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. Now the state Supreme Court has upheld Alabama’s ban on the sale of sex toys.
Love Stuff, a Hoover purveyer of such toys that has fought the ban, remains open. It goes on as before, making sex toy customers sign a statement declaring their purchase is for medical, scientific, educational or other legal use.
Yes ma’am. I’d like that pink battery-operated 9-incher with the rabbit-ears. It’s for, um, educational purposes.
It has to be. A contraption like that would invariably teach you a thing or two.
via Archibald: Morality … and other Love Stuff – Archiblog
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.
The following story lay dormant in my memory for many years. It, along with other experiences, explains a lot of things about how I relate to my family. I have recounted this recollection in the third person. That is just how it came out, and who am I to argue with my muse?
***
“Jon showed me something strange today.”
The little girl, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, addresses her family as they drive in the car together. Bellies filled with eggrolls, wonton soup, fried rice and the like, they are motoring home from the local Chinese buffet in Dad’s trusty old Oldsmobile Delta 88.
Dad, a solidly built man with a blond thatch of curly hair atop his large head, is in the front seat, driving. Petite, dark-haired little Mom is riding shotgun, though the little girl wouldn’t learn that term for another five or six years.
In the back, the little girl, little in stature as well as age, sits behind her Dad, while her teenage brother sits behind their Mom. All was customary.
“What was it, honey?” Mom asks.
“It was this vibrating pen. He said he got it from the dollar store.”
Lanky framed Brother begins to giggle.
“Yeah, I bet it was a pen,” he chokes out between guffaws, that mocking, know-it-all tone all teenage boys use in his voice.
“No, no, it really was. Beverly looked at it. She said it had four different colours and that her little brother had one.” The little girl valiantly defends her story, wanting to convey that if a little boy from a Fundamentalist Christian household had this mysterious toy, then it must be okay. It couldn’t be whatever Brother was thinking it was.
Brother keeps giggling… Mom joins in.
“What…what’s so funny? It really was a pen.”
The little girl is starting to tear up, as she is wont to do when she is confused. Dad remains silent, as he is wont to do when he doesn’t want to get involved. Brother and Mom continue to laugh.
A child’s toy that has adult implications. A child’s story that isn’t taken seriously.
What the family doesn’t know, what the family can never learn, is that when Jon, one of the “big boys” (at sixteen or seventeen years) said to the little girl that morning:
“Robin, hold out your hand. I want to show you something.” That when he had said that, she had been fearful, fearful in a way she only half understood, of what he would show her. Holding out her hand, reluctantly, but with fascination, to feel something round, and long and hard, but blessedly buzzing and plastic.
The Delta 88 (a 1985 model) pulls into the driveway, and a normal family gets out. Yet at least one member of the family isn’t the same as she was when she left for the coveted treat of a trip to the Chinese buffet. She has learned subtly, from her usually loving mother’s laughter, that there are some stories she should keep to herself.
Submitted by RM
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.
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.
If you’ve yet to have children, remember this: toddlers are extremely curious and creative little creatures. When you’re taking a bath or in the kitchen, they will dig through your drawers or under your bed looking for play clothing or monsters or a lost Toy Story Buzz Lightyear. And when they do, they will find whatever it is that you’ve hoped they would never ask about. And then they will ask about everything single thing they discover.
This is what happened to me one lazy Saturday afternoon while my husband was out and I was engrossed in the latest John Grisham novel with my feet up on the backside of the couch. In marches my three-and-a-half-year-old, proudly pulling a makeshift caddy of all our private pleasure toys that we keep stored under the bed. My blindfold is casually wrapped around her waist like a little fashionista belt and she sports one fuzzy pink handcuff pushed way up to her shoulder, like some cool punk rocker.
“Mommy, Mommy! Lookit! Toys!” she exclaims to me, excited about her bounty. And then the questions begin as she presents each item in a quick flurry, her curly hair bouncing. She pulls out a simple straight, non-penis looking vibrator and somehow actually manages to twist it just right to start it humming.
