The sex talk I wish I'd had

The vital missing piece from our sex education

Image by Chandan Chaurasia on Unsplash

Growing up as a teenage girl in the 1980s, the messages I received about sex from all the adults around me were clear-cut, and generally fell into three categories:

Don’t get pregnant – you’ll ruin your life.

Use a condom, or you’ll catch HIV and die of AIDS.

And lastly (a hangover from the previous generation):

Don’t give your virginity away too soon - you’ll be ‘damaged goods’ and no one will want you.

Yep. Sex sounded like a fun time.

And then there was the message from my peers:

Everyone’s doing it, and you’re uncool if you don’t.

Suffice to say, it was all a little confusing, and quite a source of anxiety for a young woman trying to navigate her way in the newly discovered world of dating.

I know the adults were trying to do their best. They wanted to look after us and keep us safe, but it was all based around fear. If you grew up in the UK around that time, you may recall the TV being littered with ads picturing a tombstone and the slogan ‘AIDS: Don’t die of ignorance’. It was an interesting moment in history to be discovering your sexuality for the first time.

Not once in all the sex talks and sex education did anyone mention the P-word.

No, not that one. I’m talking about pleasure.

You could be forgiven for thinking it was not relevant. Which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why, as young women, many of us developed such a high tolerance for bad sexual experiences. Heck, I would even go as far as to say it was the norm. And I’m not sure a whole lot has changed for the current generation coming through when I hear the stories of young people in my therapy room.

Here's what I wish someone had told me back then, and what I’d like to pass on to the next generation….

Sex can be many things, but at its best, it’s a beautiful, pleasurable, soulful experience. At its best, it has the power to connect you to yourself, your body, your sensory world, your emotions, your heart. At its best, it deepens intimacy, visibility and vulnerability between people. Allowing yourself to be seen in your rawness, your nakedness, is a pathway to deeper connection. Allowing yourself to witness another in their rawness, nakedness and vulnerability is a precious gift.

You cannot connect deeply to another if you are not first connected deeply to yourself.

The missing piece in sex education has been embodiment. I wish someone had guided me to listen to my body and find my yes and my no from there. Instead of making decisions based on what I thought my peers were doing, what seemed to be expected of me, what was written about in the advice columns of teen magazines, or what I thought was required to prevent some guy from losing interest.

We live in a culture that fosters disconnection from the body. A culture that privileges the thinking mind and teaches us from a young age to ignore, override, and dissociate from our own internal sensory and somatic experiences. It’s one of the survival strategies we develop in the face of trauma, and it’s so culturally normative as to be almost ubiquitous.

The body is speaking to us all the time, and it voices our likes and dislikes, our desires and needs, our yeses and nos. But if we’re not living fully in our body, how do we even begin to hear this?

When it comes to sexuality, I believe we need to know our no, before we can fully own our yes.

The body has its own language for voicing its no. This might be through unease, tightening or tension. It might be a faint hint of nausea. It might be discomfort. We override our internal signals at our own peril.

The signals are not always straightforward to decipher (and this becomes even more complex if the numbing effects of alcohol or other substances are in place). Often, we just need to slow things down enough to be able to hear ourselves.

If it doesn’t feel good, it’s a no. If you’re not sure, then it’s probably also a no – for now at least.

Once we’re clear what is a no, then we can really start to own our yes. We’re in our power, our agency, free to follow the desires of the body, as long as they are not harming us or anyone else.

And our most direct route to discovering our yeses is, of course, also through the body. The body speaks in a simple, clear language of nice and not nice. Of wanting to move toward or away. We do not need a partner to get to know our body’s desires. We live in our bodies every day and they are continually communicating our preferences – the sun on my face feels nice, the scratchy jersey, not nice. That hand on my back feels nice. That stranger sitting too close, not nice. When we live in the mind, we tend to miss the richness of all of this sensory data.

In navigating sexuality, we place a lot of importance on communication. But if we don’t know our own bodies on the most basic level, if we’re not connected to our sensory experience, how can we ever hope to communicate our needs to another? How can we hope to recognise what’s good and what’s not good? How do we even begin to negotiate the complex world of sexuality?

I made some mistakes in my dating choices in my youth. Perhaps those mistakes were a rite of passage. Certainly, they were a learning experience. But these kinds of mistakes can also be damaging for some and we could perhaps avert some of those experiences with a more open, nuanced dialogue around sexuality, that guides us towards hearing and honouring our embodied knowing. I’d love to see this happening for the younger generation. Sadly, I think we still have a long way to go….

Over to you. How was your sex education? What is the advice you wish you had received? What would you like the younger generation to know? As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments, and please do like 🤍 and share this post if it has been useful.

With thanks to Nancie Aronie for the title of this post, which was a writing prompt from the course she offers with

Lissa Rankin, MD

‘Memoir As Medicine’.