February 15 - You were writhing on the floor like a moth on molasses.

No one ever told me I could have orgasms.

As most of you know, sex ed is pretty useless. Half the country doesn’t even have sex ed, it has abstinence only sex ed, which is not education about sex, it is lying to children to scare and coerce them not to have sex. Those of us who do receive this almighty “education” know that the ever-famous Mean Girls gym-room sex ed scene isn’t too far off base (Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die).

My sex ed teacher seventh year was a wiry old gym teacher who scared the fuck out of me. She tried to “accustom” us to our vocabulary words by walking solemnly throughout the silent classroom before blurting words like penis and vagina out loudly. Our semester of class consisted of diagrams of cocks and cunts which we colored in and labeled, oral presentations on STDs, a horrific movie about childbirth, learning which materials cannot be used in place of a condom, which is all materials except for condoms, and watching movies for the last nine weeks.

What my sexual education class did not consist of was actually educating me about sex.

I had my first orgasm at fifteen, which to some people might seem very late and to others very early. I’d been curious before, but nothing ever really felt that good because I had no idea what I was doing. On top of that, it just wasn’t something girls did. None of my friends ever talked about it. For girls, it just wasn’t done. It wasn’t acceptable. Most guys have been jacking their shit since their first wet dream at twelve or thirteen, but that’s not what it’s like for girls. Girls aren’t supposed to masturbate, or at least that’s the impression I got. The first time it happened, my thought process was very quick and very simple. First shock (What the fuck was that?) then awed recognition (I have brought myself to orgasm. The almighty O has been accomplished.) then a swift descent into sharp disappointment (Wait, that’s it? That’s what all the fuss is about?). Rest assured, young self, it gets better with time.

To be put eloquently, I was sticky and confused as fuck. Commence googling. That was when I first realized that I had been lied to all this time, if only lied to by omission. My friends were an odd bunch, not a boyfriend among us, and we didn’t discuss things like that. Hell, tampons were out of the question half the time. And for all the awkward diagramming and labeling, no one had ever told me what my own body was even capable of.

I still very vividly remember scrolling through Wikipedia slack-jawed and thinking, “My clitoris does that?”

How fucking sad is that? How depressing is it that while the cute boy who sat next to me in health, the very one who made it REALLY embarrassing to have write the word “scrotum” in swirly cursive on my diagram worksheet, had been wanking to Carmin Elektra since god knows when, and up until the almighty internet told me otherwise, I had thought that my clit was just some useless little lump with no real function. No one had ever told me otherwise. No one ever told me it had more nerve endings than any other single organ in my body, or  what a G-spot was, or that girls could even have orgasms. And of course, this led me to my next problem.

How many more questions can one internet article bring to mind? Millions, that’s how many. I waited patiently until everyone had left the house, locked every door tightly, shut all the blinds and made sure my speakers weren’t plugged in, and went in search of porn. Because porn was sex, right? I mean, there had to be some answers there. I just needed to know if I was normal.

Porn was obviously the exact wrong place to look for reassurance in that, but at the time I didn’t know that. As you might expect, it made me feel like a total freak. That was definitely not what I looked like naked, nor what I sounded like when I happened to be flicking the bean, and even then I knew that if someone tried to finger-bang me with the force of a jackhammer like the meatheads in low-grade vids do, I would be crying for a week. But those women seemed to like it, and if I didn’t, and didn’t look or sound like that, there was obviously something wrong with me.

Whilst my country entrusted a salty old cunt of a gym coach to teach me how to have a healthy sexual relationship and not become a rapist or get pregnant at seventeen or get AIDS, what they had really done was made sure that my only real source of reference for what sex was like was low-grade, highly stylized porn. And that’s the exact same thing they did, and do, to every single other kid who doesn’t get sat down and talked to proper about their body, and what it does, and what relationships are like.

And here’s the other thing no sex ed teacher has ever mentioned. Consent. No one ever told the boys in my class that the only thing that means yes is the word yes, or that if she’s too drunk or too tired or too whatever to say it, that you do not have consent. They never talked about whether or not you owe a guy a sexual favor after he pays for your date (which you don’t. EVER. But a lot of girls think you do) or when you should give in to your boyfriends grovelling despite the fact that you’re still not ready (which is never, cause if you’re not ready you’re not ready). They never mentioned consent in any context, not once. And I think the fact that we can mention pubic lice and genital warts to seventh graders, but not the fact that no means no, and maybe later means no, and not tonight means no, and I’m not ready means no, is why we have such a fucking problem in this country.

That, and the fact that we can’t tell our little girls what to do with their clitoris.