Bit Testing

I went to the Sexual Health Clinic yesterday to get my bits tested, as one does when one starts fooling around with somebody new.

The interview was a little bit bumpy.

"How many people have you had genital sex with in the past three months?" she asked me.

This question always stumps me. You can do a lot of really safe stuff with genitals that a lot of people would classify as sex. "By genital sex you mean...?"

"Intercourse. Or oral."

Now, I'm looking at the sheet. I can see that what she is not saying is "Or rectal." Maybe rectal is separate from genital?* Maybe she thought that I looked like a nice girl and assumed that nice girls don't like to put things in their dirty dirty bums? I do not know. I did not ask. I let her skip it.

She seemed surprised that I was a font of information. I knew how many male partners I'd had in the last three months and the last year, how many female partners in the last three months and last year, the day I last had intercourse, the day my last period started, the length of my last 4 cycles.

"Thank you for being so forthcoming," she said. "I always worry a little that people will think I'm prying when I get to these questions." I should have given her tthe link here.

The pap part was actually pretty great. Not that I wouldn't rather have been doing something else, you know. But. It's possible that the Goob's recent attacks on my nether regions made yesterday's stress-free stay in the stirrups seem better than it was. My nurse practioner was kind, made small talk with me LIKE I WAS A PERSON, warmed up the speculum, tested the temperature of the speculum on my inner thigh before putting it in, and TOLD ME WHAT SHE WAS GOING TO DO before she did it. Like the stuff she was messing around with was actually attached TO A PERSON. So I didn't get all tensed up waiting for lord knows what scraping was going to come next.

She got the speculum in pretty easily and opened it up. Then she started kind of digging around. Now, this is not the most comfortable feeling. But since she was treating me not only LIKE A PERSON, but like a person with an uncomfortable plastic tube shoved up inside herself, she was TALKING TO ME, and not pretending that I was some kind of practice dummy.

"Your cervix must be turned down a little. It's being a little shy," she murmured.

I felt like a boy for a moment.

"Unhh, weird. This has, uh, never happened to me before."

Swear to god.


*Okay, I can understand not wanting to ask someone if they've had rectal sex, since that phrase has just about the worst mouthfeel of any phrase I've ever uttered and does not sound like something anyone would want to do anyway. Technically, I know that if you're putting something more than an inch or so inside your ass, it's rectal, and not anal, sex. But really, isn't the word anal bad enough? Why can't such a fun activity have a better name?