You should subscribe to the site's RSS feed here or bookmark the page in your browser. Also, submit your own story for inclusion on the site here. I just read the story about a girl telling her family members about a vibrating doodle pen and I had to share my own story about the things.
I had my first orgasms with one of those pens as a young teen! I got it for Christmas a few years earlier, as did all of my younger cousins, but I noticed that the adults were snickering and knew there was something naughty about them. I don’t remember what persuaded me to slip it into my underwear one night, but I remember making quite a habit out of it.
I knew that girls were supposed to masturbate by putting their fingers inside themselves, but I was scared to put anything inside me because I knew that I could hurt myself if I stuck my fingers into my other orifices (or so I was told). I was especially frightened when I first began to get aroused and found myself getting wet, because somehow in all of my sex-ed classes (including a pretty detailed sex-ed book for teens!), no one had ever mentioned that women get wet when they are aroused and I thought I was sick. I had been told that if anything strange came out of there, I should tell my mother or ask to go to the doctor. I wouldn’t get my period for a couple more years yet.
It never occurred to me to rub my clitoris with my fingers, and even when I got older and tried using my fingers inside myself, I didn’t feel anything special like I thought I was supposed to feel. But the pen worked. I used to steal the batteries out of all my old toys to power the thing. When I burned out the motor after a couple years of frequent use, I rode my bike to all the stores nearby that might carry another one, because I was too young to buy a real vibrator. Heaven forbid a sixteen year old girl be allowed to masturbate!
Hopefully by the time I am a parent I will figure out a graceful, caring way to give my teenage daughters their own safe vibrators without totally mortifying them.
–Submitted by M.
Awesome post from random babble… explaining how she learned about menstruation:
I spent the next few nights holed up in my room reading about female and male anatomy, puberty, necking and petting, snickering to myself and re-reading the part about intercourse and ogling the scientific drawings of penises. The books were full of pictures of sanitary napkin belts and never even mentioned STIs or contraceptive. I am absolutely sure it taught that one should abstain from sex until marriage.
And that was that.
That was my big sex talk.
My big lesson on the “birds and the bees”.
I didn’t even know that periods didn’t last forever.
Read the rest of this post at Talking to Kids about Sex.
It makes me so sad to think of a child — any child — worrying unnecessarily about what’s happening to his or her body. Read the rest of the post for the authors quite sensible suggestions on how to bring up sex-ed topics to kids. (Hint: She suggests starting before the age of the first menstrual period.)
random babble…
My mother died when I was eleven, so I feel fortunate that everything I had needed to know was explained to me well before that.
She was always quite open to talking to me about anything – even before I even knew there was anything to talk about. I remember her and my father sitting me down and telling me that it was time for me to consider wearing a bra. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind yet, but I just shrugged and said OK. It was simply no big deal.
One day when I was about eight or nine I guess my Mom decided that it was time to answer any questions that I had about sex. Perhaps she thought I was too shy to bring it up myself? Honestly, I think I was just a bit too innocent. I never thought about sex or wondered where babies came from. In retrospect it seems a bit unnatural my lack of curiosity.
My Mom sat me down at her friend’s place with a book, and told me about sex. She explained that a man put a penis in a woman’s vagina and that’s how babies were formed. She also explained about menstruating and what to do, and why it happened. She used all the correct words and didn’t sugar coat anything.
I was astonished by the whole thing. I simply had no suspicions that such an act ever occurred. I had a bit more idea about the period thing since I had seen her supplies around the house–but it just seemed like a grown up thing, and I didn’t fuss about it.
I’m glad that I had it all explained to me while I had the chance to absorb it, with the opportunity for follow-up questions. I didn’t get my period until I was twelve and she was gone – so at least I didn’t have to burden my poor father with my ignorance.
All in all, I think I had the best possible experience with “the talk.”
At my school, we were given Sex Ed in grade seven. It was a fairly comprehensive program covering the anatomy and reproductive cycles of both the male and the female, the general mechanics of sex, pregnancy and some time devoted to topics of pleasure, relationships, masturbation and anonymous Q&A sessions.
During one class when we were learning about menstruation and the laundry list of symptoms that accompanies this monthly cycle, my teacher told us “The body is mourning the loss of a potential baby”.
I remember instantly disliking what she had just said. There was something about that statement that grated against me like nails on a chalk board. But I couldn’t tell why. For several years, whenever I thought about that class, I would flush in anger. I felt there was something fundamentally wrong and insulting about the comment, but I couldn’t put my finger on what bothered me so much. I eventually put it out of my mind.
