Aren’t you embarrassed? TMI. I didn’t need to hear that. Wow, you’re brave.
Talking about sex is bound to elicit one or many of these reactions. But there’s nothing unpleasant about discussing sex, and in fact, we should be discussing it more. Women are made to feel like talking about sex is awkward and inappropriate. Sexuality is an isolating territory to navigate on your own.
There’s a turning point in a girl’s life when she watches Sex and the City from beginning to end for the first time. The SATC women—Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda—teach us what to wear, which cocktails to drink, how much is acceptable to spend on shoes, where to eat, and who to sleep with, how often, and in what ways. More than anything, Sex and the City makes women want to have sex. The series depicts sex as something that can be causal, spontaneous, empowering, or sometimes even glamorous.
I first started watching Sex and the City when I was 13, sneaking episodes in after my parents went to bed. Though I didn’t understand the half of it, it was the first time I’d seen sexual women on screen. Since then, I’ve rewatched the series more times than I can count, as have my girlfriends. I’ve found that with each watch, we all increasingly long to become the kind of unabashedly sexual women we see on the screen. Seeing women talking unapologetically about orgasms, threesomes, and tantric sex at brunch is important, even when it may not seem like it.
My girlfriends and I were 16 when we first started having conversations about female intimacy and pleasure. Sitting at a table at our neighborhood Mexican restaurant, we stumbled upon the topic of female pleasure, dubbing female masturbation as “the feminist movement.” We had all thought we were abnormal for masturbating as teenagers, and we talked about the fear that pervaded our ability to tell and talk to each other about it.
We’ve always been on very different ends of the spectrum when it comes to sexual liberation. I have girlfriends with various points of view about sex, from the friend who’d never admit they partake in “the feminist movement” to the friend who gifts us all rose vibrators. Regardless, it never ceases to amaze me how little all of my girlfriends and I know.
In our contemporary culture that claims to be sexually liberated, women still struggle to talk honestly about their sex lives. There exists an impossible double standard to simultaneously exaggerate positive sexual experiences, as well as feel embarrassed for encountering sexual struggles. Our lack of ability to talk comfortably about sex is a product of a sex education that taught us little to nothing about the mechanics of sex.
As my girlfriends and I became sexually active for the first time, we shared the “pee after sex” advice. Beginning to resent our uneducated sexual partners, we helped show each other where the clitoris is. Over the years, our conversations ebbed and flowed in content: we asked each other what morning-after pill we should take, if it was bad that we usually didn’t have an orgasm, what sex positions worked and felt the best, and how we were all enjoying our rose toys.
There is something sacred about sitting with my girlfriends at a table together to share wisdom in a safe and supportive environment. SATC’s fierce female foursome figured out how to ask for the kind of wild sex lives they wanted, and they gave us permission to do and say things that previously seemed too scandalous or embarrassing.
Talking about sex is healthy, especially when it’s centered on our physical health—what’s normal and what’s not. There’s value in discussing our sexual experiences, even if it’s just laughing about what happens when things don’t go according to plan.
If we don’t openly talk about sex, most of what we know comes from either sex education or mainstream porn, both of which often provide little information or harmful misconceptions. My girlfriends and I are now able to talk, and have talked, about almost everything. It’s totally normal to have weird smells, interest in various kinks, and all the other kinds of queries we have as sexual beings. Without normalizing these conversations, we’ll never get that reassurance, and we’ll keep feeling abnormal when we’re really not.
There are very few institutions that give women permission to talk, learn, and understand sex, let alone how to enjoy and embrace it. No one teaches us that women can have sex just for fun like men do. Girlhood and womanhood mean and encompass so many things, but dialogues about sexual education, pleasure, and liberation need to become a more prominent part of the narrative. It’s okay to be curious, even from a young age. Sex is too fun and important of a topic to stay silent about, and it broadens our perspective.
Written Anonymously for the Independent.