Beyond the Birds and the Bees

I never received “the talk” from anyone. In fact, my parents were so cagey about anything regarding my body, that when I was twelve and presented my mother with a story that a family friend had given me about tampons – that if you don’t stick one up inside you once a month, you become pregnant – she said tampons were nothing I needed to worry about. I got my period the month I turned thirteen, and waited three days of spotty bleeding before presenting my underwear to my mother while she was watching TV and asking if this was “the period thing” that I’d heard mentioned at school. “Yep, that’s your period,” she said, and turned back to the television. When I was around fourteen I found a copy of “The Joy of Sex” in my parents’ closet and asked if I could read it – my mother took it, turned to my father, and said, “We need to find someplace better to put this.” When I was sixteen, I became the brunt of merciless teasing for months, when I asked my friends after a health class what exactly an “orgasm” was, and whether people normally masturbated using their clitoris.

I also was told that I wasn’t permitted to date until sixteen. After that point, dating became a rather moot point, since I had begun boarding at an all girls’ school and knew no boys which weren’t either boyfriends or brothers of friends.

Which, if the stereotypes can be believed, would all end up making me either a sexually stunted wallflower or a raving, soon-to-be-impregnated nymphomaniac.

The truth was, I’d been having orgasms since I was twelve, having figured out that pull-ups felt “good” and going about learning how to deliberately manipulate my abdominal muscles to take that a few steps farther. I had a very, very active sexual fantasy life.

By the time I was out of high school, I was able to orgasm from several different nerve bundles, and I knew very well what turned me on and what didn’t. When I began having sex at 18 with my first real boyfriend, I was able to direct him to what I liked, able to figure out what he would like, and able to invent and be creative. My sex life has been very fulfilling. I credit at least part of that to having a sort of forced self-focus early in my sex life; because I had no one else’s desires or interests distracting me, I could focus on myself.

I now have two young girls. I plan to give them more information than I received. But I’m also going to encourage them to wait to date until they’re at least 17 or 18, so that they can have several years of no-pressure learning and happy orgasms before bringing another person into the picture.

I think that is an important lesson that everyone needs to hear: you can be single and still have a great sex life.