I’m not the first, nor will I be the last, to propose that the socially acknowledged terms for sexual orientation leave a lot to be desired. I’m a woman and on the Kinsey scale (which I consider far more user-friendly) I would fall somewhere in the range of a 2. It’s taken me a while to get there and understand what that means for me.
Only in the last few months has the memory surfaced of the first I thought I might like girls. I remember very distinctly standing in the enclosed back porch of my cousin’s house. I was, perhaps, seven or eight and we were taking a brief break before foraging back into the pool. She, six months my junior, had always been a bit of a bully, but I tried to make due with my lone playmate. Being an only child with overprotective parents lent me to very few excursions outside the house, so I knew to enjoy the time I had while I had it.
Somehow it came to me in our conversation that day that I might like girls. I didn’t understand the social ramifications of the information, I hadn’t been given the ‘gays burn in hell’ speech yet, I only knew that, for some reason, I sort of liked girls the same way I liked the freckle-faced boy at school. I shared this information with her and she, giggling and wide-eyed, accepted it with no more issue than had I told her I sneaked an extra cookie before dinner. At least, that’s what I thought.
Later that afternoon I decided to exact my new-found power of using the telephone on my own. We took the cordless phone from its holder in the kitchen and dialed the number of my aforementioned freckle-faced crush. I don’t remember what we talked about (what does one talk about on the phone at that age?), but I remember the absolute shot of panic that ran through me when she snatched the phone and declared, “I’m going to tell him what you told me! I’m going to tell him you like girls!”
I somehow managed to talk her out of it, and I’m not beyond wondering if I actually grabbed the phone out of her hands and hung up on him. I know there was a brief period of begging, of desperation, but she never did say anything and I never spoke of my vague interests again.
I liked boys well enough and, as single digits turned to double and upward, I tended toward boys almost exclusively. In fact, I don’t remember the thought of girls crossing my mind for several years after that. I can only guess I must have severely pushed the information away. During those years I also came to understand that God thought same-sex intimacy was abhorrent, and that those engaging in sexual immorality would be permanently cast out. Between you and me, looking back now, I think Paul was just bitter he wasn’t getting any.
In the mid-late years of puberty I came to the realization that the idea of sex with a woman was not only interesting to me, but desirable in the right circumstances. I realized I was watching women more than men when I was out in public. I didn’t know what to make of it, I was a little afraid of it. I remember driving home, on the interstate south of Richmond with my mother, and telling her that I thought I might like girls too. I came out and said, “I think I might be bisexual. I sort of..like…girls?”
She gave me an odd sort of look from the driver’s seat and laughed, “No you don’t! You wouldn’t want to kiss a woman, would you? Gross!” This, followed by another sort of finial laugh was enough shut me up entirely.
Since then, I’ve shared the information with only two people: my best friend (who doesn’t care, particularly given I’ve never been attracted to her), and my male partner. He is a solid 3 now, perhaps a leaning 4 on the Kinsey scale. He had predominantly (nearly exclusively) male partners before we found each other and, for some reason, we fell in love. We work well together, we have a great sex life, and when I told him about my interest in women he laughed and said, “Fantastic. Now we can really look at people together.”
I don’t know if I’ll ever have sex with a woman. If our relationship continues as we both foresee it doing (that is, marriage and children), I have no interest of bringing other partners into the picture. It may be that I quietly admire from the sidelines and enact fantasies on my own or with him when the mood strikes.
I know this for sure, though: whatever gender preferences or interests our children have, we will never, ever, laugh at them.
I can’t shake the idea that my mom was more experienced and more knowledgeable than she let on. I only wish she’d shared with me more of what she knew and what she experienced before she died.
My most vivid memory of any kind of sex talk with my mom was when I was 26. I had graduated college and was moving across the country for a new start. She’d come to visit me and to help me pack my apartment before I left for a state 2000 miles away.
I had already sold my bed and was sleeping on an air mattress. I remember going to the store to buy more boxes and returning to find my mom organizing the kitchen.
She turned to me and said: “I started to work in your bedroom for you. I got the dresser done, but I didn’t want to touch your bed. I thought I’d let you pack your vibrator by yourself.”
Blushing and embarrassed I ran into my bedroom and realized that my mom had seen the air pump socket on the side of my air mattress and thought it was a plug-in vibrator.
