bored. I would have been ashamed for anyone to find out about it. Despite all
the supposed openness of my "sex education," these surreptitious experimen-
tal forays felt unpleasantly dirty, made me nervous. I did not like the boys,
and I did not like them touching me, but I let them do it anyway.

The summer after seventh grade, I began to menstruate. I was the last in
the group of my four closest friends. My mother bought chocolate ice cream,
and-we celebrated (a pleasant contrast to one of my friend's experiences: her
mother had actually slapped her across the face). I asked my mother not to
tell my grandparents, but she did anyway. They said that they were proud of
me and that I was growing into a fine young woman. Their pride was conta-
gious; I called my father to tell him. I could tell he didn't know what to say,
but he congratulated me.

I was relieved when my friend from the Truth or Dare game moved on to
giving hand jobs and blow jobs to high school boys, leaving me behind; I was
uncoercible here and didn't understand what was in it for her. She did it
because they wanted her to and because she wasn't supposed to, and also
because she wanted them to be interested in her. It seemed to me as repellent
as the copulation of humans had seemed years earlier in How Babies Are Made,
but now it was not the physical act that disgusted me so much as the obvious
use of my friend by these older boys as a masturbatory tool. I vividly remem-
ber my mother confronting me about my friend's misadventures after over-
hearing us talking. "What do you think about what she's doing?" my mother
asked me. I didn't want to talk about it; it embarrassed me. My biggest con-
cern was that my mother would tell my friend's mother what my friend had
been doing.

The common threads that run through my sex story so far include: a dread
of bodily embarrassments, a lack of control, a number of hidden deeds. There
was some openness and a little ice cream, but these goodies were over-
shadowed by misgivings about and silence on the subject of sexuality. Perhaps
it seems that none of this story relates to abortion. But it does: the secrecy
and lack of agency in our personal sexual lives converged most dramatically in
our dread of pregnancy. And for many years in my life and the lives of my
friends, all our possible or actual pregnancies were unwanted, fearful pros-
pects. Getting pregnant meant getting caught. Getting caught seemed awful
enough on its own; getting pregnant had unique consequences.

I don't remember much talk about abortion. I am certain that we didn't
learn about it in seventh-grade sex ed--although it would have been legal by
then. My blow-job-giving friend had conscientiously arranged her sexual ac-
tivities to avoid the possibility of pregnancy, as far as I knew. In high school,
my impression was that the girls who "did it" were careful. During my senior

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