moominmuppet

So, the post about music got me thinking about the books and other events that were associated with the development of my sexuality. And when I look at my history, I absolutely see direct lines of connection between how I learned, and how I am today. I'm mixing sexuality and reproductive health in these stories, because it's all tangled up together.



I've talked in the past about having an excellent sex ed at home; my family was always casual about clothing, and questions were answered from the time I pointed at Dad and asked "What's that?" when I was 3 or so. It was all information at the level I was capable of comprehending/processing at that age (for a long time my notion of sex didn't really include any movement at all -- I just knew the penis went into the vagina, and I visualized it as a bit of an injection sort of thing), but it was excellent and thorough, and never a verboten topic in the house. I grew up knowing that masturbation was a good and healthy thing, it was just something you do in _private_ (unlike many small children who play with themselves in some environment where it embarrasses their parents, and are told they're being bad). My folks are mainstream, and very religious (Dad's an Episcopal priest), but they always saw sexuality as a wonderful and healthy thing within a married relationship, and masturbation as a perfectly appropriate outlet prior to that. Obviously I didn't absorb all their specific values, but all-in-all, I was raised in a very sex-positive environment, and I'm very grateful for that. Best sign of that: in our huge basement library, the sexuality books were on the shelf in the reference section, right next to the dictionaries and encyclopedias. When I wanted access, I had it, along with tacit approval, based on that location and accessibility.

I don't entirely know the timing on the following, but I've arranged them in what I suspect is a roughly chronological order.

How Babies Are Made: I don't remember the exact timing on this, but most reasonable assumption is that it was when Mom was pregnant with my younger brother James, so I would've been about 4. I know there was lots of explaining around that (including learning all about lactation after he was born). I had a kids book, title unknown, with very seventies paintings of a woman and a man as she goes through pregnancy. I wish I could remember enough to find a copy on one of the out-of-print book sites. I'm almost certain there was a soft-focus sort of image of them having sex at the beginning, and I know there were images of the birth.

The Chicken Story: 1st grade. Obviously I'd started getting some sex ed; at show and tell one day I told about seeing a chicken and rooster mating at the zoo. I really didn't understand why this upset the teacher (that was also the year I told my classmates Santa Claus was dead, since Saint Nicholas lived a long time ago).

The Bible: I was really religious. I spent a lot of time reading and studying the bible. I also knew where all the dirty bits were, and I studies those _extra_ hard from a very early age.

The Visible Woman: Oh, I loved the Visible Woman! She had two different bellies, and you could switch out the pregnant uterus and non-pregnant.

First view of "real" porn: My next-door neighbor Cheryl had two older teen brothers. Once at her house, in the basement, she showed me a picture of a man standing up, and a woman with her mouth on his penis. I wasn't shocked in the least. Nope. I knew all about how you could superimpose images on each other *nodnod*. (so entirely outside my frame of reference I didn't realize 'til years later what I'd seen -- at the time, it was so obvious that no one would actually do that!).

Playing doctor: I only ever did a small amount of play with other kids; I lived on a relatively desolate dirt road; I did a bit of "seeing how we all pee and poop" stuff with some other kids in church when we were little, and a bit of other play over the years, but really minimal, and I wouldn't really describe most of it as teaching me anything substantial.

Dirty playing cards: In our giant game and puzzle armoire, we had dozens of decks of cards. One of the decks was a 50's pin-up set. I thought they were nifty, and entertainingly scandalous. I also embarrassed my Dad thoroughly one Sunday when they were playing bridge after church with some parishioners, Dad asked me to run home (next door) for some cards, and I thought it'd be funny to bring him those. Poor Dad.

The Textbooks: Soon after James was born, Mom went to nursing school. Thereafter, I had access to all her text books, and read all the reproductive health sections quite early (probably before age 10 or 11, I think. I still have those textbooks, as mementos. And just in general, I was fascinated by anatomy, and had an Anatomy Coloring Book and such. It also means I saw a dissected cadaver vagina and uterus pic at a very young age. Odd image to process.

Police Academy and Revenge of the Nerds: Saw them both in the theatre with my Dad; my folks were much more strict about my exposure to violence than sexuality (I didn't even have waterguns as a kid -- I had water squirty fish!). I loved both, partially because they were so scandalously full of sexual humor that titillated me in weird ways.

5th Grade Anatomy class: In fourth grade I was at a great private school with a really liberal approach. My 5th grade anatomy class, as well as including multiple dissections, included a sexual education and health section. I learned about AIDS in school, in 5th grade, in 1985/6. Holy hell, ahead of the curve! Go them! We talked extensively about the physical, psychological, and sociological aspects of sexuality. We watched a human birth on video. We got an opportunity to submit anonymous questions every day. About five years ago, I went back and found Jane and Emery (my homeroom and science teachers, respectively) to thank them for all their contributions to my education (way beyond the topics of this post). Oh, and we had those incredibly cute kids sex ed books with the little cheerful cartoon characters in class -- I think I've seen them for sale in recent years, but I don't recall the titles. My sex ed classes in 6th grade and high school, in two other schools, were utterly abyssmal in comparison.

