Scarleteen
Sex Ed for the Real World
By Heather Corinna

She tells the wrong kinds of jokes, she never shuts up, she laughs too loud and too much. She has questionable friends and she sleeps around shamelessly. She eats too much and with too much delight; she can hold her own liquor; she stays out after curfew; she even gets in bar fights. She could always use a shower, she doesn’t shave her armpits, eschews deodorant and she’ll only wear jackboots. She’s an unapologetic slob, and when she leaves a mess behind, soiling the most pristine of places, she’s always grinning while she mouths “No, Up yours.”

She is our shameless, smelly, lurid sister.

She’s not just the flow: she’s the undertow. She’s timely in her own way, but she hates a 9-to-5 schedule, and she’s going to take a week off when she bloody well wants to, whether we like it or not. She’s not a good girl, and she doesn’t deal at all well with authority.

People never get tired of talking shit about her, and we blindly believe and spread every nasty rumor we hear, no matter the source, no matter how far-fetched or cruel. We walk ten paces in front of her on the way to school, hoping that no one will know we’re in any way related to her, let alone so closely. All the same, she trails us around doggedly and kills our cool, and no matter what we do, her bad reputation sullies us just by association. Try as we might, we just can’t seem to untangle our own reputations from hers. At best — if we gleefully and guiltlessly malign her with everyone else — we can at least get some sympathy for having the poor misfortune of any association with her: our menstrual period.