X is for X-Rated

By Justine Cadwell

Let’s talk about sex ba-by/let’s talk about ther-a-py. Pretty sure that’s how the song goes.

***

“Waaaaaahh,” my 18-month-old daughter wails from my bedroom. I bolt out of the bathroom to rescue her.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?”

She approaches me with tears in her eyes, cradling a trembling pink toy she must have turned on by accident.

Oh—I see you’ve found my vibrator.

***

The first time I sexually experimented, I was 5 years old. My friend Natalie and I debated over who would play “the boyfriend” and decided to take turns. I pulled down my underwear to let her kiss my mons pubis and labia majora (it was all a “vagina” back then). She laughed in between kisses, highlighting the fact we were confused children with the vague notion genitals were “private” and therefore, forbidden and exciting. But also, haha—vagina!

Two years later, I set up an elaborate plan to kiss my friend Beth, creating a scene where we ran around a “building” (a large appliance box) and our lips just happened to run into each other. Somewhere in this plan, I convinced her to remove her shirt as well.

Shortly after this, I felt the need to come clean. Sexual feelings were embarrassing and certainly not appropriate for kids. During a bath, I confessed pieces of these events to my mom as shame spread through my body. The response I received was loud and clear: don’t do that again.

Inside a sleeping bag, I pseudo-masturbated around the age of 7. There may have been some play commentary that my older sister overheard on the other side of the room.

“What are you doing?” Louisa demanded, a tone of disgust in her inquiry.

The message I received was loud and clear: don’t do that again.

Catholicism taught me the sterilized notion of sex looking like a married couple having sex in the dark to create more of God’s children.

Casual sex was:

                                                           DIRTY

                 DANGEROUS

                   AN ABOMINATION

Lesson learned: sexual desire is wrong.

While watching the movie “Ghost”, my parents instructed me to hide behind the recliner during the pottery scene. When Forrest and Jenny make love in “Forrest Gump,” my Catholic maternal grandmother squirmed, prompting my sister and me to fast-forward. These movies were rated PG-13.

Most of the sexual media I absorbed as a child were the unedited bits of whatever was showing on cable television. As a result, I witnessed overemphasized elements of coercion and male pleasure. At the beginning of “Romancing the Stone” a woman is held at gunpoint while a dirty cowboy demands she take off her clothes. In “Abducted,” a deranged mountain man kidnaps and sexually assaults a female jogger. These movies were rated PG.

When I was twelve, I locked my bedroom door and muted my 19-inch television to watch late-night soft-core porn on Cinemax. I tried to trick myself into thinking I wanted to teach myself what was expected of me, sexually. I wasn’t depraved, this was research! Apparently, pubic hair was undesirable because these ladies didn’t have any.

X-rated movies hid behind a curtain at the video rental store. Years after tricking Beth into kissing me, I suggested we rent the horror classic “I Spit on Your Grave” because the description promised a rape and revenge tale. Not fucked up at all, huh? I was so desperate to view sex in a socially acceptable manner. I had to rely on Hollywood’s exploitation of women, cloaked in an innocent desire to watch a scary movie. America loves its murder porn.

I remember talking to my mom about sex exactly twice as a teenager. As I rummaged around the refrigerator for a snack, she caught me off guard.

“I saw on Oprah that kids in junior high are giving oral sex in school bathrooms. Do you know anything about this?”

“Uhh—”

I hadn’t even kissed a boy yet.

The next conversation happened in the car around the age of 15. My mom told me whenever I decided to start having sex, to be sure and get on the pill first:

“No daughter of mine is getting pregnant in high school.”

Good talk, mom.

My academic sexual education was not much better. In my sixth-grade health class, I received an assignment to write a letter to my future spouse, promising to “save myself” for him. During my tenth-grade health class, boys were instructed to stand on one side of the room while girls stood on the other side. We scribbled down STDs on sheets of paper and then walked toward each other in pairs.

“I just gave you syphilis,” I sheepishly announce to my classmate.

“And I am giving you herpes,” they reply.

From the novelty store Spencers, my male friend stole a white vibrator for me that looked like a medical device. I didn’t ask him to, but he had a crush on me, and maybe this was his way of wooing me? Perhaps I could self-educate. I attempted to masturbate, turning the vibrator on, and pushing it in and out of my vagina, mechanically. What is supposed to be so great about this? I didn’t understand the difference between a vulva and a vagina or where the clitoris was or how it worked or what to do— so I gave up on masturbation and eventually tossed the vibrator in an apartment dumpster.

***

All American women grow up facing the virgin/whore dichotomy: you should be pleasing to look at and accommodate men’s desires, but if you explore your own sexual inclinations, you’re a “hussy.” You can read all about it in “The Purity Myth” by badass Jessica Valenti if you want to be “woke.”

Thanks to Catholic indoctrination and America’s deranged views toward sex, I approach watching porn with a look-over-your-shoulder, because your parents might catch you vibe, even as a married thirtysomething year old.

Most porn is created with men in mind, and the industry is problematic. But women like porn, too, and there’s even some created by and for women. The “Fifty Shades of Grey” series is popular for a reason (despite the horrendous writing). I’m a feminist who doesn’t want to support raunchy old men, but I’m also a human being with the ability to watch people have sex in the comfort of my own home. What’s a girl to do?