I was embarrassed at the time, and it has it’s humorous side, but truthfully I wish now that my mom had taken the opportunity to talk more about sex with me and to talk to me about the experiences that were/might be in my future.
Even more, as I enter my 40s, I wish that she were around so I could ask her more about what I could expect as I get older. My life is very different from hers – at my age she had two children and I am divorced and childless – but I think I still could learn a lot from her.
I guess if I had anything to say to moms of adult women is this: don’t shy away from talking about sex with your daughters. I’d have love to have known what my mom’s experiences were and what advice she’d have given to me now if she were here. Even though she’s been gone ten years now, I know that every day I could benefit from her advice and her point of view.
While I am certain that my mother had (or tried to have) The Talk with me roundabout sixth grade, I seem to have blocked that from my memory. Or perhaps I blew her off to stave off embarrassment and avoid the whole thing altogether. I likely said “Mooommmm I already know that, they gave us a class” and turned my back. She gave me a crude 1980’s era clinical pamphlet from the doctor’s office. I can recall looking at it in secret but I didn’t fully grasp the information.
But I still recall a few moments from my first Sex-Ed class. It was tradition at the time for the sixth grade class to take a field trip into the big city; both before and after the mortifying group class we took little jaunts to the Aviary, the Museum, etc. So we had bits of normalcy to cushion the shock, so to speak.
It was taught by a nurse and there were slides of health book style drawings and diagrams. I believe the moment she completely lost control of our sixth grade class was when she got to the “penis in vagina” part of what intercourse is. The whole class laughed. For a good five minutes. There was the usual nudging and giggling throughout but for the most part the boys and the girls didn’t acknowledge each other. We now KNEW THINGS that couldn’t be taken back.
But between the forced-group initiation and my discomfort on discussing such subjects after that with the likes of my mother, I actually didn’t learn much. In fact I clearly did NOT learn much even after the Sex-Ed portion of the eighth grade health class because when it came time for me to be in a sexual relationship four years later……I didn’t know much about my own genitalia. When my teenage boyfriend tried to lick my clit, I didn’t know what he was doing – but I didn’t like it and said “I think you’re in the wrong spot.”
It took another five years at least until I admitted to my then-boyfriend that I wasn’t sure where my clit was; he showed me. And it was another couple of years (late 20’s) until I was masturbating “properly” and experiencing something close to an orgasm. I truly had a number of years of being sexually active and not getting a whole lot of pleasure from it. I liked the idea of the act, and the pleasure I was giving my partner, more than the actual act of sex itself.
I wish I had been taught better, in more comfortable environments. Not in a classroom full of giggly peers and not by my mother who I didn’t like much. I would have been much more receptive if the teaching was done by a female I liked and looked up to, like any one of my cousins.
I know that should my future daughter refuse to let me talk, I’ll enlist outside help. But I also know that I want my daughter to know so much more than me, including how to masturbate and derive pleasure from sexual activities when she’s ready. I feel like I missed out on a number of “good sex years” by not knowing how to enjoy it.
Honestly I don’t remember a lot about how I learned about sex growing up. I remember that it was always held as something special in my family – not necessarily for marriage (although that was ideal), but for someone who you really “love love love”.
I *do* remember sex ed, though, in sixth grade. It was called Family Planning or something to that effect.
It was taught by our lesbian P.E. teacher; she was very no-nonsense and I liked her.
At one point, on the overhead projector, she put up a diagram of the male body, including the genitals. We were given a handout or some such with the same drawing and additional information. She asked, “Is anyone embarrassed? Don’t be afraid.” I raised my hand – you bet I was embarrassed. Sixth grade? Diagrams of a naked adult male? Yes.
But… I was the only one who raised my hand! Now I was REALLY embarrassed.
I knew everyone else was lying. They had to be. Right? I couldn’t be the only one embarrassed to be learning about this, could I?
I have never forgotten that moment, and I am kind of proud that I was able to stand up and admit that the subject matter was new and embarrassing for me. I like to think I’ve taken that approach through the rest of my sexual life, a kind of openness that has made sex fun, never too serious, but special.
I was with my father one day, walking down a street in Manhattan when I was roughly six years old and saw two lovebirds making out in an alleyway. I started to giggle and asked my father, “Why are those people giving such big kisses??”
He turned to me, red faced and flustered and said, ‘Well, I, umm…well…you know…” He just couldnt think of an excuse! I remember standing there staring at the man who was never at a loss for words wondering why he wouldnt tell me what was going on.
