Sex Education: As a Polygamist Boy

hello everyone and welcome back my name is sam and i'm melissa and today we want to continue answering some more questions so we'll dive right into it yeah we've gotten the question a lot about what kind of sex education there was if any and kind of what that looked like for the kids in the polygamists the flds group um that followed warren jeffs that sam grew up in so um kind of i guess the first question is how open to begin with were was the community about anything sexual as a community and like in the church meetings and the gatherings and that it didn't seem like it was a topic that really was brought up ever and it seemed to be yes it seemed to be very almost secretive anything about sex sexuality in any shape or form just seemed to be very uh secretive in a way yes okay and so in um for those of you who don't know where they had homeschooled groups in homeschool like did they like skip that section or did they have like anatomy lessons at all like did you learn the basics of anatomy and they just didn't go into sexuality or so i so as far as what i remember growing up there were i do remember in my home schools books anatomy books that would talk about that and and go into some of these topics but i looked through those books on my own never necessarily a topic in of discussion in the schools or anything like that it was more of a hey these books are here they wouldn't encourage us to go look through them necessarily but i did i did go and look just out of curiosity and try to you know figure out a little bit of what's all what everything was what everything was what life's all about here i guess but um anyway so but as far as in the schools and that they didn't really have a topic okay this is an anatomy class nothing like that that i personally remember and that would also be in my own home school what was outside of that i don't know but i do have some stories that would kind of help answer some of those questions from people that came from outside of my family so yeah we'll get to the stories because they're pretty funny but so inside your home how old were you when you learned what sex was oh boy and did your parents ever have any kind of talk with you never okay so no parental like sit down birds and bees talk at all granted i i left when i was 18 years old okay so and because all of the marriages were arranged and all that there wasn't supposed to be any type of sexual sexual relation before marriage and all of the marriages were arranged so i assumed they would have said something hopefully they would have said something to me but you know if if i were if i would have gotten married out there i would hope that they would say something i don't know for sure but as a young man obviously you're gonna be curious so how old were you when you actually found out about like what sex was that's a good question i don't know exactly uh early teens i would say okay and how did you find out i found out just uh by other people uh we didn't have the internet either so it was like some through books and whatnot that was just kind of there but mostly just talking amongst friends and other people and hey i heard this so i know this oh and just kind of put piece pieces together put pieces together yeah okay with that many women i i hadn't even thought about this question until just barely but like with that many women being pregnant as young kids you guys never asked like how a baby was made or did you ever ask like where baby came from like our little girl's four years old and she keeps asking me like how does a baby come out yeah and i just you know so far i'm like trying to dance around the question because i feel like she's so young but like at some point like weren't you curious with that many mothers pregnant and curious yes did i ever ask the question no gotcha and i think one of the reasons for that is because like you and i we try to be very open with our children obviously we don't go into details details or conversations at this age but we want to make sure that they're always that they know we're always there for them if they ever have any question they come to us yeah i didn't feel that way uh growing up i would have felt very awkward very awkward asking that type of question to my parents because it just it seemed like it was such a big no-no no one talks about it no one asks about it it just seemed like it was a topic off of the off of the table so i never asked anything like that no yeah our little girl's like too comfortable asking us anything and i'm like i don't even know what to say but but i was curious i did have those questions of uh okay well how but i will say though because we were raised in a way that we were told that everything that happened was because god wanted it to happen uh the marriages who you were assigned to everything was because that's what he wanted and he had his his i guess power in every little detail of someone's life so as a younger person i assumed that once god assigned two people together he would just then give them a baby so i assumed as a young person that that's how that worked that as soon as you were married then then voila because it seemed like every time someone got married they would have a baby so i just assumed that that's how it worked so they would automatically uh give them a baby i feel like that's pretty common too that's what i believed you know you hear that when mommy and the daddy love each other then right i probably believe that at a older age than you did but but yes that's kind of the way the only thing i could i guess come up with so yeah were you guys um i mean even if it wasn't sexual topics like what did you know about like female reproduction like did you know about periods or like that your sisters were having them or anything nothing about that uh or at least