Discovering The Clitoris

My sex ed wasn’t as… damaging? Is that an alright word for it? Not as misinforming as some of the other stories here. But I remember being in elementary school, and fantasizing about Disney princesses at night sometimes and twisting my legs together because it felt good. I tried to stop later on, though, because I thought it was bad.

Then in middle school, I somehow discovered that nipples were awesome. So I started doing that under the sheets. For some reason the feeling of “I’m doing something wrong” was gone by then. My school does basic sex ed in fourth grade with a couple of puberty and menstruation videos. They actually asked us how a woman gets pregnant (myself and someone else guessed that maybe kissing did it), but I can’t remember if they explained it. I remember reading a book called “Baby Being Born” and being fascinated by the pictures, but grossed out by the bit where they described how Baby was actually started.

In eighth grade I discovered the-clitoris.com, and slowly all the jargon and mumblejumble about “Fallopian tubes” and whatnot started to make sense. Sex ed was a constant throughout middle school, but there was no time for questions. It was a couple of videos or a short chat about reproductive organs (focusing mainly on the internal bits) before moving on. I was so confused and freaked out by all the new information about this part of my body that I’d never had to acknowledge before that I didn’t really understand anything. I cried when I got my first period because I had been dreading it for so long and now it was finally here, and I couldn’t escape it. It meant I had changed and I wouldn’t be “normal” ever again.

But, with a plethora of feminist, sex-positive websites that I paged through— Scarleteen, Go Ask Alice, more of The-Clitoris—I started to understand what my vulva looked like. My body started to make more sense. And when I got the courage to start looking down there myself, I gradually became accustomed to what had been a very alien part of me.

The other thing my sex ed never addressed was “normalcy.” I didn’t know it was okay for labia minora to stick out. For a while I didn’t know that my vagina and urethra were two separate entities. And when I started getting into the nitty-gritty of actually touching myself— at first I didn’t even consider it. I was used to how it looked, but I sure as hell didn’t want to touch it.

But, somehow, that changed too. At first I was worried that my clit “didn’t work right,” because the more hetero-oriented pleasure sites kept saying how awesome the clit was. I didn’t get much sensation from it at all. Luckily, Betty Dodson’s website let me know that sometimes it takes a while for those 8,000 nerve endings to figure out what pleasure is.

And currently? I’m still a teenager, but I’m really comfortable with my body, and in my relationship with my partner. We experiment and we talk about it. And guess what? Recently my clitoris started “waking up.” And it’s awesome.

I guess that was a really rambling way of saying that the internet was my sex ed.