Most of us don’t start out with a great template for a healthy sexuality. Our fear and compartmentalization of sexuality is something we learn when we are very little kids. Our society places a great taboo on children’s sexuality, which is likely motivated by our collective desire to protect our children from sexual violence. Fair enough—but shaming kids for having sexuality doesn’t do anything to protect them from abusers. Children do have sexuality, and that’s normal. It’s not a mature sexuality in the sense that they want to have sex with another person, but in that they can feel their genitals and can experience weird pleasurable sensations “down there” that make them curious. It’s natural for a kid to want to explore those sensations in their body, but when they are caught with their hands down their pants, some parents gasp in shock and immediately teach the child that “down there” is not a safe place for them to go. All that fear and anxiety hasn’t stopped one in five girls and one in twenty boys from experiencing sexual violence in childhood. That figure doesn’t even include the many incidents that go unreported.
The fact that children have individual experiences of their own sexuality is an important thing to acknowledge because it’s vital to maintain appropriate sexual boundaries with them. They need to know that no one has a right to their sexual bodies but them. Kids have excellent intuition about what kind of touch is good and what kind of touch is bad, and this is something a lot of us lose when we’re taught to feel nothing but shame about our sexuality. When a child’s sexual boundaries are violated by a caregiver, even when there’s no overt sexual contact, children are not given a chance to take ownership over their own sexual bodies. They learn that boundary-crossing by adults is normal. They are taught to doubt their own intuitions. Teaching kids shame doesn’t stop adults from taking advantage of them, but it might prevent the kids from getting help if something is wrong. Right out of the gate, many of us learn that sex is scary and unsafe, and it’s pretty hard for us to figure out our relationship with our own sexual boundaries.
Even if we don’t have any history of sexual abuse in childhood, most of us picked up some weird lessons about sex as kids—that is, if we talked about it at all. Then, freshly through the gates of puberty, we’re supposed to somehow instinctively understand what we’re supposed to do, how to be safe, how to treat each other, and how to communicate about what we want. Our only guidance comes from our equally confused peers, our awkward parents, the paltry sex education given in school, magazines, porn, or the wild world of the Internet. Needless to say, these schools of love tend to be somewhat lacking in useful information. If we’re lucky, we learn a thing or two about condoms, but it’s rare to be taught where the clitoris is on a vulva (or, ahem, what a vulva is). We rarely learn anything about pleasure except vaguely that the penis goes in the vagina and everyone is supposed to like that. It’s shocking how little the average adult knows about female anatomy. The full anatomical structure of the clitoris, which wraps around the vagina and extends deep into the body, was only discovered in 1998. I couldn’t find an actual statistic on how many people out there think women pee out of their vaginas, but I can tell you that a quick Google search resulted in fourteen separate articles explaining that no, honey, women don’t pee out of their vaginas. There’s a whole separate hole for that.
Thanks to our good buddy Freud and his assertion that only immature women need clitoral stimulation to orgasm, there have been generations of heterosexual couples containing one unsatisfied woman and one very confused man. Our society has been much harder on homosexual people in general, of course, but they may have one advantage over their hetero neighbors: they are probably having better sex. When your sex life is not completely dominated by some cultural script of what sex is supposed to look like and how it’s supposed to feel, you are free to play and actually enjoy the experience. In an interview with HuffPost Live, sex columnist Dan Savage points out that gay people may have better sex than straight people, because without a script telling them how it’s supposed to go they have to actually communicate. When a straight couple goes to bed, everyone knows what’s going to happen: once consent is obtained (ideally), penis enters vagina. “When two dudes go to bed together,” Savage explains, “they get to yes, they get to consent, and that’s the beginning of the conversation.” Considering that 25–30 percent of gay men don’t even have anal sex, straight people are confused about what’s supposed to happen next. If there’s no penetration, what do gay people do? “Well,” Savage explains to this imaginary straight questioner, “we do all kinds of other fun stuff that you can do too that would really improve your sex life!”
When we are stuck trying to play out a script of what we think sex is supposed to look like, we can miss out on plenty of fun. Even the straightest of us could benefit from queering up our sex a little, at least in terms of our willingness to experiment with a sex life beyond penis-in-vagina. More than one man I know who dates women has confessed to me that he learned all his first lessons about sex from porn, which caused a great deal of difficult unlearning when he finally came into contact with human women. One told me that he memorized a set of moves and simply went through them the first few times he had sex. “I don’t think I felt anything those first few times,” he explained. He only started to enjoy sex when he learned to let go of that performance, slow down, and actually be present with his partner.
When we can let go of those expectations, worlds can open up. We can touch all over our partner’s body: people have many erogenous zones, including the nipples, ears, back of the neck, top of the shoulder, inner thighs, and so on, and everyone’s zones are different. Trying to figure out what your partner responds to with a tongue, lips, or hands can be like a treasure hunt for hot spots. Skin to skin contact can feel amazing, even if it’s not genital contact. And genitals can be touched with hands, mouths, even breasts or thighs. Mouths can get so much pleasure from exploring another body, and so can hands. Genital-to-genital contact doesn’t always have to be about penetration, either. Vulvas love to be touched in all kinds of ways, and there are many more nerve endings in the outer regions, in the clitoris and entrance of the vagina, than inside it where all that thrusting happens. Penises also have a range of sensitivity, with most of the nerve endings located around the head of the penis. There can be lots of pleasure without any penetration at all. Thrusting madly as they do in porn is not the most creative, nor the most effective, way to enjoy sexual contact with another person. It’s certainly not the only way, anyway.
Reprinted with permission from Want: 8 Steps to Recovering Desire, Passion, and Pleasure After Sexual Assault by Julie Peters (Mango Publishing), available from Amazon and Bookshop.