It was great. I remember thinking, ‘I’m not just a kid anymore!’ I loved it!
John, age 26
It was strange. I was tired all the time and sleeping a lot. I wasn’t really sure what was happening to me.
Bill, age 19
People make it sound like it’s a big dramatic thing that all of a sudden happens one day. It’s not like that. It’s not like some man pops up and says, ‘Hey, kid, this is it. Now it’s going to happen to you.’
Jackson, age 33
It seemed like I woke up one day and everything had changed. I was a different person in a different body.
Sam, age 35
Even though they had very different things to say about it, all these men are talking about the same thing – puberty.* Puberty is a time in people’s lives when their bodies are changing from children’s bodies into adults’ bodies. As you can see a boy’s body changes quite a lot as he goes through puberty. For one thing, he gets taller. Of course, we grow taller all through childhood. But during puberty a boy grows tall at a faster rate than he will ever again in his life. During this growth spurt he may gain as many as 130 mm (5 in) or more in height in one year.
The general shape of his body changes too, so that his shoulders become broader and his hips seem narrower in comparison. His muscles develop and his body strength increases. His entire body begins to look more ‘manly’. Hair grows in places where it never grew before – around his penis, under his arms and on his face. His penis and his scrotum, the sac of skin just beneath his penis, get bigger. At the same time that these changes are happening on the outside of his body, other changes are taking place on the inside of his body.
For some boys these changes happen so fast that they seem to take place overnight. But they don’t really happen that quickly. Puberty happens gradually, over a period of months or years. These changes may start when a boy is as young as 10 or may not happen until he is 15 or older. Regardless of when they start for you, you’ll probably have a lot of questions about what is happening to your body.
‘We’ are my friend Dane and I. The two of us worked together to make this book. About a year before we wrote this book, my daughter, Area, and I wrote another book, a lot like this one, about how puberty happens in girls’ bodies. (It’s called What’s Happening to My Body?: A Growing up Guide for Parents and Daughters.) Even though I’m a medical writer and teach classes about puberty and know a lot of scientific facts about puberty, I thought it would be a good idea to get my daughter’s help in writing the girls’ book. She was going through puberty herself at the time. Of course, I had been through puberty too, but it was a long time ago. I was 36 when Area and I wrote the girls’ book and, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t really sure I could think back across all those years and remember the kinds of feelings and questions I had then. I reckoned Area could give me the young person’s point of view on things. So I talked her into writing the girls’ book with me, and I guess we did a pretty good job because Esther Margolis, the woman who published the girls’ book, said, ‘Why don’t you do a book about boys and puberty?’
I thought that sounded like a good idea and, once again, I wanted to get a young person’s point of view. It seemed especially important for this book because I’m a woman, and I don’t have first-hand knowledge of how puberty happens in a boy’s body. I don’t have a son, so I decided to find a boy who I knew really well and who felt comfortable enough with me and with himself to work on a book like this. That’s when I thought of Dane. Dane’s mother, Katie, and I have been good friends for years and years, and I’ve known Dane ever since he barely came up to my knees. (He’s way past my knees now. In fact, he’s 15 and 1.8 m (6 ft) tall and I have to stick my nose up in the air when I want to talk to him.)
Dane thought the idea of doing this book sounded good too, so he agreed to provide the young person’s point of view. He read over the various parts of the book and told me when I’d written something really stupid or when I’d forgotten to explain something or when what I’d said was confusing or unclear. And we both talked to lots of men and boys to find out what happened to them during puberty, how they felt about it and what kinds of questions and concerns they had at the time. You’ll hear their voices throughout this book. Some of the quotes we’ve used are from pupils in my classes. During the school year I teach a class in puberty at Sequoyah School in Pasadena, California. The boys and girls in my classes and the men and boys Dane and I talked to had a lot of questions and a lot of things to say about puberty. So, in a sense, they too helped write this book.
When I first started teaching classes about puberty, I decided that the best way to begin was to talk about how babies are made, because the changes that happen in our bodies during puberty happen because we are getting ready for a time when we may decide to make babies.
I didn’t think I’d have any big problems in teaching the thoughts about puberty with class. ‘Nothing to it,’ I told myself. I’ll just go on in there and start by talking to the children about how babies are made. Probably I’ll have to draw some pictures on the blackboard to help explain things, and maybe I don’t draw really well, but we’ll manage.’
‘No problem,’ I told myself.
I was so wrong! I’d hardly even opened my mouth before everyone, or almost everyone, in the class started behaving in such a crazy way. They were giggling and nudging one another and getting red in the face. One boy even fell off his chair. People were behaving in all sorts of strange ways because, in order to talk about how babies are made, I had to talk about sex, and sex, as you may have noticed, is a very loaded subject. Young people in fact, people of all ages – often act embarrassed, giggly or secretive when the subject of sex comes up.
Even the word itself is confusing because ‘sex’ can mean so many different things and is used in so many different ways. In its simplest meaning, sex refers to the different kinds of bodies that men and women have. There are a lot of differences between male and female bodies, but one of the most obvious is that a male has a penis and a scrotum, and a female has a vulva and a vagina. These body parts, or organs (organ is another word for body part), are called sex organs. People belong to either the male sex or the female sex, depending on which type of sex organs they have.
The word sex is also used in other ways. We may say that two people are ‘having sex’. Having sex, or having sexual intercourse, involves a man putting his penis into a woman’s vagina. Or we may say that two people are ‘being sexual with each other’, which means that they are having sexual intercourse or that they are holding, touching or caressing each other’s sexual organs. We may say that we are ‘feeling sexual’, which means that we are having feelings or thoughts about our sexual organs, about being sexual with another person or about having sexual intercourse.
Our sex organs are very private parts of our bodies. We usually keep them covered up, and we don’t talk about them in public very often. Having sex, being sexual with someone or having sexual feelings are also private matters that don’t get talked about very often. I suppose that if I’d had half a brain in my head, I would have realized that coming into a classroom and talking about sex and penises and vaginas and making babies and all the things that people don’t usually talk about was going to cause a big commotion.
After that first class, though, I caught on. I decided that if we were going to get all silly and giggly when we talked about these things in class, we might as well get really silly and giggly.
Puberty (PEW-bur-lee)-The word puberty is pronounced with the accent on the first part of the word, pew. You say this part of the word with the most emphasis. Throughout this book, there are a number of words that you may not have heard before.
*1\95\2*
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Tags: Erectile Dysfunction, Men’s Health