The first time it happened, I thought I was going to die.
I was 27 years old, had been married and divorced, and was now a couple of years into my second long-term romantic relationship.
I’d thought I’d known what orgasms were, but I’d been as wrong as wrong could possibly be. I couldn’t have been more wrong without thinking that actual dolphins would appear from nowhere and leap over the bed when it happened.
I’ve never really talked about that day before now. Maybe it’s high time I did.
The day I realized something wasn’t right
The movie “sex, lies and videotape” came out in 1989, but I was neck-deep in my Pentecostal phase then. By the time I got around to seeing it, it was getting hard to find movies on actual videotape!* One line in it stood out to me, though, a line that I’ve never been able to forget. Ann, the main character in the movie, is talking to her husband’s old college buddy Graham, who’s just blown into town:
I think that sex is overrated. I think that people place far too much importance on it, and I think that stuff about women wantin’ it just as bad as men is crap. I mean I think that women want it, I just don’t think that they want it for the same reason that men think they do.
Ann and I had a lot in common. She’s a repressed housewife who just wants to have a perfectly clean house and to be the best wife she can possibly be. She’s a matriarch in the making, even though her formality and officiousness exasperate her husband and sister. When Graham comes to town, he shakes up her marriage, her relationship with her sister and, most of all, her relationship with her own body.
When I saw the movie for the first time, I realized I was aching to be shaken up like that. I needed to be shaken up. In one scene, Ann masturbates in front of Graham and has what is implied to be her first orgasm. Afterward, she is left rocked to her core.
I was, too. I was in tears.
I’d never had that.
I wanted that.
I just had no idea how to get it.
Fallout from the Purity Myth
Plenty of folks have written about Christianity’s obsession with sex and the misogynistic conceptualization of “purity” it idolizes, including me. I don’t feel the need to go over that ground again here, except to say that almost everything bad said about it, I went through. The Purity Myth wrecked my life. I totally believed and bought into its insidious lies and put my faith in its false promises. I was completely convinced that sex could devalue me, that the number of partners I’d had was an indicator of my value as a woman, that my body belonged to my husband, that using porn was some kind of moral failing, that men needed sex in a way women did not, and that my consent was always implied if I was in a relationship.
One thing that ran afoul of the Purity Myth’s script for me and my then-husband, Biff, was that we’d met before becoming Pentecostals together. I’d been Pentecostal but had drifted out of it, then had met Biff during that six months or so when I wasn’t a member of any churches. He became Pentecostal, joining the same church I’d briefly attended, and then he’d persuaded me to rejoin it. I’d been quite cross about his suddenly deciding he didn’t want to have sex anymore, and if I hadn’t reconverted along with him a few months later, chances are we’d have simply broken up.
Once I reconverted back to Pentecostalism, though, I took its message to heart. We abstained after our conversions — or rather, I did. Biff’s own abstention was, to say the least, inconsistent, but it wasn’t hard for me. I’d liked having sex at first, but after the novelty had worn off, it didn’t do a whole lot for me. I was completely ignorant of how my body worked or what felt good to it. I can’t really blame my mom for that; she’d tried her best. She’d made biology books available to me, and I’d gone to high school before all that abstinence-only nonsense. I really should have had my bases covered.
By the time I reached my late teens, my general understanding of sex was probably on par with that of lifelong Pentecostal women my age. I understood the biology better, but that’s all I had going for me.**
And then there was this not-so-minor problem:
I had reached adulthood having never once masturbated.
I’m not kidding.
Not even once.
Oh, I’d fooled around, but nothing had come of it, and I’d been left vaguely wondering what was wrong with me. After a few of those fumbling experiences, I concluded that I simply wasn’t one of those people who really like masturbation, so I didn’t bother with it anymore. When I heard preachers rail about it, I didn’t understand why it was such a big temptation for so many people.
A Cold War in my bedroom
Marriage proved to be a huge stress for both me and my new husband. Even though sex was totally allowed now, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting to the demands my religion was making upon my sexual expression.
Biff had had several partners before me, but he’d been my only partner. Despite his greater experience, neither of us had the faintest idea what we were doing. He’d told me that that rising feeling I sometimes got during sex was an orgasm, and I had believed him because I certainly had nothing with which to compare the sensation (and obviously, neither did he!). By his standards, I was climaxing every time we had sex, so he didn’t understand my total lack of interest in it. To me, though, sex was boring at best, painful at worst, and either way a big waste of time that would only get me mussed up and uncomfortably sweaty.
After a year or so of Cold War-style tension, we settled into the evangelical model of using sex as a transaction. I deeply resented that my husband seemed so oblivious to the effect his attentions had on me, but I also deeply resented my own body because nothing in my life resembled the Happy Christian Marriage I’d been told I’d get if I complied with Christianity’s rules for women.
Biff, meanwhile, had been indoctrinated with the men’s version of those rules, and he’d been taught that if he followed them, he’d get laid regularly enough to make it possible for him to resist the world’s many temptations. We were both miserable, but neither of us connected our misery with the failure of a message we believed was perfect.
I’d done everything right. My sex life was supposed to be fantastic. I was supposed to be moving through a gauzy haze of conjugal bliss. Instead, I felt like a small, trapped animal in a hole every time my husband wanted sex. By the time I was 22, I’d written sex off forever as something I’d never be interested in. (Some women really aren’t interested in sex — asexuality is a real thing. But I wasn’t asexual. I had a very active fantasy life, though I had no idea what to do with it, and yearned to have a sexually fulfilling marriage.)
