The Best You'll Ever Have (3 page)

This book is a first step toward normalizing any sexual conversation and exploration. Men need a lot of education, and they need to change their thinking as well, and they’re next. But because women take a leadership role in intimacy, I want to address women first. (If you are a lesbian, I hope you’ll overlook the heterosexual bias in how this book is written. I don’t mean to offend.)

“If sex is such a natural phenomenon, how come there are so many books on how to do it?” —Bette Midler

“Sex comes naturally” doesn’t ring true. “Nature” is an idealized myth buried under many layers of our culture, including our own experiences, media, relationships, education, and so on. Everything must be learned, from math to reading to blow-drying our hair—and sex is no different. As I’ve already mentioned, the huge gaps in our sexual education (fear, shame, silence, etc.) shorten the learning curve. Harry Truman said, “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.” So it seems to me that you might as well build on other people’s sexual learning curves, which might be steeper than yours.

I’d say my curve is pretty damn steep. I’m going to give you all I’ve got. I’ll be delicate yet candid and hopefully not off-putting, although that can be hard to accomplish. Talking about sex can be shocking or embarrassing. Even someone with an open mind will blush when exposed to words that usually go unmentioned. But momentary embarrassment seems like a very small price to pay in exchange for learning how to expand our pleasure horizons and giving our partners new experiences that will get better and better as we boldly go where few women have gone before.

I trust that you’ll be able to relate to my experiences as well as identify with the women’s stories I’ve collected along the way. I also hope that you’ll feel confident enough to share your own thoughts and ideas with me via e-mail at
[email protected]
or at a Safina Salon. This book—part autobiography, part history, with real stories and voices throughout—is as much a conversation as it is a concrete, practical sex guide (including all the signposts and directions needed to take you where you want to go). Ideally, my conversational style will launch many frank discussions with your friends. Whether these talks start with the question, “Am I normal?” or not, the conclusions will be the same. This book will prove that you are not alone and that you are normal.

The C Word

Show of hands. Who remembers hearing
the word “clitoris” in fifth grade sex-ed class? Anyone? I sure didn’t. I first heard this particular C word in college, circa 1990 (I’d heard the other C word way before then and hadn’t liked the sound of it one bit). I didn’t get a long hard look at a clitoris until my late 20s, and that was the one I had on me. Since I hadn’t seen any others, I was surprised by what I saw in the hand mirror. It was small and red and oddly shaped, if I was even looking at the right part. I worried I might be deformed. The whole area looked misshapen.
Now
I know that most women have this same fear and that none of us are deformed. But my sexual education took decades, starting with my fifth grade health class.

Chapter 2

Are You There God? It’s Me, Shannon It’s Me, Shannon

When I was 10, the only books that really resonated with me and my friends were written by Judy Blume. Her novels were the most sympathetic and informative books I’d encountered, and I’m still grateful to her for making me feel normal in my preteen confusion. I could have easily placed myself into any of her plots, but the one character that hit home the hardest with me—and millions of other girls—was Margaret.

I read
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
a dozen times in fifth grade. My copy was dog-eared and tattered, but I kept going back to it, paging through certain parts on a nearly daily basis. Margaret and her friends were all getting their periods and kissing boys. I was fascinated.

On the last morning of school that year, just hours before the start of summer vacation, the school nurse, Mrs. Blanche, came into my homeroom and made an announcement. All the girls were to go down the hall to the other fifth grade classroom; all the boys should stay put and were to be joined by the other fifth grade boys for health class today.

We all knew what was coming. We’d gotten to the human sexuality chapter in our textbook. We’d seen the curious illustrations and already learned about the sperm and the egg the week before. As my friends and I walked down the hall to join the other girls, we were nervous and giddy. The mysteries of the universe were about to be cracked open. Secrets would be revealed. Darkness and confusion would turn to the light of knowledge. Or so we thought.

What Every Girl Should Know

As we found seats, Mrs. Blanche started a filmstrip called “What Every Girl Should Know.” When the filmstrip got to the female anatomy—a chart of the ovaries, fallopian tubes, and uterus (the same illustration that was in the textbooks)—Mrs. Blanche paused the film and pointed out the parts, talked about the movement of the eggs once a month, and explained menstruation in a very straightforward and reassuring way. Then she handed out little kits that we were to take home. She patiently explained the contents of the kit. There was a pad for when we got our periods—in a pink plastic pouch, along with a pink booklet, also called “What Every Girl Should Know.” I flipped through it. More ovaries. Another uterus.

And then the class was over. I was happy to get the little kit to take home, but the pads scared me. They were bulky, big as a brick, and surely visible through jeans, despite what Mrs. Blanche said. Unlike Margaret, I wasn’t quite as eager to begin life as a woman. Getting my period sounded messy, uncomfortable, and terrifyingly grown-up. And what if I got mine before the other girls? I became worried that it would set me apart or mark me for ridicule.

But the biggest disappointment about the class was that Mrs. Blanche failed to explain anything I was really interested in. Ovaries and blood had nothing to do with love and excitement. I wanted to understand the feeling I had when I thought about kissing a boy. What was going on in movies between men and women? Is this all there was?

