Stuffies

Like Vernacchio’s students, I have difficulty rationalizing facts (“70 percent of women do not orgasm through vaginal penetration alone”) with logistics (One student tells Abraham that “when she and her boyfriend ‘do anything, we just end up having sex’”). Like them, I struggle with communicating with men who say they want to make me feel good, but feel “very insecure” if they don’t implicitly understand how to do that. Like them, I have struggled to align my feminism with what I actually want in bed. One girl told Abraham that “she doesn’t enjoy cunnilingus, but taking the personal is political to heart, she asked her boyfriend to do it anyway: if she was expected to service him orally, he should have to return the favor.” I could have provided Abraham that sound bite, too.

If we miss out on the basics at a young age, when do we evolve into full sexual adults, people who know what we want and how to get it? Proponents of “disaster prevention” sex ed seem to think that if we teach kids about sex at a young age, they’ll mature too quickly. I was educated on that assumption, and I’m still waiting to really grow up.