Ask Bish - Your Sex and Relationships Questions Answered

Ask Bish Bit scared…

Advice for someone who looked at Bish and found it all a bit scary (that’s cool).

Hi. I am thirteen years old- is it normal for all of this stuff to scare me? h

My friends talk about stuff kind of like this, and I feel really uncomfortable, and often don’t really understand what they are saying. It’s just so disgusting… However, I feel kind of left out. Now that I can’t really engage in their conversations, they often don’t invite me to go out or when I ask what something means, they tell me to “look it up”.

I went on this website because I saw a leaflet in the nurse’s office and thought that it might make me understand and know more. I think it’s just made me more scared… Please respond!!

Ax

Hi

What a great question. I’m sure that it’s something that many many other people will want to ask but haven’t been able to.

Firstly, remember that this website isn’t really for young people your age. It’s appropriate for young people who are starting to (or are thinking about) becoming sexually active for the first time. Lots of it is quite frank, there are lots of pictures, the language is a bit strong (sorry mum) and there are lots of references to things (for instance, porn) that are for an older audience.

So I’m sorry if it’s made you a bit more scared than you were already 🙁 If there are any specific questions that you would like me to answer (maybe the stuff that your friends told you to look up) then please write in again and I’ll answer them as nicely and as well and as non-scarily as possible.

Secondly, sex can be scary: it’s fine to be scared about it, particularly at your age. People develop physically and emotionally at different speeds and at different ages, some young people find that they start becoming more interested in sex the longer they have been going through puberty. As their bodies change and develop they may start to have more sexual thoughts. This can be exciting but also worrying and many young people going through this stage will have lots of questions and concerns. However some young people prefer to keep quiet about sex, or prefer to talk about sex with adults they can trust, or to find out about it from websites 🙂

Also lots of people (young and old) aren’t that interested in sex at all. They are either not that interested in having sex or they aren’t interested in talking about sex. Or they might be a little bit interested but don’t want to spend their whole time talking about it. (I bore some of my friends to death talking about sex – sorry everyone!)

What I’m saying here is that to feel how you do is absolutely fine. You might feel differently in the future when you get a bit older, or you might not (though hopefully you might be less scared by the whole thing).

Thirdly, it sounds like your friends are perhaps being a little bit mean to you. It doesn’t feel nice being left out of anything, particularly if it’s something that you don’t feel that you can get involved in talking about much. It sounds to me like you need to get a little bit tough with your friends. Hopefully a couple of posts from my website can help you here.

Firstly give yourself a BIG UP , from that list, pick out all the qualities that apply to you: pick out at least 6. You might not be interested in what your friends are at the moment but you have a lot to offer.

Then I think you maybe need to get assertive with your friends, for ideas go to my page on how to say no You maybe don’t need to say no to your friends but maybe you do need to say things like “look, I’m not that interested in you all talking about sex, please respect that” or “it’s fine for you to be interested in talking sex and stuff but I’m not yeah?” or “it hurts when you leave me out of things, can you not do that please?” Perhaps you could try to change the topic or try and organise an activity for you all to do (bowling, cinema, DVD night, knitting, etc).

Unless they know that they are hurting/annoying/disgusting/boring you, they won’t change. If you want back-up you can say that this (amazing) website told you what to say!

You do also have the option of making some better friends. Have a look at my relationships graph here If you leave out the stuff to do with fancying someone and sex and think of it more of a friendships graph, how would your friendships look? Would they score highly on ‘limits respected’ or ‘trust’ or ‘good times’ or ‘communication’? How good are these friendships?

Fourthly, I reckon that your friends don’t know that much more about sex than you do. Young people hear lots of rumour and nonsense about sex because sadly lots of adults don’t feel able to talk honestly about it. When your friends say “look it up” I bet that this is because they don’t really know what they are talking about either, or aren’t able to explain it. Sometimes sex stuff can be scary but also it’s complicated.

Like I said above, if you want anything explaining in simple, straightforward language, ask me here and I’ll post an answer on here as best I can. Or you could ask a parent, family member or other trusted adult.

I really hope this helps and I really hope it wasn’t too scary.

*ROARS*

Justin

Bish

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