He then turned to me and said, “Well, when two people fall in love they like to stand really close and give big kisses, but only when they are old enough to know how to do it correctly!”
From that point on I was determined to do it correctly and practiced on my teddy bears. A few months later, I walked up to my dad, teddy bear in hand, as he was sitting with my mother and family at the dinner table, and full on made out with the bear. The food stopped and so did my poor father’s breathing! He quickly wisked me away and told me that he forgot to tell me people have to be MUCH older and that they are supposed to do it when no one is looking, because it is private.
To this day I still can’t kiss anyone in a very public place without a reminder of my fathers lesson. :)
My little girl hit a mental growth spurt somewhere around age four. In one week, she understood one-to-one correspondence and the difference between men and women. This all became clear in a booth at McDonald’s when she looked across the nearly empty dining area and pointed at the three men seated in a booth by the door.
“Look mommy, “ she shouted. “Three men. Three penises!”
“Yes, sweetie,” was all I could say. “One, two, three,” and I blushed as the three men chuckled good-heartedly.
Now, that little girl is almost twenty-one, and she’s well aware of one-to-one anatomical correspondence, only now, she keeps it to herself (usually).
When I was just about to become a teenager, I remember my dad being very concerned about me being properly educated about sex and sexuality. My mother has been a bit of a prude since I’ve known her, but she made an effort at this time as well: bringing home sex education videos from her school for me to watch (I attended a catholic school in a different district).
Being the curious person that I am, I was interested in the videos and would often watch them alone when I got home from school.
One day my dad happened to come home from work while I was watching one of the videos on contraception. Over the past months he and I had had a number of edifying talks about waiting to find someone you loved before having sex, protecting oneself from infections and pregnancy, and other topics in this vein.
He was pleased that I was watching one of the educational videos and was eager to assist with the lesson. While I continued to watch the video, slowly becoming mortified by my dad’s enthusiasm, my dad went upstairs and came back with a condom from wherever my parent’s stash was.
I’d never seen a condom before (besides the dirty used ones that we occasionally found on the baseball diamond and school and didn’t dare touch) so I was interested to be allowed to open a fresh one for myself. My dad encouraged me to try unrolling it a little way and stretching it to see how durable it was. I did and was suitably impressed with how much the material could stretch.
I soon lost interest in the condom though and turned back to my video, thinking the “hands-on” portion of this lesson was mercifully over.
Apparently my dad wasn’t sure I had learned everything he wanted me to know about condoms – specifically, how un-durable they can be. Much to my SUPREME embarrassment, my dad proceeded to unroll the condom over his fingers and began rubbing the condom with his other hand – trying to create enough friction for the condom to break.
I stared intently at the television, trying my best to ignore my dad’s shenanigans, but he was determined. It ended up taking quite a while for the condom to break in the end; I think even my dad began feeling a little embarrassed by this lesson gone awry.
But when the condom finally did break, my dad was triumphant – “There! You see? Condoms can break when you’re having sex, so you’ll want to make sure that you use other forms of protection as well.”
“Yes dad” I replied dutifully, relieved that the lesson was finally over.
Now that I think about it, that might be the last time my dad tried to educate me about contraception.
Looking back I still cringe a little at my poor dad’s antics. But I realize that he was only trying very hard to teach his daughter about the dangers of the world – desperate to provide me with tools to keep myself safe when he couldn’t be around to protect me.
It’s not always easy being the offspring of an astrophysicist. Relations between me and my father were always a little awkward when I was living at home. No direct unpleasantness, but there was always some sort of distance between us. It was probably as much my fault as his; we’re too much alike. We have never been really close. The advantage – and at the same time the curse – of living in a learned family was that the house was full of books, plus we had a monthly subscription to ’Scientific American’. We were encouraged to find things out for ourselves. If we came to our father with a question he would indicate one of the many bookcases and say “Go and look it up.”
One day, a new book appeared in the house. It was never mentioned, it just appeared. I know now that it had been strategically left lying around and that sooner or later I would pick it up and read it. I can’t remember what it was called (Your Changing Body or something equally imaginative I should think), but read it I did. From cover to cover. Several times.
And that was that. Sex education done and dusted.
