Molly O'Keefe prevously wrote about her love of Bruce Springsteen, and is back with a discussion of how she – and we – learn about sex.
I never had a discussion with my parents about sex. Or even a vague and confusing birds and the bees conversation. Which is odd considering my dad was a high school health teacher and my mom was a nurse. Instead what I got was a musical montage of pornography, sexual health pamphlets and romance novels.
Growing up, my brother’s room was the cave of wonders and at every opportunity I was in there breaking stuff, eating secret stashes of candy and pop tarts and reading notes from his girlfriends. At some point my parents allowed him to put a lock on his door to keep me out. As you can imagine – this only made me rabid.
The second my brother left for college I was in his room.
I was eating his Swedish fish and going through his bookshelf when I found them: a stack of dirty magazines. I still vividly remember the full body pins and needles I felt looking at those Hustlers and Penthouses.
This was big. This was bad. This was AWESOME.
I was twelve.
Immediately I called all my friends to my house to see this and for a few months I was the most popular kid in the seventh grade. So much so, I had to move the magazines, one at a time, smuggled under my Strawberry Shortcake nightgown from my brother’s room to my own pig sty of a room. Just after Halloween my mother – tired of the slovenly mess I called home – began to clean my room. Starting under my bed where I kept the magazines.
I got called out of typing class to the office where my mother was on the phone. She asked me (in a terrifyingly calm voice considering, she’d found Spankalicious under her 12 year old daughter’s bed), where I’d gotten the magazines and instead of ratting out my brother (noble of me, I think) I ratted out one of the boys from my class. To this day I don't know what mom did with that information.
That night Mom worked so Dad and I ate dinner in front of the TV in the kind of silence that rightfully should have smothered me. Right after dinner I went to bed only to realize the Choose Your Own Adventure book I was reading needed the dice from the game that was in the TV room with my Dad. I knew if I went there was a good chance he’d say something about the magazines, but I REALLY wanted to read that book.
Any good book addict knows how this played out.
Dad didn’t look up from whatever game was on the TV and I had the game box in my hand and was halfway into the kitchen, thinking I was totally home free when Dad spoke.
“Molly?”
Oh, it was like my heart dropped to the center of the earth.
“Yeah, Dad.”
“You know what your mom found in your room? You know it’s not really like that.”
“Yeah, Dad.”
And that was it. There was no further discussion about the magazines. Or sex. Or what Dad meant by sex not being like that.
However, my father began leaving all kinds of pamphlets and books about sex and disease and birth control around the house during every slumber party. And my friends and I got a fairly thorough education.
A year later I began reading romance novels (thank you The Thorn Birds) and mom took me aside, while I was devouring every word Elizabeth Lowell ever wrote, and told me “You know, Molly. It’s not really like that.”
To which I responded, “Yeah, Mom.”
Obviously I had no idea. Was she talking about marriage? Relationships? Men? Gold mining? Sex?
The sexual messages I got from the pornography and the romance novels totally cancelled each other out. Romance told me that inexperience and naiveté about my body and sex was valued. Trust my partner to understand my body better than I did and pleasure would just kind of happen. Magically. Delivered in waves by manhoods.
I had no frame of reference for the pornography, but experience seemed like the prize. The more the better. And it was explicit – nothing vague about Hustler. But those bodies? Is that how I was supposed to look? Was that sexy? No one I knew looked like that – were we all lacking?
The middle ground between the porn and the romance was information, so thank God for the health pamphlets.
I would imagine there are a lot of women who learned about sex through the colorful euphemisms of the romance novels from the late 80’s early 90’s. Just like there are plenty of boys who learned about sex through their father’s stash of Playboys.
I’m over-generalizing obviously, but if boys learn about sex through pornography and women learn through romance novels is there any wonder sex at the beginning is so confusing? That we’ve got our expectations and politics so skewed? We’re not learning or valuing the same things. And it feels like far too often girls are taught to value emotion more than information, which we all know can be manufactured and faked and has the potential to make women victims.
Information is not the same as experience. And arming girls with information is not the same as sending them naked into the streets. Information protects. Information can create valuable experience, healthy experience. Girls need all the information they can get.
For a moment I thought all of this was moot in the internet age – because anyone with an internet connection can find out plenty about sex but with recent legislature in some states sending women's sexual health back to the middle ages – I think it might be more important than ever. And since a cell phone picture can go viral in an hour sex and the internet has become a whole new realm of confusion and potential victimization.
Romancelandia is the one place I know (besides a good mom's group, but that's a different discussion) where sex from the fantastical to the realistic, from the extraordinary to the awful is talked about. And celebrated.
Now, I know it's not romance's mandate to inform or educate. Neither is it pornography's. But that it's a by-product we can't really deny.
