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.
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.
Spending a week in Greenwich Village in New York City was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. I was on Christopher Street, the literal birthplace of the gay rights movement. While some of you may wonder why this so deeply touched a married heterosexual mother of two, others of you understand the importance of this to me with no question.
Sexuality is one of the cornerstones of my life. Many people have commented to me that I am sexually inappropriate, as if they are the first person to tell me this. It is not something you need to tell me. I am fully aware that I tend to be obsessed with sex, and that I can make even the most innocuous statement into a horribly dirty joke.
I have poor boundaries about sex. I want to know about your sex life, not to judge or belittle, but to salivate and celebrate. Also, I am just plain nosy.
So to all of those people who think that I need to “grow up” and “shut up” here is my charge to you. Instead of telling me that I am sexually inappropriate, do as some of my other friends have done – tell me it makes you uncomfortable. Own your feelings. Think about what it is that I am saying that makes you nervous, and if you still don’t want to hear things from me, GROW UP and tell me. Do not pathologize my interest in sex, when to me your disinterest is just as odd.
Many people consider sexuality a private, intimate topic to be shared only within the bounds of marriage. Or, they consider sex a compartmentalized piece of their life, something that is great and all, but nothing to get so worked up about. I am not either of those people.
Without sharing too much of stories that are not mine, I grew up knowing the realities of sexual abuse. Although I was never the victim, I can’t remember a time in my life when I was not aware of the dark side of sexuality. Rape and sexual abuse are powerful, destructive forces, and can destroy even the strongest person. It can become not just an assault on the body, but an assault on the mind as well (I would say soul, but we all know I don’t believe in souls :)
I have always been the person that my friends came to to discuss sex with, including their sexual assaults. I have had more people disclose abuse to me than I can count, and once an interviewer even disclosed to me as I was interviewing for a job with her. She had never told anyone and was deeply ashamed.
In 1995, I began my career at a domestic violence/rape crisis center. For the past fourteen years, I have been exposed daily to the worst stories imaginable. Stories that I will not repeat, but can’t forget. Stories that have made me cry at the vulnerability of children, and seethe at the power of men in our society. I have seen women abused within an inch of their life choose to go back to their husband and abandon the child he also assaulted. I have seen boys who were abused as children grow up to become the very monster they feared. I have seen women who were sexually abused in childhood be aghast and surprised when the same abuser hurts their own children. I may not believe in god, but I have certainly seen the devil.
And how do you defeat the devil? With joy, love, and pleasure.
In my line of work, it is pretty easy to become jaded and bitter, and to blame sex, society, and/or men. I have chosen instead to fight from a position of love for humanity by seeking out the joy in sexuality. For every bit as destructive as sexual assault can be, sexual fulfillment can be healing. I will NOT allow the abusers, naysayers, and prudes of the world to deny that power to me or anyone else. In fact, I try at every opportunity to flirt with, celebrate, and encourage the multitude of good, decent, and loving men and women as a direct affront to the pain and suffering my clients and family members have suffered over the years.
I was raised to believe that my body belonged to me, that my sexuality was mine to own, and that sexuality was about pleasure, pure and simple. Sex was not a bargaining chip to get something from others, nor was it a chore that must be endured to receive love. My sexual power was not to be given to someone to else, but rather something to be shared. I was taught to never do anything sexually that I was uncomfortable with, and I never have. I was also taught that with sexuality comes personal responsibility, not only in terms of taking care of my physical and emotional health, but also my experiences. Orgasms were my right as a sexual partner, and a woman, and not a nice “extra” on occasion.
If people are allowed to be obsessed with science, movies, religion, sports, literature, Live Action Role Playing, midgets, ghosts, and lake monsters, why is it such a problem that I choose to focus on one of the most life affirming activities on the planet? There is nothing that screams “fuck you” to the pain and the hurt in the world than screaming “fuck me” to the person in your bed.
I have always loved the quote “The solution to bad art is not censorship, its better art.” Well for me, the solution to bad sex and the pain it brings is not abstinence, its better sex. And better sex will only come about when we admit, deal with, and respect the power that sexuality has in our lives.
Oh, and I am still really nosy.
–Submitted by Heidi Anderson from The Fat One in the Middle
My parents never told me anything. Learning about sex in the late 70s-early 80s was like taking an independent study course with a couple of professors who couldn’t be bothered to keep office hours.
I was a first-born, serious girl. I had spent my preschool years playing outdoors with my older male cousins. Sometimes our games were sexually charged: as a result, I knew what boy parts looked like and that they didn’t have to sit down on the toilet. I knew I liked being tied up as we re-enacted various Bugs Bunny cartoons, but I couldn’t say why. I had seen a medical textbook of my father’s when I was very young; the image of a cross-section of a woman’s abdomen with an upside-down baby inside was burned into my memory. I had seen big women like this and was able to conclude that babies come from inside women. But how did they get there? A man giving a woman “a special kind of hug,” as my mother explained it, seemed insanely vague.
When I was 11, Mom gave me a pamphlet called “Growing Up and Liking It,” which featured a dated photograph of a smiling blond teenage girl in a blue dress on the cover. The pamphlet described menstruation and really seemed to push Modess (“rhymes with oh yes!”) sanitary napkins. Included in the pamphlet was an insert about bras. This was lavishly illustrated with drawings of fabulous, impossibly-stacked women wearing various bullet bras and did little more than cause me to become fascinated with fabulous, impossibly-stacked women wearing various bullet bras. The menstruation information, however, was old news. They had already shown us The Film at school. And that, apparently, was all we needed to know about sex. Except they were skipping what seemed to be the most interesting part!
Being self-reliant, I set out to learn about sex via the only tools I had available to me: books. I knew the act was called sex, so I consulted Webster’s Student Dictionary, but looking up “sex” was a big disappointment to say the least.
I turned to fiction for help. Judy Blume seemed to know what was going on, and I pored over Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret (useful, but not about sex), Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (inscrutable at the time because it was a boy’s story, but I knew I was on to something), and Deenie, which described what I later understood to be the miracle of masturbation. Deenie talked about getting in the bathtub, rubbing herself somewhere–I don’t think she ever said exactly where–with a washcloth, and getting a “really nice feeling.” So, of course, I tried rubbing my body in various places such as my stomach and arms with a washcloth, but I never experienced a sensation beyond “washcloth feeling.” Eventually it occurred to me to try Down There, but I didn’t know what to do or how long to do it, giving up after possibly ten seconds. “It must be something weird that only Deenie does,” I concluded. I mean, the girl had problems.
Strangely, I didn’t connect this Deenie thing with what I sometimes did in bed to fall asleep. I would close my eyes and imagine some elaborate scenario in which I was tied to a chair, tree, or pole. Bad guys would be lurking around in a threatening kind of way, about to do something to me, whatever that might be. Some heroic man, usually faceless but probably also Christopher Reeve-ish (I had a crush on Superman), would rescue me. As I thought about this, my hand casually migrated south, not doing much beyond just being there, providing warmth. I never came close to having an orgasm and had never even heard of the word at the time.
Things continued like this until I entered high school. At age 14, I was in a hospital waiting room as my little sister was being born. Bored out of my mind, I started reading the hospital’s offerings from cover to cover. I came across a Redbook with an excerpt from a popular romance novel reprinted on pulpy, peach-colored paper. The story’s heroine described an encounter with her lover and said something about “how good it felt to have him inside me.” This concept was a complete revelation to me: the man has to be inside the woman! It all makes sense to me now!
–Submitted by K.
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