To the world, Biff and I both presented the appropriate facade. Of course we were happy. Of course the Christian model of marriage was perfect. (We were the failures, not the model — as always in that religion, where the message is presented as flawless and foolproof.) I’d recently learned the doctrine of “speaking truth to power,” which made perfect sense to me: It was just a variation of “fake it till you make it,” and I was already doing that at home. By acting like I was already having a perfect sex life, I would show “God” that I had so much faith in his promises that he’d finally fulfill them.
Obviously, “God” didn’t fulfill jack
When I deconverted, I didn’t magically achieve enlightenment. Nobody does. I still had those mental tapes of repression playing in my head, so unsurprisingly, my next relationship wasn’t considerably better than the one I’d had with Biff.
We were together for several years because one of those tapes playing in my head was love means never, ever giving up. I felt so stung by the failure of my marriage that I decided to try extra hard to make the next relationship work, even though my new partner was just as incompatible with me as my ex-husband had been. Our sex life was equally miserable, though for different reasons; this time, I wanted sex much more than he did, because he wasn’t half-bad at it, but he used sex in the same way I had in my previous relationship.
Seeing this dynamic from the other side of the mirror only added to my miserable suspicion that something was really seriously wrong with me. I couldn’t seem to do anything right about sex. I couldn’t make anybody happy. And I sure wasn’t happy myself, though — remember — I’d long ago decided that I never would be totally happy with sex anyway, so I was much more concerned with the feelings of my partners.
I thought the feelings I was having during sex were orgasms. I still had no idea what one really was.
At one point, my partner had to go out of town without me for a few weeks. I watched a lot of TV, and “sex, lies and videotape” was one of the tapes I rented.
I paused the movie right after the scene I described above, on a close-up of Ann’s tearful face.
Ann’s cosmic and simple relief, joy, grief and understanding eclipsed all the porn I’d seen up till then, every sermon on marriage I’d ever endured and anything I’d ever done in my bedroom.
I desperately wanted the same experience she’d had.
I began to hatch a plan, because I’m nothing if not methodical. I bought a marital aid — a simple, nonthreatening one. I still remember how nervous I was buying it. There wasn’t any way to order stuff online at the time — we’re talking the mid-1990s — and I sure didn’t know of any paper catalogs I could order from, so I had to walk into a sex shop to find what I wanted. I felt like a blazing beacon of awkwardness, but nobody there even looked twice at me.
The toy stayed in its box for a few days while I went about my business, but finally, one afternoon I took a long, hot bath, lay down on my bed, and thought to myself, I’m not getting up again until I have damn well figured out what this fuss is all about.
The fuss is figured out, and how
An hour later, I finally understood.
I thought I was going to die.
I thought I was having a heart attack.
I was scared to death.
But I was absolutely, positively not getting out of the car till it had come to a complete stop.
Afterward, I was exhilarated — and mortified. I realized I’d been basically faking orgasms for 10 years, though I certainly hadn’t known that, nor would I have done it if I’d known better. This experience was absolutely, positively, completely, categorically and thunderously different from what Biff had told me was an orgasm and what I’d believed for so long was one.
And I was angry, too. I was in my late 20s by that point, and I’d largely wasted my youth because I’d believed a man who I’d known for years was a narcissistic liar about a topic I knew he knew very little about, and a religion that I’d known for years said a lot of untrue things about everything under the sun. Yet I had trusted both to tell me how to drive my body! And that’s on me. I could have taken a more active role much earlier, but I was way too trusting, and a lot of people had taken advantage of my trust.
I’d lost many years that I now was eager to make up for.
Not long afterward, I dumped that second guy, and over the next few years, I dated a few more men until I found one who clicked with me, body and spirit. I eventually discovered why I’d had so many problems having orgasms during sex, and I found techniques that worked to help me overcome those problems. Some women find and fix those problems very quickly; others, like me, take years.
But the first step was finding out what all the fuss was about.
Reach for what you want
Looking back, I’m glad I took my sex life into my own hands (literally). I wish I could travel back in time and tell my younger self what I know now about sex, but I’ll have to content myself with writing about it here in the wild hope that my story is some kind of help to someone else.
If you want something more fulfilling than you have now, it’s in your reach. There are resources at every turn now, resources that didn’t exist at the time today’s story happened. Please take advantage of them. If this life is all we’ve got and there’s not going to be a cosmic do-over after we die, then we need to drive it like we stole it, because there is simply not enough of it to waste on awful sex.
I lost 10 years, but you don’t have to lose even a fraction of one.
Resources:
The Secular Therapy Project. If you need professional help sorting out your sex life, this site will help you find a nonreligious therapist who puts your recovery first. (Here are some tips about when to consult a professional.)
Advice about choosing your first sex toy.
Extensive critiques of one of Christians’ favorite marriage advisers, “Dr.” John Gray of “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.”
My critique of their other big favorite lately, “The Love Dare,” which is the book featured in the movie “Fireproof.”
[Image Source: Flickr]
* You will pry my Kenny Loggins “Outside: From the Redwoods” cassette tape out of my cold, dead hands. I will be buried with it — not because I love it so much, but because it’s like a monkey paw I just can’t get rid of.
** I once got into a big argument with some young men at church over whether or not a woman’s body has a urethra. Really. I don’t remember how the subject came up but I’m the one who got in trouble for not being ladylike. Not a whole lot has changed.
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