nothing was talked about in the house i think it was once again something that the the mothers would tell the tell my sisters and just at a young age they would just try to keep that all very hidden personal and hidden and it wasn't talked about i never came across anything that would have made me wonder about that wow yeah it was just very very well hidden yeah and i never uh as a young boy never recall my sister's going through a lot of pain so once again they were just very good at hiding it i guess yeah or if they were sick i assumed it was because of you know just a regular sickness or something like a flu or something or yeah i don't know not like pms yeah so i i didn't i didn't really have any idea what was going on now okay so at what point when you left was like the first time you experienced women because like being open about things like that like oh right away yeah when when i when i left was how shocking was that was that like super shocking that like girls would talk about having cramps or how they were feeling or messing yeah and how how open people were about it was very shocking yes just like oh oh we're talking about this you know because like i said there were i learned about things because of just talking amongst friends and and you know this guy heard this and this guy heard this and so we were just kind of talking and piecing things together but i never i never you know had any idea what was actually going on yeah oh man so okay yeah and i guess we'll end on a story because i mean that's pretty much the the gist of what he didn't know but so i got a little sidetracked there because i i hear a baby crying outside so he's with grandma so he should be good we're good we should be good so did i answer that question yes you answered that question i got sidetracked okay um but why don't you finish off by telling the story so you know some people have said like okay obviously every family is different right like sam's experience different than other people's but just to give an example of the lack of sex ed out there knowledge about it would be if you want to tell the story yeah and this kind of goes hand in hand with what i said that i assumed that once you got married you would be given a child that god would say voila you're now married and now you can have a baby so uh as a as a well i guess this was when i was still out there this story i was told about well actually one of my neighbors so they got married uh one of my neighbor he was he was a guy he got married to one of the women out there and they had been married for quite some time i believe it was over a year and they didn't have a baby and so of course they were concerned and confused why why they wouldn't have a baby and uh so they went to the nurse there in colorado city a local nurse and asked her hey uh you know i'm not able to have a baby we're not able to have a baby what's going on what's wrong with us why can't we have a baby and uh anyway she said well you know just she started asking generic questions like oh well some people have a more difficult time and just kind of started with the generic questions and then and then she asked well have you guys been trying and they're like uh i mean yeah we want a baby really bad and then she said well have you have you been having sex regularly to you know help help the process along and i said wait what what like what what does that mean so they had no idea that that you actually had to have sex in order to have a baby they just assumed that that like i said once you got married voila the baby would appear yeah so anyway so obviously his family's not the only one that didn't talk about things out there and surprisingly obviously their parents didn't tell them anything when they got married well not only that but i feel a little bit sad for them too in the sense that like you're getting assigned too right which means that there might not be any like sexual chemistry or anything like that to begin with so if you're living with someone and you're married to them for a full year and you haven't gotten to like that step yet or like even have any desire to then it kind of makes me feel bad for them it does make you feel very bad but it doesn't surprise me because i grew up out there uh you know just just because it wasn't marriage in that it wasn't oh i fell in love with someone necessarily it was okay you are to be assigned to this person and and then that's and then a lot of times they wouldn't really have much of it more than a couple of days to get to know to get to know each other and just talk you know and and then they were married so it was it definitely wasn't i don't know it was all business yeah oh that sounds like that's what it seemed like yeah but there's a little bit about um what it was like growing up there out there in uh hilldale flds community and their lack of sexual education and going to the real world and getting yeah it was definitely interesting coming out moving out from there and just being introduced to the openness of it i guess and and for me it didn't take too long to be comfortable about talking about it and all that but it was that i didn't feel like i was very educated though so it took me a while to pretend like i knew everything and then i would just you know hear people talking that until finally i was like oh okay this is how it is now so yeah it was definitely uh quite the experience yeah if you guys want to hear more stories about what it was like for sam growing up in polygamy then please like and subscribe and we'll talk to y'all we will talk to you soon

Channel: Growing Up in Polygamy

Views: 63,336

Keywords: polygamy, polygamist, flds, lds, mormon, sister wives, growing up in polygamy, escaping polygamy, warren jeffs, hildale, colorado city

Id: EcCot7UOxeI

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021