I went home and reread “What Every Girl Should Know” while locked in the upstairs bathroom. I wondered how badly cramps would hurt and how much blood there would be. I thought about the potential mortification of running in gym class with that huge pad in my underwear or leaking all over the basketball court. Perhaps it would be best, I thought, if the secrets and mysteries of sex were left undiscovered.

Fear, confusion, dread. Not an auspicious way to begin a sex life. Mrs. Blanche hadn’t fallen down on her duty. It goes without saying that the transactions between sperm and egg taught me about reproduction. But her class didn’t prepare me at all for SEX. Besides my beloved Judy Blume books (which, aside from
Forever
—remember Ralph the penis?—hardly went beyond second base), my adolescent knowledge of sex came from the beauty parlor’s stack of
Glamour
and
Cosmopolitan
magazines that my mother never bought. But the articles inside were frustratingly cryptic and raised more questions than answers. To this day, twenty years later, women’s magazines continue to serve up the requisite “How to Drive Your Man Wild” and “Am I normal?” stories each month. Most of us, even as adults it seems, are still wondering what sex is about, having a hardtime finding answers, and wondering if we’re deformed.

Who Says Ignorance Is Bliss?

After talking to hundreds of women at Safina Salons, I realize now that I was lucky to get any sex-ed at all. I frequently meet women in their late 20s who thought they had cancer or were dying when their period started because no one told them what to expect. Tanya, a 30-year-old mother of two, told me her horror story:

I was 12, sitting in class, and felt an odd dripping sensation in my
underwear. I looked down and saw a huge red blotch on my white
shorts. I felt complete panic but managed to calmly get up and leave
the room without asking permission. I was too scared to speak! I went
straight to lost and found, found a pair of pants that fit, and went to
the bathroom. When I undressed and saw the blood, I assumed I was
dying. I didn’t know what to do or who could help me. I balled up the
shorts, put them between my legs, pulled the pants on over them, and
finished the day at school, knowing I had one week to live. When I
got home, my grandmother explained it all. But that’ll go down as one
of the most terrifying afternoons of my life.

This story blows me away every time I’m reminded of it. What’s even more mind-blowing: Tanya isn’t unique in her first period experience. I’ve heard variations on this story again and again. Hard to believe in the twenty-first century, isn’t it?

Call It the American Paradox

You’ve heard of the French paradox, how they can eat pounds of cheese in a single sitting and guzzle rich cream sauces by the bucketfull, yet they remain skinny nonetheless? Well, we have a paradox in the United States too. Our countrymen and countrywomen are obsessed with sex, yet the introduction to our sex lives is mired in embarrassment and confusion. Even though we have the most sex of any industrialized nation (even more than the thin, well-fed, sexy French), we are still misinformed about it. We are saturated by images of naked women, and yet few American females have even looked at their own private parts.

Show of hands. Who has held a hand mirror under their naked butt to see what’s going on down there? Anyone? I often wondered what I looked like “down there,” years before I actually took a peek. Once when I was around 8, I started to peel off my leotard after dance class with the idea of trying to see myself in the full-length mirror hanging on the back of my bedroom door. I didn’t even get it off both shoulders when my sister walked in, guessed in an instant what I was trying to do, looked at me with sheer disgust, and left. I was embarrassed and ashamed. I quickly dressed and didn’t dare try to glance between my legs for fifteen more years.

My sister’s attitude definitely discouraged my healthy curiosity about that region of my body. But she merely contributed to the message I’d been picking up over the years: “Don’t look, don’t ask, don’t touch.” I suppose the silence around sex started in the earliest stages of life. I would ask, “Why is the sky blue?” and get a thoughtful response. But if I asked, “Where does pee come from?” or “What’s a penis,” I met with some very uptight reactions or was told to stop asking. Good girls were supposed to wipe from front to back and that was it. There wasn’t even a name for what we were wiping.

In hosting Safina Salons, I’ve met only one woman, Jessica, who had a long, informative conversation with her parents when she was 10 on the subjects of anatomy and how the body and mind react during sex. She is the only one in thousands of women. When I demanded to know what tampons were for (I was probably 9), my own mother refused to answer me until we’d left the supermarket and were alone on the living room couch. She said, “When you get older, women bleed, right here.” She was patting her inner thigh, on the seam of her jeans, as she talked. “It doesn’t hurt. The tampon is for absorbing the flow.” From that day forward, or until Judy Blume came into my life, I believed a gash would spontaneously appear on every woman’s right inner thigh and bleed until it healed itself. Like a cut from a scissors, but not from scissors. What was I supposed to think?

With such silence and confusion about sex in our childhoods, it’s a wonder we can ever take control and gain confidence in the erotic realm as adults. If sexual functioning were treated as practically and perfunctorily as, say, eating or sleeping, we’d all be far better off. When I think about the time and energy that was wasted unlearning what I’d been told, and then learning the truth about my own anatomy and my sexual response, I often get angry. Why should any of us suffer in confusion and silence about sex when it’s as basic and necessary to our health and happiness as good sleep and nutrition? That said, onward, to the center of female power: the clitoris, at last.