Many years later, when I was in university and hanging around with friends in the Women and Gender studies program, and blossoming with my own ideas of sexual liberty and equality, I recognized that statement for the misogynistic bullshit that it was. I was able to finally put into words exactly what it was about that statement that bothered me so much — how it suggests that a woman can not be complete or truly happy unless she is pregnant. That her entire purpose is to carry children because even her own body demands it and “weeps” when it is denied every month. It represents the manipulation of biology and science to justify social inequality and misogyny (similar tactics have been used to suppress other minorities as well).
I am sure that was never my teacher’s intention, who for the record was a woman herself. However, those words represented my first encountered with institutionalized sexism and how we as a society can so easily perpetuate this type of inequality and ridiculous social attitude, even against ourselves, by what we say or do not say.
I will always be proud of myself for being bothered by those words, even if I didn’t understand why. I was able to recognize that there was something wrong and I was unwilling to accept sexist bullshit.
You know how Cosmo has a different article about sex on the front cover every month? How it’s really the *same* article, over and over again, just with a few different paragraphs here and there? What about those racy “It Happened To Me” stories in the middle of YM magazine? “I had sex with my stepfather,” or “My mom was a prostitute”, etc. Those ridiculous articles were my earliest introduction to a sexual lifestyle.
I devoured them, article after article, issue after issue, in a big, quiet library a few towns over. My mother was part of a quilting group that met at this particular library on Wednesday nights and sometimes Saturdays. She’d bring me along so I could do my favorite thing – read. She was sort of in the dark about exactly what I was reading, of course. I would flip the magazines over to the back and stack them so the least salacious advertisement was on the top of the stack.
Sex was driven out of my parents’ house. I knew they were having it, they knew I knew they were having it, and they put me on the pill before I started having it. Needless to say, no one wanted to talk about it. When I got my period, I waited a day and a half to tell my mother, convinced she was going to explain in detail how tampons were inserted. If something sexual happened to flit across the TV screen, my mother would change the channel after a few agonizing seconds. Sooner or later I figured out that if I simply left the room, I could listen from the dining room and figure out when it was safe to come back in. I can’t even tell you how much television was ruined for me by Viagra commercials.
I know this is supposed to be a story about what my parents told me about sex, but that would be a very short story indeed. The only way to tell my story is to talk about the person who *really* taught me about sex.
When I was fifteen I met the guy who would save me from night after night of awkward television watching with my parents. My first boyfriend was a freak, a loner. He wasn’t exactly who I always thought I was going to lose my virginity to, but it was obvious that there was a story waiting to be told between us. People I barely knew laughed at me, said I could do better than Dave. They didn’t understand him and they certainly didn’t understand me. I knew I would do things for him that I wouldn’t do for anyone else. I lost my virginity to him a year later.
We spent every day together and had sex nearly every day. I realize now how lucky I was to have such a passionate boyfriend who wanted nothing more than to please me. One day my father opened the door to my room to find me lying on the bed with Dave’s head between my legs. He immediately closed the door and stood out in the hallway. “You don’t have to come out, I just want to know what kind of pizza you wanted me to order for dinner,” he yelled through the door. It still makes me cringe thinking about it. My poor father.
The sexual energy that brought us together was the only thing keeping us together after a while. He was a member of my family and I couldn’t imagine losing him, but Dave wasn’t easy to love. He contracted Lyme disease and refused to get treated for it, saying medicine was unnatural and he would heal himself. He started walking with a limp, then started using a cane, before he would admit his ‘treatment’ wasn’t working. He was a person of extremes and his opinion was the only right one. Being his girlfriend was a full time job. I was incapable of leaving him alone. A three week family vacation to Germany, where a phone call to Dave was more expensive than most of the souvenirs I bought, was an unbelievably stressful experience. I didn’t want to be surprised by something that had happened to him in my absence. Not only was Dave a handful on his own, but his father had been known to throw knives at him, among other things. He made me come, but he made me cry too. Years later he told me that he had both a personality disorder and bipolar disorder, and I thought, NOW it all makes sense!
I was single when I went to college and it was the right thing to do. I don’t regret what I did in high school and I am learning to look back on my past with laughter rather than embarrassment. Even when my parents found my stash of condoms and a vibrator in my old bedroom.
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.
My mum and I had exactly two talks about sex, and the first was only brushing up against it.
She had gone to the chiropractor, and we were on our way to wherever. I was old enough to read, so I could have been 6, but I think I was older–maybe 8. I was reading the brochure she’d picked up in the doctor’s office, and one of the things the brochure claimed chiropractors could help with was menstrual cramps.
Well, me being the curious child, I asked what that was. My mum explained about periods and how when a man and woman have sex, that blood goes to the baby. I don’t remember much of the exact wording. I just remember being mortified that my little sister was in the backseat hearing all of this.