First sex scene in a book: My family has a powerful tradition of reading aloud to each other. Even though we all learned to read very young, we continued that for years. One of my first introductions to Scifi and Fantasy, and the beginning of my love of it, was Mom reading me Dragonsong, Dragonsinger, and Dragondrums. Toward the end of Dragondrums, there's an exceedingly non-graphic "fade to black" sort of sex scene between Menolly and Sebell, and at the time, it seemed so graphic and overwhelming (and exciting).

Piers Anthony: Anthony's humor tends toward the ribald and punnish, usually in combination. I think it's _only_ kids who can tolerate it long, because it all seems so wonderfully dirty, and the humor's about at our level at the time. Read most of the Xanth series in 4th and 5th grade. Thought plenty of it was wonderfully dirty and scandalous. Liking his stuff, I branched out. Anyone else read Anthonology? For a 10-year-old, there was a hell of a lot of graphic, kinky, scary sexual imagery. It was pretty mindbending. Anthony is also the first time I remember being embarrassed about a book I was reading -- I was at a church event, reading one of the Incarnation of Immortality books, and some adult guy in the church who kind of creeped me out kept trying to find out what I was reading, and I really, really didn't want him to know it was a book with sex scenes, and was terrified that it was blindingly obvious.

My mental association with Children of a Lesser God: will forever be my Mom and her best friend talking about how sex in a pool is much less fun than it seems it should be, and how water washes away all the lubrication. (it was out in '86, so I must've been 11 or 12)

Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman: I just told the story here in a previous post, so just a placeholder note, really.

How to Teach Your Children About Sex... (without making a complete fool of yourself): It's by the Berensteins, of Berenstein Bear fame. It's a collection of very 70s little cartoons about kids and sex ed, and it's actually quite funny even today. Another one from the sexuality collection in the basement.

Kinflicks: I read this pretty young, because I had some sense that it had some sexy bits. It did, and several that rather fascinated me, but I was way too young for it, and it mostly just freaked me out and confused me. Might've been my first exposure to the concepts of lesbians and vibrators, though. I keep meaning to go back and reread it, see what it's like now. Haven't brought myself to do it yet, largely I still have that gut "freaked out" feeling about it (there was a ORV accident of some sort that resulted in a shocking freak beheading, I think?).

Titters: The first collection of humor by women: Still alternately amuses and confuses me as much today as it did then. Wow. Bizarre. If you ever have a chance, you must check it out. If you're at my place, I actually have this, along with most of the other books I talk about here, since I claimed them all from Mom and Dad's library as they've pared down in recent years. Introduced many concepts that were foreign to me, but not exactly in contexts that were clarifying, to say the least.

Nude, 1920: A beautiful little book of "french" postcards. I loved it. Probably the first pornographic images I ever saw. Mom and Dad had a collection of sexuality books, but Dad didn't have the usual personal porn stash, so modern mags and movies came very late in life for me.

Playboy's ribald classics: We had two volumes of these. In retrospect, they're really remarkably tame. Although I was excited by the idea of them, I don't remember them doing remarkably much for me at the time, either. (there's also a collection of Playboy's Limericks).

The Sensuous Woman, by J: I remember rereading this one a lot. Very dated, but kind of fascinating. I should reread it and see what I think of it these days.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask) Oh, the rampant misinformation in this book! Fascinating to me at the time, though.

The Sex Book: So out-of-date these days, but BEST BOOK EVAR! Loved this one. Big full-page black-and-white photos of people having sex, A-Z explanations of everything, even a list of slang and medical terminology, so I finally had a way of translating between the language I used and the language my friends used (finding that page caused about a four-year backlog of dirty jokes to finally make sense!)

Mom's romance novels: I'd skim them for graphic sex scenes, the more intense the better. I think I was more embarrassed about the possibility of getting caught reading (ew!) romance novels than anything else. Still, it was probably some of the earlier actual erotica I read, aside from the Playboy stories I mentioned earlier, and these were at least better than those...

Time Pressure: A scifi snag from the used book sale at my local library. My first introduction to group sex and something that looked rather polyamorous. Made a huge impression on me, and Spider's still one of my all-time favorite authors; I have that copy to this day. In later years, Spider's worldview continued to affect me, and still does. I doubt my personal world looks all that remarkably foreign to other Callahanians.

SF/F: It's really not surprising that as a burgeoning SF/F geek, most of the sex scenes I read in my teens were in various SF/F books. And I tended to seek them out and dogear them.

And I'm running out of steam, and if you're still reading I just plain shocked, so just a few other notable points:

RHPS: I know it's just a fabulously campy movie, but Rocky Horror, including the experience of getting dressed up and attending, was probably some of the very first introduction of kink, even on a fantastic imaginary sort of level, in my whitebread world. I was 15 the first time I got dressed up in a Janet outfit and saw it, and it made a difference (Janet made sense at the time; I was a virgin myself then -- in later years I always identified with Magenta so much more).