“Why does it move like that? It tickles.” I gently take the toy from her and turn it off. This is a delicate moment to handle. I don’t believe there’s any shame in sex, but I also believe that 3 ½ is far too early to introduce the concept. I’ve heard stories from friends whose mothers taught them that sexuality was improper, keeping the facts of life from them until they were well into their teenage years. By then, of course, they had learned all the truly improper – that is, inaccurate – information from their friends. One close pal was even slapped in the face by her mother when she unintentionally found mom’s vibrator and asked about it over lunch in front of other ladies. This would never be my approach. I consider my response and give her as close to the truth as I think is appropriate.
“That’s for when mommy’s back hurts.” I tell her.
“Can I put it on your back?” She asks, all innocent.
“That’s sweet, honey, but my back doesn’t hurt right now.”
She seems content with this answer and moves onto the feather tickler, sticking it in her hair like an Indian. She poses fiercely for me. I cower in mock fear. Then she removes it and tickles my nose with it, so I giggle.
“Tickle me back!” So I do and she giggles. “Why do you have this, mommy?”
“For tickling, of course.”
“Right!” And she tickles me again. We have a good laugh. Then, suddenly, she runs back into the bedroom and brings back my wedge.
“Mommy, what’s this?” Her face is screwed up with a completely confused expression, her head tilted to the side like a dog that’s just heard a funny sound.
“What does it look like it’s for?” I ask. She pauses. Then, with great accomplishment:
“A slide!” And she plops down on the high end and slides down to the floor, squealing. It’s not a very long slide, but it does the trick. She jumps back up and this time rolls down it, turning over about twice and laughing dizzily at the bottom.
I leave John Grisham on the couch for the rest of the afternoon while I watch my daughter play with the blindfold, feather, cuff and wedge. The rest of the toys go back in the bedroom, but this time on a high shelf in the closet.
Some day I know we’ll have a good laugh about this day. She may even think I’m kind of cool. Or maybe when she’s a bit more grown up, she’ll come to me with more adult questions about sexuality because she knows she can trust that I’m as open and honest as I can be, given the circumstances. Maybe she’ll remember that I let her play and use her imagination, knowing that she wasn’t being “tainted” or shamed in any way. Until then, of course, as far as she’s concerned, a feather is just a feather.
Follow toywithme on Twitter @toywithme
When I look back on my life and try to figure out the exact moment when I realized what sex was, I find it a bit of a letdown that I can’t come up with one. There were always moments that I can say contributed to my not-insubstantial wealth of knowledge on the subject, but no specific one. My mom primarily raised me, and didn’t teach me about sex so much as she didn’t keep me from researching it – the highlights run like a blooper reel.
My mother called the vaginal/labia area “Mimis”. As in, the plural of Mimi. I think it was Hawaiian slang, as I spent the vast majority of my in vitro months in Honolulu before my grand debut. Now, normally this is just a cute folksy family thing, this slang-for-vagina practice, but my mom also called snap dragons mimis, or mimi flowers, because when you pinch the back, they open as if they are singing an operatic aria — the musical note “mi.”
So before my age hit double digits, I had firm association between my female parts, flowers, and music. This made perfect sense to me, but was met with incredulous alienation when the other girls in the playground took their “no no place” and “cookie” teachings to go play among other frigidly raised children instead of the little girl with an imaginative vagina that produced music and flowers. (In a related note, “Cookie”? Wtf is that about?)
I found my mom’s vibrator one day when I was probably about five. I ran around the house with the fleshy 1970’s relic turned on full blast, holding it aloft like the scepter of a sexually liberated relay runner. When I poked my napping mother in the side with it while she dozed on the couch, she made no move to take it away from me, and showed no sign of freaking out and telling me to drop it immediately.
Years later, earning my keep writing marketing for objects much like that one, I wonder if her lack of freakout was when the road to my own comfortable sexual awareness went the right way instead of the route of fear and loathing. I realized many years later in horror, as the memory flitted through my subconscious, what exactly I had been running around with and asked my mom why she DIDN’T freak out. She replied: “I always washed it, and if I grabbed it away from you or scolded you, you would have just gone looking for it again.”