In between the “official” talks, I read voraciously. My mum was always a big reader herself–of romance novels. One day she said, “You have to read this book.” She marked out a couple of paragraphs in the back that I wasn’t allowed to read, and I didn’t read them. The text after didn’t make much sense, as the couple was aglow from lovemaking and I had no idea what was going on. Eventually I decided I needed more context and read the last paragraph between Mum’s lines. Then the whole forbidden passage.
I remember the day I announced that I was going to read other books by that author. Mum said, “Okay.” Then I just shifted into reading other romances as well. These books provided a lot of my sex education, though it was a very vague education and it wasn’t till I was in high school–late high school–that I got a clearer picture of what sex really was.
The next “official” talk came about 15 years after the first. I was involved with N., and I was telling my mum about a camping trip we took. “And you slept in separate tents, right?” I gave her a look. She said she was just kidding and told me to be careful.
By that time I’d had 3 or 4 partners and I knew most of what I needed to in order to protect myself. I was educated about birth control–and I was taking it–and I used condoms with all my partners.
I think I got lucky–I didn’t have much sex ed from either parents or school, but didn’t end up like so many women in my family: having a baby before they were ready. I suppose I have to credit my religion at least a little bit; if I hadn’t been uber-Christian, I wouldn’t have been set on waiting for sex. By the time I changed my religion, I was educated and ready for sex.
The doctor’s office was crowded. The kids were getting antsy and the doctor was late. I let my ten year old rifle through my purse for a pen and some paper to draw on.
“What’s this mom?” he shouted
I turned my head to shush him as he yelled again “I SAID what IS this MOM?”
All eyes in the waiting room turned to my young son as I stared horrified at the yellow plastic square he was waving around in the air.
“Give me that… that … that is for ladies!” I stammered through gritted teeth as I hastily snatched my “emergency” maxi pad from him and shoved it back into my purse.
Guiltly, I watched him turn five shades of purple and tears well up in his eyes.
Way to go Mom! Super parenting skills!
On the drive home I quietly mulled over what I should say to both of the kids about what had happened in the doctor’s office. We had already had many conversations about the changes a boy’s body goes through during puberty but we had never touched on the subject of menstruation. Maybe I hadn’t thought it was something I needed to talk about with them BECAUSE they were boys. Maybe I just didn’t think it was the “right” time. My mind wandered back to a trip to the drug store to buy female “supplies”. My older son had turned beet red and said “You buy THOSE mom?”. I knew at the time he had no idea what “those” were or what they were for. I decided now was the “right” moment.
“Hey guys, remember the thing you pulled out of my purse back in the doctor’s office and I told you it was for ladies? Well I am sorry if I yelled about it. I was just surprised you found it. I’ll tell you what it is now, okay?”
And I did. Due to the fact that their step-mom had just had a baby, we had already had conversations about where a baby grows in a woman’s body etc. So I used the information that they already knew and catered the conversation to their knowledge base. I explained that every month a woman’s body naturally prepares itself in case she decides she wants to have a baby. I explained that it does this by “growing” a lining in her uterus, kind of like a nice little home for the egg that will turn into a baby. I also explained that if woman decides not to have a baby then she has to shed this lining every month so a new one can “grow” again the next month. I explained this was a menstrual cycle or a period. Of course other questions sprang from this explanation, but I answered them as simply, honestly and non-graphic as possible. And you know what? It was kind of easy and I was more prepared than I ever thought I would be.
Here are some of my own personal rules when I am talking to my kids:
1. Be honest.
2. Keep it simple. Cater to your child’s age level.
3. Ask your kids questions back to make sure they understand your explanations and aren’t afraid or confused by them.
4. Use “real” terms. Don’t use made up names for anatomical parts.
5. Relate your explanation to something they know about already or may be learning about in school. My son was learning about cells in science class. This came in handy when we had the whole “sperm and egg” discussion.
6. If you don’t know the answer to one of their questions, don’t make one up– be honest about your knowledge and maybe try to find out the answer together or tell them you will find out for them. Follow through of course.
Most importantly, follow your instincts. No one knows your kids better than you do.
Upon realizing that a man has to be inside the woman in order for sex to happen, and having a sketchy idea of where things were thanks to Growing Up and Liking It, I attempted to figure my fourteen year-old self out. I explored my nether region’s interior with an inquisitive finger–baby steps for at least a year. Was that all there was to it? The penetration of a pinkie felt merely kind of good, but it was not exactly the kind of mind-blowing thing that seemed to be going on in The Thorn Birds, for example. Still, I knew I was on the right track.
