what safe sex is really about

monogamy, masturbation and finding safe people

I may be an absolute sad sack with only one friend in the world, but weirdly I still have the sexual appetite of a dirty teenager.

I’m also single and really, really not relationship-ready, so I’ve had to get creative about solving this problem.

The truth is that I don’t have a good frame of reference for recognizing safe people in general, let alone safe sexual partners. Uploading some cute pics to Tinder and setting myself up with a new sexual partner wouldn’t be a good option for me. And anyway that place in my heart is still full of another. It’s kind of shitty to have sex with a person while secretly wishing you’re with someone else. I don’t think that’s fair or kind to any of the parties involved. 

Safe people, safe sex.

I really don’t know how any of that works. I’ve been fumbling around in the dark my whole life and have made many bad decisions when it came to granting people access to my body.

Like a lot of kids in my generation, no one talked to me about sex. But unlike other kids, what I received instead was a biblical education in sexual shame, body shame and also secret-keeping, which is a dangerous combination and helps to explain why there is so much sexual abuse in cults.  

Here is the sum total of the sex education I received as a young person: don’t have it until you’re married. 

It wasn’t just that I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian group, the sex education I got in high school was not much better. We had a single period of gym class where the teacher told us the best birth control was abstinence. After that a girl in our class put a condom on a cucumber while the rest of us giggled and that was it. We never talked about it again.

My parents never told me the reasons why I wasn’t supposed to have sex before marriage, but it was obviously one of the worst sins there were. It came up all the time. We never talked about bodies other than what not to do with this one specific set of body parts. The message was: don’t have sex because it’s bad and sinful and even when you’re married it is still a giant fucking secret and let’s pretend we never had this conversation which is probably also a sin. 

None of the adults who talked to me about sex as a kid had a clue how to have that conversation. They were obviously super uncomfortable. That discomfort was really the only thing I took away from those conversations.

Sex is confusing and weird. It’s better for everyone if we just don’t talk about it, I reasoned.

No one told me that my body was a precious gift that deserved care and respect, or what that might look like if another person were to treat it that way. No one told me that the way a person treated my body would say a lot about how they treat me in life. My body was a shameful thing I had to deal with and I didn’t know what to do about that either. Sports were considered worldly, so that was out. This awkward human body seemed to really get in the way of being more Christlike. Fumbling my way into adulthood, it was just easier to pretend that my body didn’t really matter. 

Fumbling my way into adulthood, it was just easier to pretend that my body didn’t really matter. 

Like many of the other nonsense rules that came with no explanation, I broke the sex rule as soon as I could, with some random guy I literally met at a bus stop. Being a virgin was awkward and I really just didn’t want to talk about it so I gave my virginity away to a random stranger and then dumped him about three dates later. Case closed.

Because I didn’t have the language to talk about sex, I found myself in a lot of unsatisfying sexual partnerships with people who knew even less than I did. I did not understand consent and neither did any of my sexual partners. It is a miracle that I have not suffered any major sexual abuse because my childhood had me perfectly groomed for it. If there was abuse in my own family I wouldn’t have known because we just didn’t talk about it. I didn’t even know that I had a right to my own body. When I was married my husband made it seem like I owed him sex, and I believed him because I had no reason to think differently.

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A note to the reader: I’ve redacted this portion of this email, in which I shared things about other people that were not might to share, and impacted the safety of people in my community. I’ll write more about this when I have a better understanding myself. For now I only want to say that my efforts to learn to identify safe people have taught me that I have many things to learn about being a safe person myself, and have caused others harm in that lack of self-knowledge.

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Unexpectedly, in the middle of this colossal mess, for the first time in my life I experienced a sexual relationship with a person with whom my body felt really safe. It was one of the most beautiful and sacred things I have ever felt. Rather than force my body into additional relationships that weren’t clear or adequately boundaried, I surrendered to the only body that my body wanted and [redacted - see above].

In the physical safety of that relationship I discovered things about myself and my body that I never knew before. I discovered the kind of sexual partner that I am, and who I have the potential to be. (Spoiler: I am totally awesome.) My body reached new levels of pleasure, the likes of which I did not know myself capable. It was wonderful.

