by Tyra Banks
I shake my head slowly, because she doesn’t know what she’s in for.
“There is more to sex than here, there, and blah, blah, blah.” I point out the window, referencing the horsin’ around act the whole train just witnessed. “If that horse was a man and did what that male horse was doing to that female horse, he’d be up under the jail right now.”
Now she’s starting to squirm. Reality is setting in. “Ma, you’re still talking crazy. . . .”
OK, that’s it. Enough of me being vague. I decide to start in with the real stuff, and I used to be a medical photographer, so I can get real real. I start with feelings.
But not the kind you think.
Tyra: I sit there listening to her, and at first, I think she’s “syndicating.” This is what we call it in our family when Ma doesn’t exactly know what she’s talking about, but she’s committed anyway. We started calling it this when I once asked her what it meant when a television show was syndicated.
“You know,” she said. “It’s popular . . . it’s on reruns . . . a lot of people, y’know, watch it. . . .” I sat there listening, knowing she didn’t fully know what she was talking about, but she was gonna keep on going until she ran out of words.
Carolyn: “I want to talk to you about feelings, Ty. How your body feels. A boy will touch you. Put his hands on you. And I have to say, it will feel good. Your body will respond in ways that you haven’t felt before. You may even feel weak. Because as he touches you, caresses you, holds you, you feel like you are floating. He will say all kinds of things, and you will feel loved, as if he loved every ounce of your being. He will tell you he loves you. And those words will sound so good. And you will believe him. As your body continues to be caressed, and your bra is removed in a way you won’t even remember it coming off, he will rub you in places never touched by anyone but your washcloth. As he kisses your neck, he will try to pull your underwear down. You will instinctively put your hand over his and tell him to stop. To leave your underwear alone and in place. He will comply and go back to doing whatever he did before he tried to remove your panties. Three minutes later, he will try again. And again, you will tell him to stop. So he stops. But kisses your neck again, squeezing you in all the places that he is learning second by second excite your body, which then turns on your waterworks, the secretions. And then . . . right at that moment . . . he will utter eight words that every young woman has to watch out for.
“Can
I
stick
it
in
a
little
bit?”
Tyra: Now I know that my mom is officially crazy, and I will be forever scarred by those words she just said.
Can I stick it in a little bit?!
Really, Ma? What the hell?
My mom has truly just lost her mind.
And she’s disgusting. What are you talking about “secretions”? Talking about vaginas getting wet (What? Yuck!) and how boys say certain things that will make your whole body go weak? Though I’m fake-smiling on the outside, my young brain is thinking she’s gone buck-wild crazy and the inside of me is going, “No, no, no, that is not going to happen, this is not how this works, no one’s gonna talk me into anything.”
Carolyn: As the train starts up again and picks up speed, I take a deep breath and inhale the courage of the Lion in The Wiz. “Ty,” I say, “there is no such thing as ‘a little bit.’ ‘Can I stick it in a little bit?” really means ‘Can I stick it in a lotta bit?’ A whole lotta bit. Like, the whole damn thing.”
Tyra: OK, I now vomit a little in the back of my throat. The train stops at the Carlsbad station, and a woman in a Hawaiian shirt grabs her luggage to get off. As she passes us, she smiles at my mom with that “You’re doing the right thing, Mom” look. OK, hula shirt lady is crazy, too. Then right behind her, another woman, with purple espadrilles and lipstick that is bleeding so bad it’s moments away from entering her nostrils, passes, but this time there’s no knowing smile. She looks at my mom like she just spoon-fed me rat poison. I glare back at her with a Smize that can kill.
Only I can accuse my mama of insanity.
Carolyn: So how do I know those are the eight words my baby girl has got to watch out for?
From experience! From plain, cold (or hot) experience!
Tyra’s daddy was my high school boyfriend and we did a lot of heavy petting and making out, but nothing really happened. To be honest, I never quite knew what he was doing and was too scared to ask. But again, nothing was going anywhere.
Then one day, something had indeed gone somewhere and it hurt. Also, I was shocked: I thought everything just bumped up against each other. I pushed him off me and ran straight to the bathroom, where I saw blood running down my leg.
Now, I did know enough to know that this meant I was no longer a virgin. The thought made me nauseated, and I sat right down on the toilet and cried. Needless to say, I never let him poke around down there again.
Tyra’s daddy and I broke up, and he joined the air force. We slowly drifted apart when he was deployed to Vietnam, and I met a navy man (oh the irony of San Diego being a naval port!) who was much older than me. I was very intimidated by him. He told me, “I’m going to teach you how to be a real woman,” as if being a real woman meant doing some stuff you didn’t understand.
I didn’t have anyone to tell me any better, so when he said I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant because he was just going to “put it in a little bit,” I said OK.
“Put it in”? Shoot, I thought he meant “put it in motion.”
But whoa, did I find out.
Tyra’s daddy and me at my high school prom, shortly before he left for Vietnam.
At first, I thought I had the stomach flu because I kept throwing up every morning. “Gosh,” I thought. “This virus just won’t go away.”
Warning sign number one.
Then I thought my boobs were having a second growth spurt. All of a sudden, they got a lot bigger. Plus, they were so sore and tender.