Remember the big teenage tampon controversy? How if a girl used one, maybe she wasn’t a virgin anymore because…you know…? None of my uptight contemporaries used tampons for this reason, and neither did I until the night that I maybe kind of “borrowed” one from the woman whose children I babysat. I was menstruating; I figured that to do this any other time would be a bad idea. I took the mysterious little tube thing home and, in the privacy of my bedroom, I clenched my teeth and lost my virginity to it. And it merely felt kind of good. Not amazing by any means. But oh was I sophisticated, and thus began my on-the-sly tampon usage.
After this, ahem, breakthrough, things seemed to fall into place rapidly thanks to books. I got a job at our town’s sleepy library, where I discovered an astonishingly robust cache of soft-core pornography written by people like Judith Krantz (shockingly favored by old ladies I knew from church) and, remarkably, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). I couldn’t believe that this book had not been discovered by one of the town’s upright citizens, who would have undoubtedly organized a torch-hoisting mob hell-bent on burning the library to the ground. To protect my library from certain destruction, I checked the book out to myself repeatedly, and what do you know, it answered a whole lot of my questions. Apparently there was this orgasm thing? And it was kind of the point of sex? Also that one thing was a clitoris? Hmmm.
Soon I discovered “Sex Talk with Phyllis Levy,” a talk show on Chicago’s WLS radio station. I listened to this on headphones at night, and the wonderful Phyllis filled in more blanks for me. Regarding orgasms, I remember her telling a confused caller who wasn’t sure if she’d had an orgasm or not, “Sweetheart, when you’ve had one you’ll know it.” Also on my headphones at night: Prince, who had many interesting things to say about sex and provided a great deal of food for thought. He set the standard for what I thought all men sounded like during sex: screaming, howling, panting, hitting high Cs, etc. (Oh what a letdown I was in for…)
So having an orgasm became my number one goal (beyond, you know, getting good grades, learning to paint, escaping my town, and maybe one day finding a circle of friends who understood me). Thanks to my extensive readings, I knew that an orgasm could be achieved digitally, but it was hard, discouraging work. A whole half hour would pass with nothing but a numb hand to show for it. I could never quite make it happen. Was something wrong with me?
Then one night Phyllis told a caller that maybe water would help, recommending a hand-held shower head. We didn’t have one of those, but what about the tub’s faucet? At my first opportunity, I sequestered myself in the bathroom and locked locked locked LOCKED the doors. Feeling ridiculous but at this point willing to try anything, I positioned myself directly beneath the faucet’s running water with my feet up against the shower wall. It felt so good and so different that I panicked and got the heck out of there. But I came back the next day, and before the water turned cold I had an orgasm and I knew it. Oh did I know it. I emerged from the shower shaky-legged and golden/sparkly. I had done it. I knew things. I had a big fabulous secret.
Ultimately, the fact that I had to learn everything about sex on my own through trial and error and good old-fashioned research wasn’t so bad. In the end I felt like I somehow owned sex. I had to fight for it–my parents didn’t just hand it to me. My initial water orgasms, followed by my equally hard-won, first “land orgasms,” were mine alone, and something about that made them dirtier and sexier. Did I really want to hear my mom’s how-to instructions in my head as I made these things happen? Absolutely not! From that point on, sex was mine.
–Submitted by K.
My mum always made her sex-positivity clear. There were not many actual discussions just small gestures and disclosures.
I remember when I got my first period and my mum was so exited and congratulated me and all I wanted was a pad and to get on with my day because thanks to her I knew periods weren’t a big deal. She then shared with me her first period story where as a child she went to the bathroom discovered blood and believed she was going to bleed to death. She told her mum who said nothing more than that it would happen every month. My mum was certain that she was dreadfully sick, going to die and that her mother didn’t care.
My mum never hid her feminism. She wore it proudly and she always told me that the birth control pill was the best thing to ever happen to women. Through this comment I knew that sex for pleasure was ok, that multiple partners were ok but that it was essential to make responsible decisions.
The laundry was a place where I was allowed to see her sexuality and her acceptance of mine. Sheer lacy underwear belonging to my mum hung proudly on the line and when I added my own fancy knickers to the laundry she just mentioned how cute or pretty they were. She was always very strict relating to privacy, that she and my father had a right to it and that my brother and I would also have our privacy respected at all times.
The sweetest lesson though was the accidental. Walking around the house you ran a risk of catching my parents making out in the hall, always leading to me slinking away as I didn’t want to disturb them. It taught me that beyond supporting my brother and I they supported each other with love and affection. They taught me what a healthy relationship could look like.
There were a few big conversations such as the abortion talk (pro-choice all the way) and when I had to tell them I was working in porn but they can wait for other postings.
–Submitted by Cate
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