Hello, friends, I've never found a place where I could talk about this until now :]

In my mother's family, girls hit puberty earlier than average (most girls in our family got our first periods before the age of 10; my mother and her sisters, their mother and her sisters, and so on), so my mother started borrowing puberty books from the library right before my 9th birthday. My mom never sat down with me to look over the books, she left them for me to look on my own time. The books were scientific and straight-forward: women produce eggs, men produce sperm, sperm + egg = healthy baby everytime! At no point did it discuss consent, that the mother and father should both want to have sex, and make a baby, just the cold hard "penis goes in vagina, and 9 months later a healthy baby is born!"

As a 9-year-old, I internalized that to mean that at any moment, any man can decide to put his penis in my vagina and put a baby in me, with absolutely no way to stop it. I'm very fortunate to live in a very progressive area of America, but even then, as a child, I would see bumper stickers saying "it's a BABY, not a CHOICE!" which reinforced my deep fear of rape and pregnancy.

As a child, I had no way of articulating this fear to anyone, especially adults, especially my parents. This lead to an aversion to dresses and skirts, since in my child mind I deeply, sincerely, with all my heart believed if I were to wear a skirt or dress, there would be nothing to stop a man from putting a baby in me...

Thank you for your time.