We were a fairly conventional churchgoing family. When I did finally get a girlfriend, visits from her were always with a parent in the background, always in the lounge and never up in my room. The same when I visited her at home. We did a lot of making out in the car, as you can imagine, although with us both being good well brought up kids from good churchgoing families, in a peer group with similar backgrounds, it never developed into more than a kiss and cuddle and a grope under the jumper…in all the five years I was going out with her.
I remember the scandal at the church youth club when one of the girls, who was very well developed for her fifteen years and more forward than most, took one of the lads behind the stage in the church hall and let him take her bra off. I was warned in no uncertain terms by my mother to steer clear of that particular girl because she might get me into trouble. SHE might get ME into trouble???!!!
University changed all that, and for most of that first year Heather and I were sleeping together, despite the fact that we each had a room in hall of residence. The second year was going to be more problematic because we were expected to find digs for ourselves and accommodation in London has always been a problem. The situation was not made easier with the university accommodation officer being a militant Trotskyist whose contribution to bringing about The Revolution consisted of attempting to foment unrest among the student body by failing to find accommodation for any of them. So we were left to traipse around town with outdated lists of possible addresses and much-thumbed copies of the “Ham and High” (we were definitely North London types). Eventually we managed to secure a double bedroom in a family home in Hampstead Garden Suburb. There was only one hurdle left to tackle; how to break it to my parents that we intended to share that bedroom.
I had a summer job in south west London that year and was waiting for a Green Line bus home at Hampton Court one afternoon. By the merest co-incidence my father turned up at the same bus stop. I think he’d been to the flower show or something but in any case, the odds against us meeting there were vanishingly small. Normally at home we could spend a whole evening under the same roof without exchanging so much as a word but here, at this bus stop, we started talking. He asked me how it was going with the search for digs. I answered with a few mumbled platitudes about how difficult it was to find somewhere and his reply struck me like a bolt out of the blue.
”Well, you and Heather are just going to have to find somewhere to share”.
I could have hugged him (almost!). With one sentence had had swept away the problem that had been bugging me for days. Sure, the family had met Heather several times, and liked her. But we had never told them how serious we were about each other. Now I had as good as got a paternal blessing for us to “live in sin.”
On the other hand, my father was himself, at the time, admissions tutor for a major university department. He knew the score. My estimation of him went up from that day onward.
Now that I am an adult, my relationship with my mother has shifted from one of parent and child to more like mentorship. My mother has done all the parenting she can and now my life is up to me. The honest openness that always existed between myself and my mother has now grown even stronger and more open because she realizes I am an adult now and there is now nothing left in the world she needs nor should protect me from anymore.
As a result, I’ve been able to learn a lot about who my mother really is and learn about her past and all the wild things she did “when she was my age” (and yes, I’m doing all those things now). I’ve been able to share pretty much anything in my life freely and openly without judgment.
About a year ago, I had probably the most embarrassing sexual experience of my life (so far). After a good month and a half of heavy flirting between myself and a much older guy, we finally ended up back at his apartment after a party one night. What followed was the most awkward, mutually unsatisfying, fumbling bad sex which ended when he fell asleep while I was giving him twenty minutes of oral sex. Feeling mortified and angry, I was left with nothing else to do but grope around for my clothes while he snored. I left and made the long walk home at 4 in the morning.
The next day, still feeling the sting of my supposed sexual inadequacy, I called my mother to recount the sad tale and we had a good laugh. The best part, she was able to give me the best line to use on the day I had to face him again (we had mutual friends). She said, “Sweetie, here’s what you do. The next time you see him, you smile big, throw your arms around him in a big hug and say ‘Wow, you’re looking good. You must be sleeping well!’” I’ve never been brave enough to say it, though I certainly have had the opportunity.
This is the difference between the advice my mother gave me when I was a child versus what she gives me now. When I was young, she was honest and open, but she was a parent. Her guidance was parental. She taught me about the mechanics of sex, about relationships, about self respect, pleasure, protection and all those good things.
Now that all that has been taken care and I’m waist deep experiencing it all for myself, she can now share with me snarky one liners, and saucy stories from her past. Rather than the information being passed from her down to me, it is now a mutual sharing of experiences. It’s not that I don’t still have a mother. I do, it just that our relationship has matured and changed and so have our conversations about sex, relationships and all aspects of life. I can’t think of a time when I won’t be talking to my mother about sex. My father is a different story.
–Submitted by A.
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