***

From a naughty NSFW subreddit, I click on various videos, equally enthralled and horrified.

People get off on this? I wonder aloud, clicking on “Stepdad Fucks Stepdaughter on Kitchen Table.”

Suddenly, my sinful quest is interrupted by an official-looking message: my computer has been compromised, and I need to call the number on the screen to fix it. Obviously, a Microsoft message, created by Windows staff! Well shit, this didn’t look good.

I should call my husband Derek to verify this sketchy pop-up. He works at Microsoft and knows computers in a way I never will. He also knows I occasionally look at porn, so it wouldn’t be a total shock. But I’m embarrassed by the content I clicked on and prefer to erase the laptop memory when I’m done, so I’ll just solve this issue on my own.

I dial the number and await my fate. When a man answers the phone, there is excessive background noise which strikes me as odd, but he sounds official enough. He has a strong Indian accent, and I try to push any stereotypical assessments out of my mind. Microsoft has offices all around the globe, after all.

I tell him my plight, reading off the message on my computer screen.

“It looks like you were looking at some adult content.”

I want to die right now. “Yeah…”

“It’s only natural. I can direct you to some websites that are safer to visit in the future.”

“No, this has ruined porn for me. I’m never looking at it ever again!”

He butters me up, making my shame less palpable. Then, he gets down to business.

The man directs me to a help site where he pretends (I later learn) to log into a staff Microsoft account (he’s good) and proceeds to take control of my computer.

Occasional red flags pop up during our conversation, making me question the validity of this whole operation, but then he says or does something convincing, restoring my confidence.

Apparently, I need to buy a firewall program to solve the problem. The cost is somewhere around $100 or $200. Two hundred dollars and this all goes away? Worth it.

Then I do the unthinkable. I give this man my credit card info. To my credit (heh), I use a card with a low credit limit that isn’t tied to my bank account. So, I’m a dummy, but a cautious one at least.

The man keeps prompting me to purchase additional bells and whistles.

“I can’t afford that. I just want the issue resolved as soon as possible.”

After several minutes, he gives up and tells me to await a phone call from their billing department for confirmation.

I call Derek to confess and explain the situation to see if I had been duped. You bet I had.

“They have control of my computer, and they’re processing payment now—”

“Shut off your computer.”

“Shut it down?”

“Shut it off right now.”

“Ahhh, okay!”

I plead my case, “They were so convincing!”

“Yeah, I’ve seen some of those. They’ve gotten really good.”

Derek tells me to call my credit card company to try and get the charges reversed. During a three-way call with Capital One and the scammer “company,” I accuse them of such. They assure me they are a legit operation and would be happy to reimburse me.

After some investigation, Derek determined they were trying to sell themselves as a credible organization, so he wasn’t too concerned they would try to steal information off my computer, but of course, we updated our security, changed passwords, etc. to be safe.

Wisdom garnered: You’ll pay for giving in to your sexual curiosities, ya heathen!

***

Is it any wonder I didn’t have my first orgasm until I was in my twenties?  When my friend Kaitlin discovered this, she was horrified.

“We’re going to buy you a vibrator and I’m going to wait outside your bedroom door until you finish!”

That’s not how it went down but I appreciated her concern. In college, I finally received a proper sexual education via a health course that explained how important the clitoris was and a trip to Sex World where I purchased a pink vibrator.

“Have you had an orgasm yet?” my friend Annika asked.

“I think so?”

“You’d know.”

A few days later, the difference between almost and achieving climax became crystal clear.                

Unfortunately, the ability to have an orgasm with a partner was an entirely different story. A long one, so here’s a quick summary: After years of struggling to have an orgasm in Derek’s presence, he encouraged me to seek out the help of a sex therapist. She recommended an informative book called “Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life” by Emily Nagoski. The contents of this book + more sex therapy + the decision to open our marriage + dirty thirties hormones = things have improved. But there was a lot of unlearning to do, no thanks to the sex-negative culture I was raised in.

***

I laugh as I reclaim my vibrator from my scared toddler. Whoops! I guess I forgot to put that away.

I aim to raise my daughter in a sex-positive household. Not too long ago, I heard her singing a song from the bathtub that made me proud:

This is the way I wash my vulva/wash my vulva/wash my vulva/This is the way

I wash my vulva /so early in the mor-ning.

A vulva and a vagina are not the same thing? Who knew?

Justine Cadwell is the author of “The ABCs of My Neuroses: Tales from an Anxious Life,” coming soon from Library Tales Publishing. She blogged at TheHungryGuineaPig.wordpress.com and ParentalAdvisorySite.wordpress.com. Her work has appeared in The Collapsar, Adelaide, Fine Lines, and Braided Way magazines. When she’s not writing, she’s working as a clinical dietitian at a long-term care facility, playing music as “Channeling Merlyn” on her YouTube channel, or volunteering at the food pantry or hospice with her best friend. Justine lives in Minnesota with her husband, daughter, and feline friend. To see more of her work, follow her on Twitter @JustineCadwell