And frankly, I am totally heartened by the fact that if a girl is learning about sex through romance novels being published right now she’s getting a more powerful message about her body. About the dangers of sexual naiveté. About how pleasure isn’t sinful and it doesn't arrive without direction.
I remember with almost the same pins and needles sensation as finding the magazines, discovering – as an adult – Robin Schone. For me, Schone's erotic historicals were the first romance novels I'd read that had heroines taking their limited sexual experience and naiveté in hand and searching out an education. This was the first I'd read about female masturbation, about women having a period (except for some very vague Jennifer Blake novel when I was much younger). There were detailed conversations about sex and sex organs which, in direct contrast to the Judith McNaught historicals I'd been reading – were mind-blowing.
For me, Schone kicked open a door and more authors are trickling through, bringing realism to their sex. Ruthie Knox (Ride With Me) and Courtney Milan (The Duchess War) have written memorable female masturbations scenes. Anne Calhoun's latest (Uncommon Passion) features a heroine on a fact-finding mission about sex and pleasure and the three Cara McKenna books I've read (Willing Victim, After Hours and Unbound) feature characters that talk and make decisions about sex and kink and pushing personal boundaries in a way that I found astonishingly equal and informed. Romance novels increasingly depict healthy sexual relationships as part of a woman's full and happy life, which, when you think about it, is no small miracle.
So, what about you? Did Catherine Coulter teach you about sex? Did you find your brother’s dirty magazines? And if you have daughters how do you plan on talking to them?
Molly O'Keefe is the RITA® award-winning author of more than twenty-five romance. Stay tuned shortly for a giveaway of her newest book, The Wild Child.
For anyone looking for a newer resource for information on sex, bodies, even gender identity, etc., have I got a great book for you: Sex: a book for teens by Nikol Hasler (http://amzn.com/0981973329).
I work at a public library that is full of middle and high schoolers everyday after school, and 4/5s of their conversation is about who is getting with whom and calling each other names or throwing around sexual insults that none of them understand properly. (I’ve almost given up explaining to them what it really means when they call someone/something gay). When this book walked into the library we started handing it out to the kids left and right, mostly to correct their truly warped vision of what sex entails (‘no, I’m not going to to draw you a picture of what a circumcised penis looks like or describe whether it is better or worse to have for sex; here’s a freaking book’).
Also, it’s not just for teens. I totally checked this one out to take home and read myself, and it’s surprising to find out what myths you believed and what facts you managed to miss in 28 years of being an intelligent person who finds information for a living. I don’t remember getting a true sex talk from my Mom (Dad was out of the picture), and the romances I started pilfering from my gram’s bookshelf I knew (even as a teen) were less than factually authoritative. I still remember, years before I became a librarian, seeing a beautiful illustrated copy of the Joy of Sex in my local library and feeling utterly unable to check it out although I really wanted to know what all the fuss was about. I still feel a bit wistful about it.
Rachael:
you can get the joy of sex as an ebook. just found it on amazon. (which will do very odd things to my ‘recommended reads’ now.
I’ve been reading all the comments and loving them! Thank you for all the ways you’ve opened up and shared what is intensely personal and sometimes really painful. This has been such a cool thing. Thank you.
@Sarah:
“I’m 100% certain that when I was a tween/teen all of the useful knowledge I had about sex came from Sassy Magazine’s sex column (this will definitely date me).”
Oh, Sassy. I learned so much from Sassy. It was the only place I’d ever heard of toxic shock syndrome, and if I remember correctly they lost advertisers because they ran articles about it. Being honest about what goes on with my vagina? Amazing to me. The level of frankness and honesty in that magazine is something I still miss in publications for women. Someone scanned them all and put them online and I won’t even go let myself look at 1 or 2 because I know I’ll lose 9 hours of my day reading back issues.
Another book that really rocked my world in terms of the science and changes that go on within and around one’s vagina: What’s Up Down There?: Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist If She Was Your Best Friend. It was so fascinating, my husband read it too. I thought I’d known a lot about what vaginas do and how they work (I’d had two kids by the time I read this book) but I learned a LOT.
I was incredibly fortunate to have a mother who spoke honestly, openly – and positively! – about sex. She’d been widowed and 27 and thrown back in the dating pool with three year old me in tow. She told me that the first time a man asked her for a blow job, she was horrified and totally shocked. (And then said “Your poor father – I never even knew I could do that for him.”)
She wanted me to have a better picture. It also helped that I found and read her copy of The Joy of Sex when I was 12, which I’m not sure she planned on. She encouraged me to wait until I was in love and then to let her know and she’d take me to her doc for birth control. Just before my 17th birthday, I told her I’d like to see her doc and she, knowing how head over heels I was for my BF, said she wasn’t surprised. I did the same for my stepdaughter.
And I want to weigh in on the 23 yo Anonymous – there’s not a thing wrong with you, honey! I’ve got a lovely sex life with my man of nearly 23 years and I still enjoy a session with the vibrator, too. Enjoy!
