"Afterword from the Mother" from Mother/Daughter Sex Advice
The first time I tried to publish responsible sex advice, I was sixteen. The principal at my high schoolbrought me into his office and said, “If you ever pull a stunt like this again, you’ll be thrown out of school for good.”
Guess which way I went?
It’s funny to think about my first attempt at sisterly bedroom advice. The dilemma I picked is one of the most common female sexual complaints: “What do you do when sex hurts?” — when putting anything in your vagina feels dry, painful, and horrid?
I may have been a tenth-grader with almost-zero personal sex experience, but I did know the answer: lack of lubrication. I was a feminist bookworm — if just newly sexually active — and I knew all about it.
The main way a woman gets lubricated is by being aroused, and without it, penetration is torture. I decided to write a little essay on this pressing subject for the high school paper.
I did all the science parts first — how the vagina needs lubrication, and that if you’re not generating it on your own, you need a little help — from vegetable oil or water-soluble lube. Back in the 1970s, that was K-Y jelly.
But! — the real sin, according to my Principal, was that I had added some homespun wisdom to my story. I wrote that if you couldn’t get the money for lube, or were too shy to grab olive oil out of the kitchen — you could, at the very least, take some saliva from your mouth with your fingertips, and reach down there and make things moist.
“Saliva!” I remember him shouting, like I had just screamed SLOPPY CUNT from the rooftops. “You can’t say that word!”
Oh yes I can—
Continued in Mother/Daughter Sex Advice, "Afterword from the Mother"
Photo: Joel Levine, 1974
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