First porn movie: This was with my friend Dan and some of his friends. I was the youngest and least experienced by far (I was 15 or 16, they must've all been 18-21 or so). It amuses me to look back and realize that I was hanging out with some of the only out people anywhere in my world, but pretty oblivious to it at the time. I specifically remember Sheila yelling at the screen "Virgin my ass! You could drive a Mac truck through that girl!" It was a funny, weird, awkward, I was embarrassed to really look right at the screen in front of all these people with more of a clue than I had...

First dirty mags: I think it's entirely possible this wasn't 'til college, and encountering the massive, massive collection at Gump's. It was, I think, something of a group effort, in the way that massive collegiate collections often are. I had a lot of fun flipping through them, pretending to be less shocked and aroused and confused than I was. Gump's is also where I really started seeing porn regularly, and Gump was one of my favorite people in town to talk to about porn, because he was one of the only who had a similar level of interest in it on an academic/theoretical level, as well as a personal level (within a year or two I was actively following what was going on in the mainstream industry, and he and I were the only ones I knew who followed that sort of thing). If he weren't a tiny little guy who only likes tiny little women, I'd've jumped him years ago. He's still one of my favorite people on the planet, despite how rarely I see him. And we still geek about smut.

First online interactions with sexuality: When I got to Kenyon in '91, age 16, having lost my virginity the previous summer, and having had my first awkward threesome less than a month later, there were old Dec terminals in computer rooms in each dorm. Some of us took to it like a fish to water. My friend R went through a string of doomed internet boyfriend relationships and was the first I knew to do so (doomed because of teenage idealism and expectations), while two other friends began openly exploring BDSM in ways that thoroughly shocked the campus, largely as a result of online explorations. I was on the computers all the time, but I wasn't that daring at all. I wandered into the "adults" chat rooms (like #hottub), and was pleasantly scandalized. We all sent each other ASCII Pron, and I learned to joke and chat and flirt online, and the fun of anonymous interactions. At some point pretty early on in college I found alt.sex.bondage, and got totally hooked on elfsJournal Entries of Kennet Shardik, which he was just releasing them. Those were a major introduction to a lot of sexual concepts for me, albeit within a fantasy context. I started collecting written erotica that I found online and that made me hot. The next year, after my first tattoo, I got involved with rec.arts.bodyart, and that was the first time I met people from online in real life (see my piercing story repost a few entries back). I also encountered the word polyamory for the first time, on alt.polyamory, but was totally unable to wrap my head around it as something people might really be doing in real life, and not just playing about online.

Bio 4 (Female Sexuality): Taught by the most hardcore, kickass 2nd-wave feminist bulldyke on campus (ok, at that time, the _only_ one). I'm still in touch with her. This class probably changed more about my life than any other class at Kenyon, and that's not for lack of competition. I took it junior year, I think? Intensive study of every aspect of female sexuality, from hormones and biology to sociology and feminism. For my class project, I got a pelvic from the school gyn, and wrote it up in detail for inclusion in a student guide. As an optional event, I saw Betty Dodson's Sex for One masturbation workshop on video with about two dozen other women from the class. It's when I learned what fibrocystic breast condition is, and finally understood the confusing texture in my own breasts. This was the class that introduced me to Our Bodies Ourselves, and A New View of a Woman's Body (including photos of the huge variety of perfectly normal ways women can look). Even having done plenty of reading and exploring myself, even being well on my way in the list of women's and gender studies courses at Kenyon, this class blew my socks off, and opened up so many possibilities. I cried the last day, I so didn't want it to be over. It really feels, in retrospect, that this was the event that gave me the context to truly develop my own autonomy and agency as it relates to my body and my sexuality.

And one last mention, because I simply can't leave it out. Although I think my earliest sex-activist readings were from Susie Bright, and she has continued to be influential, as have many other sex-positive feminists, Real Live Nude Girl, by Carol Queen, rocked my world. On its axis. When I met her this past year at the traveling Erotic Short Film Festival, I told her about the day I read her words (in an imagined letter to her mother, by then deceased), about how she could never communicate to her mother how important sex was in her life what a journey she was making of it. That. That hit home so hard I still remember exactly where I was sitting when I read it. (outside the Drexel, on a gorgeous sunny day) She was also my first introduction to the idea of patient-instructing, way back then. There was a chapter about her agreeing to be a model for medical students, and what that was like for her. I remember thinking then that I'd love to do it, and it was too bad it wasn't an option anywhere near where I lived. Thanks to her, I was fully primed to jump straight into the program when I moved to Cleveland and discovered one here.

OK, I've apparently spent all shift writing this. Must stop. Must stop before I start rhapsodizing about the feminists and sexuality activists who've fed my heart, soul, and mind as an adult, who've modeled ways of living in the world that have deeply influenced me, given me courage and a sense of community and a perpetual challenge.



Incidentally, my dreams this morning were some of the most graphic and sex-filled I've had in a long time. And I can't remember a bit of it except that this was the case. Argh!!!!