Friends: any recommendations for informative reading material for a 28 year old virgin? The Joy of Sex?
I got most of my information from an illustrated book my parents handed me in late elementary school. Then I read The Girl With the Pearl earring in hight school, which was the first time I could actually picture sex. The rest came from an anthropological study on freshmen at Rutgers that I read for a class freshman year of college, and subsequently from romance novels. And then there was the friend in grad school who told me, “don’t sleep with a guy who’s super drunk. It’ll be terrible.”
So yeah, now I’m finally embarking on internet dating, and wanting to feel relatively prepared for when the time comes.
Oh, and a big shout out to the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You. They don’t get too graphic into the act of sex because it’s a family friendly podcast, but they talk about many sex-related things (birth control access, STIs, yeast infections, etc). It’s lovely to hear the word vagina spoken aloud like it’s not a dirty secret.
This is a great thread. I can’t resist adding my own contribution. My mom also didn’t give me a sex talk (a fact which is very incongruous given the fact that she was actively involved in the feminist movement in the 70s and 80s—and still is, really). She admitted recently that she thinks she probably didn’t do very well on the sex ed front. I decided not to point out that not only did she not give me the “talk” (except a very clinical discussion about puberty/periods), but she ridiculed my romance-reading habit and in particular, would read aloud sex scenes in books I had left lying around with her friends and laugh hysterically. As a shy teenager, I was mortified and began hiding my reading material. I still have to fight my instincts to be intensely private about all things sexual, even with my hubby.
I still remember reading my first Harlequin presents which ended with a full sex scene (not just a passionate kiss). I glommed onto all the Judy Blume books, and then as I got older, the Judith Krantz ones, which I adored beyond all reason. I also read a LOT of old school romance. As a means of getting sex education, this wasn’t really ideal, since the sex was portrayed in a lot of books in a very idealized, sometimes “purple” fashion. Somehow, it was never messy or funny or awkward. It was a shock when I finally did lose my virginity and it didn’t match any of the descriptions that I had read about.
These days, I am particularly attracted to books where the sex is portrayed more realistically—where it is not perfect all the time, or where there is the need for some communication between the partners. I don’t find many books like this, so I am more inclined to just avoid the ones that seem too unrealistic. And I totally agree with Sarah’s recommendation of the book “What’s Up Down There?”. I also only read it after I’d been in a relationship for many years and had had two kids. I wish it had existed when I was a teenager.
As a mother of sons who are 9 and 11, I am starting to talk to them about sex. We have several books that my 11 year old has read, and I have made it clear to him that I will answer ANY question he will ask. And he has asked a few doozies—“what is an orgasm?” was the trickiest one to answer so far. I am sure they will get trickier! I feel it is my role (among others) to help my sons understand female sexuality, as well as their own (even if they end up preferring men). And to teach them above all to respect women, to always always use a condom, and to make sure that their partners are consenting.
I don’t remember either of my parents ever talking to me about sex. I did get the where babies come from speech when i was about 10 and i remember my mom being extremely happy that she was able to talk to me about it when her mom just left pamphlets out for her and her sisters. I still sometimes have nightmares about that—she gave me way too much information about that and nothing about why someone would want to have sex. This made things very confusing as I got older, as I knew about the result of the act but not the act itself.
My actual sex education started when I was in 7th grade and the boys in my class started making fun of me because I didn’t know what certain things were. The one that really sticks out for me was the day the guy sitting next to me asked me what a prick was. At 12, I told him that this is what made Sleeping Beauty fall into her coma-like sleep. This cracked him up so much that he then asked me other things that I had no idea about either, things like “what does being gay mean?” I guess in his mind the fact that i didn’t know what a prick was meant that I was gay. I remember telling him that I had no idea and that we probably shouldn’t be talking about these things in school. He let it drop for a little while, but then a few weeks later we got into a conversation about our tastes in music. When I told him and the other guys sitting there, including the guy 12 year old me thought was totally dreamy, that I liked to listen to my parents’ Elton John cassettes, they all gasped and told me that he was gay and I shouldn’t listen to his music. Curious, I asked what that meant and I got a very crude and homophobic response as to what “gay” was. At the time, I let that get to me and stopped listening to Elton John. The worst part of that was that one of the guys sitting in that circle was gay and was only starting to come to terms with that. I fear it set things backwards for him.
After this, my education came mainly from romance novels, and yeah, it may not be like that, but it was more information than I ever had before. It taught me that sex and desire were not bad words, which in my world they had always been. I posted on here a few years back about how my mom taught me to view sex as being the worst thing that could ever happen to a girl, especially if said girl was not married. Romance novels showed me that this wasn’t necessarily true. Can sex screw up a person’s life? Of course it can. Hell, it got a president impeached, so yeah, it can be a bad thing, but it isn’t ALWAYS bad.