Warning sign number two.
Maybe I was working out too much, getting too much exercise, because all I wanted to do was sleep all the time.
Warning sign number three.
All these dizzy spells are probably because I’m either sleeping too much or because I’m throwing up every morning.
Warning sign number four.
No period for three months.
Warning sign number . . . dang. Wham, bam, and not even a thank you, ma’am.
I’m pregnant.
I was not super slender but, at that time, I had a strong, athletic build with a six-pack belly that all my friends envied, so even by the time I was three months along and had figured out what was going on with me, I wasn’t showing at all. It was like my tight abs were pushing the growing baby backward into my organs. After the manic sleepless nights, chronic nail biting, crying like an endless waterfall, thoughts of running away, thoughts of ending it all, I was shaking like a leaf, all day, every day. Finally, one late afternoon, I knew I couldn’t wait any longer, and went into my parents’ bedroom while my father was at work. I pressed my forehead against my mother’s and whispered, “I’m gonna have a baby, Mama.” She slowly backed off from me and under her breath, barely audible, she just kept saying no.
“No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no noooooo . . .”
My heart broke, because I had broken hers.
My Dubbie and my TyTy. I couldn’t be prouder of both my children.
Tyra: My heart feels like it is ripping when I hear my mom talk about what she went through when she was seventeen. But that was the thing with her whole raw approach. She wasn’t trying to shock me, or scare me, and she especially wasn’t trying to shame me.
She was trying to save me.
She’d been through hell, and she was jus
t trying to make sure that I didn’t have to make that trip way down south, too.
Carolyn: My baby boy meant the world to me, and he has grown up to be one of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my life. He has three master’s degrees and recently retired as a major after twenty-eight years in the United States Air Force. Overachiever? Um . . . yeah.
When he was nine years old, his favorite hobby was reading the World Atlas. Instead of playing video games, he could play the drums, guitar, and piano by ear, and he made the best zucchini bread I’d ever tasted!
I’m going to stop myself here, because I could brag up and down the block about my lil Dubbie (and I’ve been known to do it), who shares my ear-piercing laugh. From the moment he was born, my family overflowed with love for Devin, and I wouldn’t trade him or the life we’ve had together for anything. But not all teen pregnancy stories have a happy ending, and I still think having a child at seventeen is way too early for the majority of people. Even if, like me, you always knew you wanted children.
Getting pregnant as a teenager was not something I wanted to happen to Tyra (I didn’t want it to happen to any girl, for that matter, but you can’t go about giving out sex talks to random teen girls on trains).
I didn’t want her to get a disease, whether it could be cured with penicillin, staved off with a drug cocktail, or worse, result in death. I didn’t want some man kissing her neck and lyin’ to her and saying he loved her, when he really just wanted to feel her lovin’!
So yes, I told my daughter those eight words, and all other kinds of words, that men say to get inside a girl’s head (and other body parts). “Now you’re a step ahead,” I told her when I finished. “You know what they’re gonna say, so, years from now, when you do decide to have sex, you know what you’re getting into. You’re not naive, and you can give informed consent. You won’t say yes to something you don’t understand or were tricked into.”
I made sure our time on that train wasn’t all serious and that we had plenty of fun and that we laughed a lot. Because really, if you can’t laugh about an awkward sex talk, what can you laugh about?
We ate ice cream. She put her feet up on the seat and I massaged her toes. We talked about the boys she thought were cute at the all-boys school. We kept talking and sharing all the way to San Diego, and the conversation didn’t stop even when we got off the train. We kept yapping as we walked around and enjoyed the scenery in the Gaslamp Quarter. I didn’t want her to look back on this conversation as a bad memory, so I was constantly giving some sweet sugar with the bitter medicine. It worked, because off the train, she had a chance to run away. But she didn’t!
There were sailors everywhere, and Tyra kept saying she was just staring at their cool, white bell-bottom outfits. But you can’t fool Mama.
Looks like my eight words came at the perfect time.
THINGS MEN WILL SAY TO GET YOU TO HAVE SEX WITH THEM
—
(This isn’t even everything! Add more to our list at PerfectIsBoring.com.
Do it now—you’ll be doing a public service.)
Come on now, baby.
You’re being a baby.
Are you afraid?
Don’t be a scaredy-cat.
Can I just touch it?
Will you just touch mine?
I promise it won’t hurt.
I’ll never hurt you.
I just wanna feel you close.
I know you want it as much as I do.
Don’t be a tease.
Just hold it against you.
If you loved me . . .
Are you a woman or just a girl?
If we do it, we’ll be together forever.
I don’t wanna do it with anyone but you.
Oh, so you’re gonna leave me with blue balls?
[Insert the name of whoever makes you feel insecure here] will do it if you won’t.
And yes . . .
Can I stick it in a little bit?
THE FIRST KISS
Tyra: My experiences of the sexual kind were nonexistent for about a year after the raw train talk. Then I touched a boy’s privates—through pants!—before I even got my first kiss. It was at the Beverly Center mall, in the theater watching Matthew Broderick in Biloxi Blues. The owner of said nether region was Christian Bravo, who went to the all-boys school that was the counterpart to my all-girls school.
