the truth they'd have to do something about it, and they're not ready for that. In the Valdez house we have an unwritten "Don't ask, don't tell" policy. I don't want to be in the position where I have to say to Dad, "There was no sexual relationship with Jimmy."
My parents wouldn't want me to feel the way I do, even though they're always telling me I should do whatever makes me happy. If I told them how happy I am about Jimmy, their heads would explode just like in Scanners. In all these night-time soaps aimed at teenagers, from "Party of Five" to "Dawson's Creek," the characters are always punished for having sex, but at the same time those shows are obsessed with sex. Everybody's having sex, talking about having sex, or trying to stop people from having sex so that they can have sex instead. Nobody would watch these shows if it weren't for the sex, so how can they be teaching teenagers that sex is wrong? All they teach is that unprotected sex is wrong; if you use a rubber, you'll still get into Heaven. That's what they teach us in Life Sciences, too.
All the messages we get from the media, from our teachers, and even from our parents are so contradictory that ultimately they cancel each other out and leave nothing. Really, the only one you can listen to is yourself. My parents and teachers are terrified that someday I'm going to do exactly what I want to do. As far as they're concerned, not only will acting on my feelings hurt me, but I don't even know what I really feel. I'm here to tell you I do know what I feel, and it's not the way they want me to feel, and that's fine.
Tyler V.
Tyler Valdez is, was, and always will be hype, yo. This was the seventh edition of her Mad Crib. Catch up on what you missed in Tyler's archive.
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