(My brother never got the sex talk either. By the time he got to the age where it was necessary to talk about sex, my dad had left and my mom didn’t feel comfortable explaining things to him. As far as I know, he still doesn’t know about sex, and even though I know it is unreasonable to believe a 24 year old man doesn’t, i choose to believe that the mention of sex still makes him turn red from embarrassment.)
I never had that conversation either with my parents. Mostly I think because they divorced when I was 12 and I lived with my father and he sure wasn’t going to do it.
I was introduced to romance novels via two sources: the nuns (yes, the nuns) at my Catholic girls’ school and my grandmother (who read the racier variety – the nuns preferred Harlequins).
I’ve often wondered just how much influence these books had on me and my life trajectory. At university in the US many years ago I met a French engineer and ended up moving to France and getting married when I was 24 (right after graduation). Was I in love? Absolutely and we’ve been married now for 23 years (we live in Versailles, France). But was I also in love with the idea of a romantic adventure fueled by all those happy ever afters? The answer is “yes” and between the fantasy of being a foreign bride in an exotic locale and the reality of being an immigrant, well, let’s just say that my feelings today about it are complicated. http://thefranco-americanflophouse.blogspot.fr/2011/11/narcissism-of-difference.html
This is a path already traced by generations of women. A friend recently recommended the book The Wilder Shores of Love by Lesley Branch and I’m far enough into it to recommend it to you.
It is really interesting to read about everyone’s individual experiences in self education about sex. My parents NEVER talked to me about sex. My mother didn’t even talk to me about menstruation. I learned about it from a pamphlet my pediatrician gave me.
One time when I was in 7th grade some boys at school asked me if I was a virgin, and I wasn’t sure what they were talking about. Although, since these boys were asking about it I was pretty sure it was bad. I went home and asked my Dad what a virgin was. He proceeded to lecture me for about an hour on how ships that have never been to sea are called ‘virgin’ ships. And then I got to hear about how ships were made, and what kind of wood they used to make them, and how the sails were made etc. Not one word about sex.
I knew those boys weren’t asking me if I was a boat. So something was clearly up with that. I discovered romance novels soon afterward, but reliable sex education was nowhere to be found until I got internet access in college.
I wrote a long comment yesterday that seems to be stuck in moderation. Short version – someone’s question question about what exactly counts as virginity reminded me of the awesome Autostraddle ‘is it sex?’ flowchart. http://autostraddle.tumblr.com/image/13292944920
Also, when I was a virgin, I thought that I was a virgin until I had piv intercourse. But I see it more as a continuum now. I started having oral sex a few years earlier than intercourse and I had multiple firsts (first oral with a man, with a woman, first intercourse, etc).
No, Catherine Coulter did not teach me anything about sex. Woodiwiss or Lindsey perhaps. But I found more erotic scenes in thrillers and suspense books, like Ken follet’s for instance. And no, I did not find my brother’s dirty magazines -but my father’s, and I found them interesting.
I think that you have to talk your children as something natural, as a recreational activity between two people in love that gives pleasure for both parts. But I have to recognize that is not an easy thing to do.
LOVE this conversation!
To the Anon who called her/himself a 28 year old virgin and to EVERYONE, there’s a great new sex ed video series on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/sexplanations/videos
I don’t actually agree with every point she makes, but the quality of the factual explanation is unbelievable and highly digestible. Well worth your time – I’m in my mid 30’s, married over a decade, and learned a LOT.
If nothing else, her explanation of the anatomy of the vulva is the best I ever saw.
When I was about 9 or 10, my mother explained to me the mechanics of sex, and when I said, “Ew! Gross,” she replied, “No, actually it feels nice.”
Looking back, I think this was the most important bit of sexual education I ever received. She framed the whole topic for me in a way that was sex-positive yet didn’t set my expectations unreasonably high. “It feels nice.”
She died of cancer a few years later. My dad was not comfortable discussing sex, but when I entered puberty, he bought me several excellent books on the subject, which I read cover to cover. I also received a fairly comprehensive sex education in school. It was fairly clinical, but it covered birth control and STDs, and we even had a class debate about abortion. The books explained female masturbation, by the way, which I eventually became curious enough to try out.
I’m always a little dumbfounded when I hear people claim that if you teach kids about sex, they’ll have sex early and often. In my particular case, this was not true. Growing up, I knew I was not ready for sex, and I told all my boyfriends, “I’m not going to have sex until I turn 18.” I recommend this technique; it works. It stopped the guys from pestering because they knew exactly how long they had to wait. And I did wait.
Knowing about sex from a young age didn’t turn me into a sexaholic. Rather, it turned me into someone who had some expectations about what I should get out of sex (“it feels nice”) and who knew very well the risks and how to avoid them.