Toward the very end my body stopped feeling so safe. It stopped doing the things that I had come to expect it to do so effortlessly. It was as though my body knew I wasn’t safe before my brain did, and the relationship ended shortly thereafter. Of all the things I have lost on the path of recovery, the loss of that safety has been among the most painful. It was something my body had never felt before. It was a returning to my myself. It felt like home.

All of this coincided with a very big awakening about my body. I started running trails a few times a week, then I started canoeing, then I started camping. It felt so good. I couldn’t believe this had been missing from my life. Outdoor exercise brought me back into my body in a way that nothing else could, not even sex.

It wasn’t until this year that I’ve started to appreciate my body for the wondrous fckn miracle that it is, and understand that life is all-around better when I treat my body better. I’ve also begun to own how much I’ve abused it, disrespected it, and forced it to be something that it is not. I’ve alternated between eating nothing but Cheetos and ramen noodles, to eating only health foods as though it were some sort of moral imperative, as it is in the New Age religion.

I am learning how to lovingly take care of my body, to treat it with respect and dignity, and think about what it would look like for a lover to treat my body like the holy thing that it is. 

Now that I know what safe sex actually is, I don’t want to do it any other way.

Part of that work involves making better choices around who gets access to my body. Now that I know what safe sex actually is, I don’t want to do it any other way. Faced with the dilemma of how I will handle being a lusty 37yo who has trouble identifying safe people, I came to an important realization. If I am really so awesome a lover, why couldn’t I be that awesome for myself?

That’s what I am now attempting to do. I am going to be the best lover I’ve ever had. I put myself on a rigorous pleasure schedule and I am determined to be the best thing that ever happened to my sex life. I’ve been giving myself vast swathes of time to lay around in bed loving up on myself and treating myself like the sexiest woman alive. I listen to sexy audios. I put on sexy playlists. I am on a weight-lifting and toning program for my vagina.

The next time I have the opportunity to share my body with someone, which is pretty hard to imagine rn but let’s talk hypothetically, one of the questions I will ask is, “Who else are you having sex with and what is your relationship to that person/those people?” In the past I never believed I had a right to that information, and ended up making a lot of presumptions about my partners that were not true.

I now see that I need this information in order to feel safe. Something I learned in my cult recovery work is that when a person doesn’t have the courage, the language and the skills to talk about sex (and other important topics), people get hurt. The collateral damage can be passed down for many generations, as it was with mine, until someone breaks the cycle.

Whoever gets access to this body in the future will have to earn my trust first. I don’t want to give my body to anyone before I know that I am safe. Trust and safety take time, a lot of time actually, possibly even a frustrating amount of time. It will probably involve some big conversations, big brave conversations that not a lot of people have the capacity for because no one taught them either, and in some ways it’s actually easier to just not talk about it. 

I tried that. It doesn’t work for me.

Someone had to break the cycle and I am a person who is brave enough, strong enough and smart enough to figure out a better way, for myself and for my descendants. So I am trying something different. 

XOT

Here are two people who’ve helped me a lot

1. I spent nearly 12 months working with Sex and Pleasure Coach Roshni Dominic. A lot of what you’ve just seen me piece together is a direct result of our work together. Roshni brings such a level of experience, care and trauma awareness to her practice that it’s also helped me have hope for the coaching industry on the whole. When I worry that the industry is just so corrupt it needs to be thrown in the garbage, I think of Roshni and I remember that it can actually be done safely and ethically. 

2. Rosalia Rivera of ConsentParenting had been teaching me how to talk to my kids about their bodies, as well as consent and boundaries. I finally told them about sex! I’ve cried a lot watching her workshop series because the information seems so important and so obvious it makes me sad to think that it took me 37 years to learn it. I feel really lucky to have found this information. If you have children, or maybe you didn’t get much parenting on this topic and you want to reparent yourself, I strongly recommend her program. It might be the best $111 you spend this year.

P.S.

Testing out a new send time! I like publishing on Fridays but it often means that my weekend is an emotional roller coaster of vulnerability. So I’m seeing if this makes a difference.🤞🏼