When my mom instructed my father to throw out his Stonehenge-like piles of old Playboys, he did what any man would do: threw out the boring ones and hid a few of the really dirty ones that he wanted to keep under his ten year old daughter’s stuffed animals, (on a shelf too high for her to reach) to come back for later. My father didn’t realize the determination of a young lady to have attendees for the tea party that day, and when I stood on a box to get my Cabbage Patch Kids down for the soiree, my first real view of sex literally hit me in the face. A truly filthy issue of Hustler I read enraptured by curiosity as a tan, oiled woman spread across the pages alongside a story of a cable repair man, a lonely woman, and a banana. After gleefully retelling this story to my day care playmates, my father received a stern phone call and sent me to my room for the rest of my natural life. Mom came home, smacked my father upside the head, and told me to go outside and play.
Sex was like a bomb with a very slow fuse that went off in a glorious burst of a pilfered romance novel, Interview With the Vampire commercials on television, and and a cleverly folded pillow. It was one of the bigger “AHA!” moments in my life. My first self induced orgasm, at thirteen, was a glorious earth-shattering thing during which I actually saw stars.
Years later, it occurred to me that this happened while I was on my stomach with my face buried in a pillow, and that my first orgasm damn near killed me via suffocation. The “stars” were black blooms behind my eyes from my preoccupied but oxygen starved brain.
I remember being confused at the story in the bodice ripper novel, because all that seemed to happen was the man thrusting his “thobbing manhood” between her “nether lips.” I would find out in time that “lips” are slang for “labia” and the story, as well as my ensuing healthy appreciation for performing oral sex, became much more understandable.
–Submitted by That Toy Chick
I don’t really remember the first time my mom talked to me about sex. I remember her buying me a book called “Where Do Babies Come From?” before I went to sleep away camp for the first time, the summer after second grade. She was worried that kids would tell me things that were untrue and wanted me to have some understanding about it before the rumor mill got to me.
The only other explicit conversation I remember having with my mom was in 7th or 8th grade. I said, “Mom? What is ‘eating out’?” She told me that it was “when a guy stuck his tongue in your ‘hole.’”
When I was 17, I told my mother that I was thinking about having sex with my boyfriend, and my mother took me to get birth control. And that was the extent of our talks.
Because my mother and I never really spoke about sex and sexuality, I never really thought about my mother’s views on sex and sexuality. When I was in college, I became very interested in the subject of sexuality and did a ton of research on the topic. I began exploring my own. I got a job working at an adult toy store. Sex and sexuality were a huge part of my life.
My mother knew this and accepted it. We would have general conversations about things that had happened at work or I would relate stories of customers that had come in, but we never talked about OUR sex lives. However, I believe that it was because of my openness and open-mindedness about the subject that my mother eventually came to me to talk about her own sex life. I don’t know that my mother had ever been able to talk to anyone about her sex life before. She is fairly conservative, as are most of her friends, and it was not a subject that was seen as acceptable to talk about. So, I was a little shocked when she brought it up.
She came to visit me at school and we went out for drinks. And once she started talking, it all came out. The years and years of being unsatisfied with her sex life with my father. How, when they were first married, she would try to wear sexy lingerie for him and he never paid her any mind. How, in their 25 years of marriage, he had never let her give him a blow job, even though she always wanted to. How conservative and afraid to try new things he was. How, as he had gotten older, he began to have erectile difficulties and that made him so insecure that he was afraid to even attempt to have sex. And she cried.
I bought my mother her first vibrator shortly after that conversation. She thanked me profusely, and she loved it. And then she asked me to go shopping with her for things to bring on their 25th anniversary trip. We picked out things that would be fun, but wouldn’t intimidate my conservative father. Some lubricant. Some flavored massage oils. Edible body paints. A small vibrating cock ring. And through talking with me, and with my encouragement, my mother brought these things with her on the trip. And she got up the confidence to tell my father that she wanted to try them. She told him what she wanted. And he listened.
Their sex life is still a work in progress, and some people may find it odd that it ended up being her daughter that ended up helping my mother to begin to find her sexual self. But we are from two different generations, and my generation is more open to discussing issues of sex and sexuality. And it was my openness about the subject that finally encouraged my mother to come to me for help. I love that my mother and I have this kind of relationship. It may not be typical, and it may be a reversal of roles in a lot of ways, but it works for us.
And I couldn’t be more proud of my mother. She is proof that it’s never too late to find sexual satisfaction.
–Submitted by Britni from Oh My God, That Britni’s Shameless
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