All the girls had crushes on Christian Bravo. He was fine as hell and had that I-care-but-I-don’t-really-care swag that put the rest of the high school boys to shame. There was no way in hell he could ever like my skinny-minnie, awkward, and yet-to-master-the-Smize self. Mr. Bravo paid lil Miss Banks no mind. So when he started touching my leg when Matthew Broderick was at basic training, I was like, “Huh?” Soon, we were holding hands, and then—then!— he took my hand and went to put it on his knee. I moved at the same time, confusion ensued, and the next thing I knew, my hand had landed right on his crotch. I yanked it back like I’d just been burned by a curling iron. And my face was definitely on fire. As soon as the credits started to roll, he leaned over and kissed me. Like I said, I’d practiced a ton with the mirror, but it never kissed back, so this was absolutely, positively . . .
. . . slobbery.
I didn’t know what to do with my own tongue, much less another tongue in my mouth. It felt floppy, gooey, and slimy. I pulled back, and tried to play it cool. “You know, Chris,” I said, “I really don’t like kissing that way.” As if I had tons of experience and knew what all the “other way” options were.
My first kiss, Christian Bravo. Every girl was obsessed with him, so I collaged his photo with a magazine cutout.
After the last credit rolled, I was up and out of my theater chair like I’d been shocked. As we walked past the food court and all the music stores selling tapes and this new thing called CDs, I walked fast and five mall stores ahead of him, all the way to the public RTD bus. I was way too embarrassed to even look at him again, and when the bus pulled up, I sprinted onto it and looked back just long enough to say bye. And from that moment on, I could never look him in the eye, so we never really talked again, but later that year, he started going out with this girl named Zara, who I had study hall with in the library. I was jealous of that lucky bee-yotch for years—because she probably knew how to kiss!
THE FIRST MAKE-OUT
Tyra: My first boyfriend was Byron Short. My oh my, he was an adorable green-eyed sweetheart, and a good soul. He was thirteen, I was thirteen. So, you get it—a whole lot of nothin’ happened. Which is exactly what should be happening at thirteen! Then when I was fifteen, I fell in what I thought was love with this guy named Vé, who I met at a New Edition/Bobby Brown/Al B. Sure concert at the Forum, where the L.A. Lakers played. Vé was eighteen, so not that much older, but old enough that the first time he came to my house, my stepdaddy took one look at him and said, “Your old ass needs to leave right now.”
Of course, that only made me want Vé even more. I had some freedom—thanks to that RTD bus—so I’d traipse around town to meet him and hang out. Once, we even made out on the roof of a building at the La Brea Tar Pits. The tar pits kinda fart and also emit a smell, but I didn’t care. I was in Vé’s arms under the stars. Who cared if the air smelled like oil poop?
Vé and I also hung out at the mall. Every mall. A lot. He had a job at the Gap, but not in a mall. He worked at what I thought was a super classy Gap, in Westwood, near the campus of UCLA. So there I was, taking the bus to fancy Westwood to go see him fold T-shirts at work. I thought he was such a businessman because he had a j-o-b. And his folding game was on point.
After he’d get off work, we’d be on the phone all night listening to slow jams.
“Ty, who are you talking to?!”
“It’s nobody, Mama, just Andria!” Then I’d go back to listening to Vé hum �
��Tenderoni” to me. So romantic, right? Well, it was to me.
I thought I was in love, and whenever my parents were gone, Vé would sneak over and we’d make out (fully clothed) in the living room after school. One day, we were going at it hot and heavy on the couch when he put his mouth to my ear, licked it, then whispered . . . those eight words.
O
M
G
I screamed, pushed him off me, and jumped up off the couch.
“She said you would say that!” I yelled. “She’s not crazy! You said it just like she said you would!” Well, he didn’t know what “she” I was talking about, but he did think I was crazy, and that I was trying to cry foul or something.
As I was hyperventilating from this surreal moment, my mind kept repeating, “Ma was right. Ma was right. Ma was right!” In fact, she was right about everything: I was feeling weak. He’d said sweet nothings in my ear. There were even secretions!
Needless to say, Vé and I did not have sex that day. Not even a little bit.
And we never did.
THE FIRST IT IT
Tyra: When I was about to graduate from high school, I had a boyfriend named Nicholas. He looked like a young Denzel Washington, and I’d met him in Westwood. In those days, all the girls would go to Westwood to just walk around the five-block radius in circles and try to meet dudes. It worked, and I ended up with a Denzel look-alike.
From the get-go, Mama didn’t like his vibe. But I thought he was so suave. He’d come over after school when Ma was still at work, and we’d spend hours just lying on my bed in my room. Not even making out, just lying there for hours. And he’d stare into my eyes all intently and say sweet nothings to me. Not erotic or anything. Just deep. Experienced. I was intimidated and exhilarated at the same time.
I remember him touching my leg in a way that nobody had ever touched my leg before. “Hmm,” I thought, “this is different.” It was just an innocent touch but so different from Byron Short’s thirteen-year-old touch, and even from Vé’s. And whew, it felt nice. Really nice. Too nice. Tingly.
