Permission Slip

My mother gave me The Talk in the car. She kept her eyes on the road and addressed her remarks to the windshield. It lasted about eleven seconds. Here is my reconstruction of her whole wisdom: “Wait for marriage, and always wear your seatbelt.”

I think she meant protection. But we were in the car, and I was fourteen. I wore that seatbelt with enormous care for years.

I love my mother. She was handed nothing, and she did her best with it. Her mother handed her less.

Somewhere back along that line of women, someone made a decision. Pleasure was private at best and shameful at worst. The instruction passed down like a casserole dish, unlabeled and heavy.

This is where we set the dish down.

I will do something very simple. It is a very big deal. I will tell you that pleasure is allowed. Yours, specifically.

It is a free gift. It needs no good behavior, no earning, and no waiting for everyone else to be taken care of. Allowed today, in the body you have.

Some of you will roll your eyes. You have known this for years. Hold that thought. A Permission Slip waits in the middle of these pages, and you will want to sign it anyway.

Where The Shame Came From

Let me give you the short, slightly outrageous version of history.

For a very long time, men wrote the rules about women’s bodies. Around the turn of the last century, a famous Viennese gentleman named Sigmund Freud sorted female pleasure into two kinds. He called one of them childish. Your clitoris, your button, the small and extraordinary center of pleasure, was labeled “immature.”

A grown woman, he declared, must graduate from it to something more respectable.

Think about that for a second. Half the population was told a strange story. The one reliable doorbell on the house was a toy. A mature woman rings a different bell.

For many women, that other bell does not work at all.

Generations of women tried to graduate. A great many marked themselves as failing the exam.

The pushback took decades. Researchers in the 1950s began asking women about the real events in their bodies. The answers contradicted the textbook.

In 1970 a writer named Anne Koedt published a short, fierce essay called “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” It traveled around kitchens and dorm rooms like a secret. The argument went on for years, and in some corners it is still going. We will settle it gently, and with a great deal of relief.

For now, the headline is simple. The old story was wrong. Your body is a complete original, and you are fully mature. Your body has more than one way to feel good.

That is a feature.

Then there was school. For most of us, sex education was a lesson in plumbing and peril. It taught us to dodge pregnancy and dodge catching things. It showed us a diagram like a cross-section of a tree.

The word “pleasure” was missing from the textbook. Pleasure exists, it is allowed, and you might actually like it. Nobody said a word.

So of course you grew up with questions. You got a lot of silence in place of answers, and silence is a very loud teacher.

The Gap

Here is a fact I find both infuriating and hopeful.

Surveys ask men and women about partnered sex. The two groups report very different results. In one large American survey of more than fifty thousand adults, about 95 percent of straight men reported usually or always reaching orgasm in sexual intimacy.

For straight women the figure was about 65 percent, closer to two in three. Women with women partners reported about 86 percent, noticeably higher than women with men partners.

Estimates shift with the people asked and the wording of the question. Treat the exact numbers as a snapshot. The Notes and Sources at the back give the study.

Researchers call this the orgasm gap. Every serious one of them says the same thing. The cause is education, attention, time, and a culture with her pleasure missing from the agenda. Women with good knowledge of their bodies and the freedom to speak up close the gap a great deal.

That is the hopeful part. Nothing is broken, and everything can be learned. Reading this book is a way of closing the gap, one afternoon at a time.

A small caution about those numbers. They are averages. They describe crowds, and no one in particular, you included.

Do you reach orgasm easily? Wonderful. Is it harder for you? You belong to a very large crowd, and the crowd was handed a fib.

Respect For What You Believe

Some of you grew up in traditions of care, privacy, or marriage-only intimacy. Some of you hold those values today with all your heart.

Bring everything you believe through the door. Many belief systems understand pleasure as a gift. Many traditions have a good deal to say about the intimacy of a couple. You will judge best the fit between your faith, family, culture, and these pages.

Take the good fits. Leave the rest. Skip a Dare or a whole stretch of pages, and you stay a full member of this house.

I gently ask one thing. Keep shame, a different thing from values, out of your decisions. Values give you a direction. Shame just gives you a flinch.

Your Body, Your Rules

A few ground rules make everything else feel safer.

This book is for adults, and everything in it is for you, privately, at your own pace.

Everything here works on your own. Will you ever explore with someone? That person must be an adult.

That person must truly want to. The yes must be warm and clear, and either side can take it back at any time. Anything less has no place in this house.

Your privacy is yours. Keep the Dares in your own notebook or your own head. Your audience is your choice, and nobody is a fine audience.

And you can stop. Always. In the middle of a sentence, a page, a Dare, a breath. Stopping is steering.

Going Slowly

I want to say something quietly, to the reader in need.

Some women carry a complicated history with this subject. Maybe there was hurt, or fear, or something not okay. Is that part of your story? This book will move at your speed.

Skip any stirring part. Stay with the clothes on. Stay in charge. Stay in the doorway all day, or all year.

Talk to a loved one. A sister, a friend, or your mother can be that person. Safety decides.

Does the weight stay heavy? Someone trained for exactly this can lighten it. Reaching out is a sign of strength.

You owe this book, and everyone, zero minutes of discomfort.

The Permission Slip

Here is the one thing I want you to keep. Copy it, clip it, photograph it, tape it inside a drawer, or sign it right here in the margin.

• I, ____________________, being of sound mind and a lovely body,
• hereby give myself permission to:

Signed: ____________________ Date: ____________

• Witness (optional): ____________________
• (A cat is acceptable.)