It’s interesting how so many are invested in our sex lives, yet sex is still kinda treated as this taboo subject.

Sex was always a topic that brought about conflicting messages for me growing up. The assumption when it came to Black girls was that we were fast, a.k.a. we were the ones out there orchestrating all the eggplant emoji x peach emoji action, regardless of who made the first move or whether or not we made a move to begin with. We were sluts if we did it, but bitches if we didn’t, and if you were fat, like me, there was this strange sort of urgency placed on you to have sex to prove you were appealing to men. Always men, always heteronormative, as you were told things like, “You’d be cuter if you lost weight,” unless he, gasp, actually managed to look past your tummy rolls or … something.

None of that really mattered because I honestly wasn’t terribly interested in having sex—at least, not back then. For the entire year I had a boyfriend, folks wondered why we weren’t sleeping together and couldn’t believe it was as simple as “I don’t want to.” This, of course, led to assumptions of me ending up with a girl in college—that MY BOYFRIEND wasn’t any good at it so now I WAS TURNED OFF FROM MEN FOREVER.

Always men.

Always heteronormative.

Heaven forbid the answer be as simple as “She’s bi, it just didn’t work out with her boyfriend.” It was somehow easier for some to think that my boyfriend “turned me gay” because he was bad at foreplay, therefore, he pushed me away from the idea of sleeping with men to, instead, sleep with women. Ah, if only I’d waited for the right peen to come along instead of enjoying myself with my new girlfriend and present-day wife.

I feel like honest conversations about sex and sexuality would’ve saved me a whole lot of trouble. And hell, maybe I would’ve been more interested in sex if it wasn’t used as some litmus test on my worth/the deciding factor on why I changed my relationship status. I certainly would’ve had my bisexual epiphany earlier if folks would’ve stopped telling me that I just needed the right guy to f*ck me to get over the “phase” I was in with my girlfriend.

To be fair, my mother did have honest conversations with me, but even THAT had a lot of folks scratching their heads because HOW DARE A PARENT TALK TO THEIR TEENAGER ABOUT THIS. And it’s hard to retain any “sex is fine, just be safe about it” information if it’s only one source telling you that, especially a source that other folks clutch their pearls over because, I dunno, moms aren’t supposed to do that?

It’s a whole-ass mess, one that I feel inspired podcasts such as Natalie Rivera’s How I F***.